So lovely and that place where Yeats once lived in a lovely white cottage overlooking the water and where once upon a time Molly said yes I do yes I will yes or something rather close to that, but no one knows just where…thank god, or they’d commodify that too. It was full of birds and wildflowers and stick men blithely walking off of cliffs and long moments of silence and being alone in the wind and the rain. But also much of the time tourists and Dublin youth dressed like it was 1984.
Pyrenees wildflowers get their own post, from irises and lilies and roses to orchids and tiny flowers hidden among the windswept rocks, they were all extraordinary.
Easter was one of my favourite days, a day to celebrate Spring and Handel on KCET and Easter baskets full of candy. I didn’t even mind church, it would smell like wax and masses of Easter lilies and the sermon would be about love and joyfulness and life and the hymns would be some of my favourites. Then home and an ever more challenging hunt for Easter Eggs and later a feast of a dinner…
But early Easter morning was mine and clear and bright and full of promise and I would wander out in my shabby old robe to pick flowers for the table and Spring in the Sonoran Desert is extraordinary though I think many people never see it. I love England’s banks of daffodils and masses of bulbs, but miss the more secret, delicate beauty of flowers that bloom amongst the rocks and gravel.
Penstemons:
And Phacelias, these do often grow in banks of glorious blue:
The queen of desert flowers because they are more rare and the colour of cobalt, larkspur:
Globemallows, these grow everywhere, especially in old lots throughout the city, thriving where nothing else seems to grow:
Fiddleneck — but those little hairs along the stems hurt your hands, so I often left them out:
Desert Sage:
California poppies:
There were other poppies, tall and pale yellow and also rare. Desert honeysuckle:
Eriatrum Difussum or miniature woolystar — these carpeted the hill behind my house along with monoptilon bellioides:
Erigeron divergens:
Wild onion:
Desert lupins (but is that what we called them or what they really are?)
Fairydusters:
Not all of these went into the bouquets of course, clutched in my little hands and lovingly arranged. And there are a number that are missing from those recovered in this March expedition, like desert chicory. I took all of these pictures in the Spring of 2009, I can’t remember why I was in Tucson but it was the last Spring spent with my dad.
Funny that I was born on Easter Sunday, so I remember we used to treat it as more of a birthday than the day I was actually born, though I think that stopped when I was quite little. My dad died on Easter Sunday the year after I took these. I can’t decide now if it is a day too overburdened by significance, or good that life and death should all be wrapped up like this. It is not my decision anyway.
I am often sad, however, that I am not still running around the desert in my sandals and faded blue dress.
I woke up Sunday morning, fell back asleep, had a brilliant dream, woke up again, made coffee. It was a bit of a late night at Allegra’s house party the night before, reggaeton and some dancing, beer and a contact high. So I treated myself, and lay in bed reading The Urban Question by Manuel Castells and maybe dozed a bit more through that, it’s heavy going. Though good for a chuckle when he starts to rumble with Lefebvre if you’re an urban planning nerd like me…
And then Bev called to say they were heading north after all, so I threw on some clothes. Jeans and a T-shirt here in the LA sunshine, but by the time we arrived in Gorman on the I-5 it was snowing.
Snowing! I love the inconsistencies of snow in Southern California a short drive from home, and the brightly capped peaks that lie to the left of the 5.
I have no proof, I took shots of the wet flakes in vain, and nothing was sticking. But Gorman is coloured beautiful with flowers,
even though the poppies and trumpet flowers were closed up tight against the weather. Wish I had that ability as well, I took this shot through my tears, they were rolling down my cheeks from the cold of the wind. Needless to say I was not prepared for snow, though I did have a sweater. We drove the 5 and then down along the 166, past row upon row of grapes, peaches, citrus trees. Past oil derricks and the weathered wood of abandoned buildings and bridges with their twisted rusted metal. And up into the hills and down again onto Carrizo Plain.
It was a day of wide expanses, a world of sun and shadow. And salt flats. And flowers.
The great San Andrea’s fault runs down through the basin, plain to the view, and if California ever cleaves in two with half of it falling into the ocean? It will crack along this line, this understated source of seismic unrest and quaking earth. It’s quite extraordinary to think you could walk along this slight cleft in the ground and never know the power that lies beneath you.
The flowers, our reason for driving, were incredible carpets of yellow. Poppies were all hiding their heads and we only saw a few clumps of lupins, but the various sunflowers?
Dancing in the wind…exuberant, short lived, glorious. As we walked up this mountainside, crickets sprang from underfoot, hundreds of them, and they sang low and sweet and from all directions. And all of this is almost side by side with Soda lake. It is filled entirely by run off from its large basin, and sometimes dries almost completely. The water leaves an eerie beauty in its wake, mud encrusted with brilliantly white alkaline salts.
Death and life once again, I find them everywhere!
The drive back homeward was full of afternoon light and storm clouds, and great expanses of rolling hills that are one of the landscapes I love best.
