October 17, 2014 2014 miscellanea: taking my camera to the office
To see more photos of 2014 miscellanea, click here.
WATCHING THE TREES WATCH ME
At least once a week, I exercise my administrative superpowers at a small home office in Bonny Doon, an area north of Santa Cruz between the town of Felton and the Pacific Ocean. This place is far from cellphone signals and grocery stores. I get there by taking the bus, then walking a few miles through a redwood forest. It’s an unconventional commute to an unconventional workplace.
I'm sure I’ve mentioned this before: over the course of six years, I’ve walked these paths to work many times, in all seasons and moods. Now I can’t help but feel that the trees are observing me as I pass by them. It sounds like whimsical nonsense, but you try walking through the same woods over and over for six years, and see if you don’t get that I’m-being-watched feeling too. Here you are again, they seem to say with their soundless breath.
I have learned to look at them in return, noting their changes. Like people, they are never the same two days in a row. I keep an eye out for the ones who are about to fall over. They might be dead or simply perched on the edge of a slope, one wet day away from collapse. When a tree body crashes across the trail, a path soon forms over the most passable section of the corpse, created by the mysterious others who share this trail with me – mountain bikers, mostly. Days later, another unseen being will do some work with a chainsaw, and the obstacle becomes part of the trail itself, no longer an impediment to travel.
IN SPRING
Each walk features something new, even under the most familiar stands of redwoods. In April 2014, I passed by unfurling buds and the pressure of such beauty was almost too great to bear. I brought my camera along one day to grab the scene and see what it would look like on my computer screen, to capture something precious and ephemeral inside the universe of my photo database. I was already beginning to envision a time when my weekdays at this job and in this forest would dwindle in number. Eventually they will disappear altogether, but that hasn't happened yet.
The pedestrian portion of my commute began, as always, on Smith Grade, a road that descends westward into a canyon. As I stepped off the bus, the newly-risen sun was beginning to touch the ground through openings in the canopy above, picking out individual plants and rocks. Patterns of light in this forest have become just as familiar to me as the trees. I found myself looking forward that day to rounding certain curves, to seeing the spotlight on a favorite oak branch or tangle of lichen. Such moments of theatricality were what I hoped to document with my 50mm lens.
This canyon is part of the Majors Creek watershed, and in some places my path ran alongside the creek. The sound of water was louder than usual because of some unexpected rain we’d gotten a few weeks before. Our long-term drought persisted, but wildflowers bloomed that week as if nothing could be wrong in the world. Down in the green depths, tan oaks and redwood trees dominated, sheltering irises. Brittle moss on trees had softened and brightened, and I was relieved. I'd pitied that moss for months. Winter usually revived it; this year's revival had been sadly brief.
A WORKDAY
Soon I reached Moore Ranch Road and began to walk uphill, passing thimbleberry bushes and lupines, watching the redwoods give way to live oaks and madrones. This road is a place where I've done some intricate rearrangement of my soul. Usually, by this point in the day, caffeine has started working. The mind is operating at top speed, and the first fifteen minutes of the walk have stimulated the neurons. Epiphanies appear one after the other. That spring morning was no different. I felt brilliant, exultant in my awareness.
Plants up at the home office were also in bloom: honeysuckle and grape vines winding around the deck, sprouts in the garden and orchard. The purple irises flowered extravagantly in the courtyard. That day, I was taking pictures of objects in the house, things my employer wanted to sell. I brought them out on the deck in the sunshine for the best light. Behind the camera, my eyes wandered over to the vines flourishing on the railings. Like a long journaling session, the morning walk had cleared my mind, and I was prepared to drift thoughtlessly along on the surface of the colors and textures around me.
The day went like this: pick up an object, dust it, place it in the best light, photograph it from all angles. Then repeat with the next object. Sometimes I swerved my lens in the direction of some blossom or bud. Reality was rich to the eye and to the touch. In between shots I answered the phone, updated a spreadsheet, wrote checks from someone else's bank account. I woolgathered my way through an odd variety of tasks, feeling far away from the rest of the world, as I always do in Bonny Doon.
REWARDS
As quitting time drew near, I felt anticipation swell up gently within me, as expected as the rising of a tide. Some afternoons, this feeling has been more like a tsunami of relief. You know how it is with workdays. For various reasons, their endings can be sweet, especially when it’s time to walk in the woods again. The rest of the hours in this day were mine. Slanting sunlight drenched the edges of grasses, cast shadows on the dusty tracks, made a new landscape out of the place I’d traversed that morning.
When I look at these photos, I can remember exactly how it felt to start off on the trip home, backpack fastened and camera ready, knowing I have two glorious hours of walking ahead. I remember taking these pictures, and I also remember hundreds of other days when I didn’t take pictures but found images that were unforgettable anyway. They are engraved upon my memory, layered on top of each other to form a composite of this road, with its curves and its natural asphalt quarry, its madrones and creek and meadow overlooks.
Moore Ranch Road drops down steeply, from oak woodlands on a ridge to redwoods in a ravine, offering a range of habitats. The profusion of wildlife here is probably due to the presence of the creek below. I’ve seen bobcats, rabbits, pumas, foxes, coyotes, hawks, owls, snakes, quail, and innumerable lizards. Once I saw seven baby wild turkeys, unidentifiable at first. These awkward-looking birds were about the size of adult quail and covered with fuzz instead of feathers. One by one, they hopped onto a branch. What are those things? I wondered, until they were joined by two adult females.
I later learned that baby turkeys are called poults. For the following month or so the turkey group appeared to me in various locations. I walked near creeks and so did they; our paths crossed. The babies were bigger and less fuzzy with each sighting. Every time they ran ahead of me, a line of little shapes sprinting behind the hens, I felt like I'd won a prize. It's good luck to see poults, I'd say to myself, adding them to a list that also includes Gila monsters.
WOODCUTTERS TRAIL
The walk down Moore Ranch is a rich visual experience, but what happens next on my commute is even better: I leave the road for Woodcutters Trail, a path through an upper corner of Wilder Ranch State Park. This trail is the only part of the afternoon hike that goes uphill and makes me sweat. I regard it with great fondness because it's come to be associated with an exercise-induced endorphin rush.
An even more compelling reason to love is the intimacy made possible by the absence of cars on this path. I walk uninterrupted here. On this trail there's no need to step aside when someone drives by, because nobody is driving by, except the occasional mountain bike or horse. I pass no homes or other signs of human habitation. On many days, I see no people at all in these woods. I get to sink deep, deep into the forest, to contemplate its contents without interruption, to see into all the corners.
This place and my familiarity with it reminds me of childhood and the thorough knowledge we had of every square foot of our little South Carolina woodland. As I did when I was young, I enter the woods with turmoil in my mind and find myself immediately soothed by the lack of criticism from the trees. I’ve held imaginary conversations here, framed arguments for and against things, laughed and cried out loud. I am always encouraged to express my feelings by the silent presence of these fellow organisms.
Piece by piece I have taken myself apart here, and put myself together again. With one hour of walking in the morning and two in the afternoon, I’ve had plenty of chances to do that. In the beginning, it was a surprise to remember that the woods could make this possible; six years later, I’ve come to depend on it. I take it for granted that the forest is a place where I’m allowed to refashion my entire personality as often as I need to.
The forest has powers to ease heartache and offer safety, to demonstrate a cycle of life that helps me to understand my own phases of existence. Beings here experience simultaneous growth and decay, just like I do. They sprout from odd places, they persevere through droughts, and the floor is littered with with their discarded parts. All of this makes me feel better about myself. My failed experiments and foolish choices seem less tragic, more natural.
At some point in the afternoon walk, after talking things over with the trees, I stop thinking about myself. I become absorbed in my surroundings, defensiveness abandoned. About halfway up the Woodcutters Trail, it always hits me that nobody knows my precise location. I'm unlikely to run into anyone who is used to seeing me in a certain way. Here I am about as free from the pressure of expectations and roles as I have ever been. That freedom combines with the exhiliration of hiking up a ridge to generate a blissful mental state.
FLOWERS IN THE MEADOW AND ON MY BLOCK
After a final uphill climb, Woodcutter's Trail emerges from the woods into a meadow at the entrance to Wilder Ranch State Park, a grassy clearing that always has something beautiful to show me, just when I'm at my most open-hearted and ready to appreciate it. Today there were wildflowers, lots of them, more than I'd ever seen in the meadow before. I'd planned for this when I brought my camera, but I hadn't expected so many. I knelt among these beauties with my camera, muddying my knees and toppling over now and then when I leaned too far.
The mile of road to the bus stop held more blooms and I stooped to capture them too. My arms were getting tired. I sat heavily in the rocky dirt under the blue and white sign and looked at the pictures in my camera and thought about what I was trying to record. Would it be possible for me to forget this walk someday? Or would it be something I would retain even when memories of other places had gone? I could imagine myself as an old lady telling people about the loveliness of Woodcutters Trail, about everything I learned in six years of walking there.
On the bus, I made sure to take a picture when we came within view of the ocean, because that's an important part of the workday too, even if the splendor of that view doesn't show up in my photograph. No more, I said to myself, I am finished taking pictures for the day. But on the street near my house I had to take out my camera again, because the sun was setting on the flowers near the chapel and the enormous aloe plants on the corner, on everything that had burst into bloom and lost its dust after our unexpected rain. There was nothing more perfect than those chapel roses rendered creamy by the soft light.
Simply lovely. This post is like a meditation and I may return to it again when I feel anxious. I hope to be with you in our old age listening to you talk about the Woodcutter's Trail.