And one of the best shots of the year below. The Pogues were playing, “Life’s a bitch, and then you die, black hell! Hell’s ditch.” And I don’t know I disagree, which gives an enormous sense of pleasure and transgression to be out in this beautiful world and joyful, a day stolen from the world’s ravages
The sun was setting as we drove through McKittrick, and then Buttonwillow, and I caught this shot of grower owner an operated gin, cotton gin I imagine! I remember reading about them in school though I’ve really no idea what a cotton gin does…still, cooperatives make me happy, especially when the sky is rosy and their surroundings beautiful.
We stopped to eat, and then drove back down over the grapevine, the dark sky carpeted with millions of stars the way it should be. And so while I could possibly name a couple of things that could make me happier with their presence, being happy is quite enough.
I renewed one of my old traditions today, when I was little I would go searching for leprechauns in the desert on March 17th. I figured if there were any in the new country, they’d be out and about on St. Patrick’s day. I still believe in the little people, but of course, I have yet to find one in Arizona.
It was beautiful. I hiked through the heady smell of desert saje and another plant I know not, amidst the calling of birds and the mad fleeing of lizards.
Tiny baby lizards, most of them smaller than my pinky finger. Hundreds of them scuttled across the sand, waving their little tails wildly. The tail serves as a decoy, it is a striking white with black stripes underneath, and they whip it above them to invite attack. Once in a botched lizard capture, I ended up with a tail between my fingers. The amazing ability of lizards to regenerate their tail, however, is one of the most incredible abilities I know of, and lizards are some of my very favourite things. Regeneration and the ability to relax completely when flipped over and their bellies are stroked? I wouldn’t mind that myself.
I went West today, and it was such a difference. Just one more reason to stay away from the East side I suppose. All the flowers I remember, and more. Not many poppies of course, but in the wash where the water table is close to the surface, there were golden clumps of them.
and evidence that there had been more, I’m not sure if I missed the height of the season, but I did miss some blooms. The penstemons were in full display though, and glorious, from afar they look like a pink haze blowing back and forth
The sage filled the air. The plant itself secretes a kind of gum that was collected and used as incense in the old missions, and smells…er…divine. Looks it too
And the phacelia filled the grasses along the wash and beside the trails the way I remember
A couple of times I followed deer trails up into the hills and then back down to the wash, I missed the deer but judging from the trails, only just. And they were incredibly heavily traveled, the volume made me think that javelina must be using them as well, but I found no other evidence…nor could I smell them. I can’t say I was sorry about that. The hillsides are covered with the gold of grass, and fiddleneck and phacelia and wild onion
I also walked amidst the mad fluttering of butterflies
And found a couple of larkspur plants, they have always been the rarest, and one of my favourites
And there were globe mallows, some tiny lupins, jewel flowers, rattlesnake weed, and many others that I did not know.
I love springtime. It is already hot of course, I stopped at the Circle K on the way home and got a thirstbuster…that took me back, way back! I forgot how nice soda tastes after a long hike. And then my dad’s birthday dinner at La Indita followed by my mum’s chocolate cake…mm. I think it is very cool that my dad, Patrick Colum Gibbons, was born today. Of very immeditae Irish descent. And he was named after my grandad, not the day.
This year there are no carpets of golden poppies or sunflowers, there are no giant swaths of color splashed across the Tucson desert, and part of me is disappointed of course. I love glorious abandon.
This is one of the years that requires a closer eye, a delight in the subtle, the ground-hugging, the tiny. I love that too. The desert is still full of flowers, they riot across the stones in perfect blooms the size of a fingernail.
Eriastrim Diffusum or Miniature Woolystar
Monoptilon bellioides, also known as Mojave Desert Star. I think. There’s something about seeing what is usually unseen. there were a couple of phacelias, though I remember years when they have filled the grasses alongside the washes in deep gorgeous blues unfurling.
The flowers have definitely seen better years, and the same goes for the prickly pear. While you’re looking for what is always missed, seeking out the small beauties and the things that are hidden, you also find these guys
The only thing that seemed to be blooming as normal were the mallows.
And when you look up the desert is still wide open, beautiful
You can’t even tell that tiny flowers blanket the hills, and that lizards crouch frozen in the mottled shade of bushes.
Dad and I found this off the beaten trail, beneath a mesquite tree where a small arroyo split into two
It could be a shrine, a joke, a memory. Plastic flowers in the desert almost always commemorate death, marking graves or the sites of accidents where flesh failed and souls left bodies. In the desert death is as present as life, they twine around each other, you see it and traces of it everywhere. Scattered bones, skin, remnants of bodies.
I love life even more beside death. Beauty hidden in an arid landscape and draped around cacti skeletons, or exploding after a good winter of rain in a riotous celebration of color. High arching skies and heat. The smell of creosote and dust. This I understand. I love. I leave it for the world of people and there is so much I don’t understand, though I love there too. I walk through the desert in sandals fearlessly, it is my place. It is a beautiful dangerous place, but I know where the danger lies. The human world? I walk through that in sandals too, but never fearlessly. It hurts much more.
