The
Alabama Hills—one of my all-time favorite playgrounds—have a singular desert-y charm
with those Hollywood-movie-famous granite outcrops layered against stunning mountainous
backdrops—a snow-capped, craggy Sierra to the west and, opposite them, the austere
but even more precipitous Inyo mountains. After moving to the Owens Valley in
1983 I was actually living out on
movie flat and, over the years, have camped for long periods at various
favorite sites. I’ve certainly spent at least a year of my life climbing and
exploring the intricate boulderfields and crags. It’s a place ideally suited
for casual strolls and loaded with surprises once you start poking into the
hidden corridors and following dry watercourses.
I walk daily
whenever camping out here; usually both morning and eve. In dry seasons, when
all the crispy-grey shrubs and lesser plants look to be dead (or nearly so)
there’s still rank beauty at every turn; an artist’s pallet of muted, earthy
tones. At those times, my eyes are drawn to the middle and far distances,
framing views of cracked and crumbling boulders below giant peaks. I stand and
gaze, never tiring of familiar scenes.
But this spring I’m often down on my knees because the
whole place has been transfigured by one of those monumental blooms that happen
maybe four or five times in a century. Right now—oh my!—the sandy flats appear
to have been painted in varied expanses of yellow and white, patches of purple;
dotted by eye-catching reds here and there…all made of small flowers so profuse
they’ve eclipsed their green parts. During my daily rambles I stop and gape,
almost giddy, drinking in brilliant hues and savoring moist air. But it’s not
those arresting colors so much as the sheer vegetative exuberance demonstrated by what I affectionately refer to as “my
little green friends.”
Openings
between shrubs are alive with dainty, minute plants of many varieties. These
so-called “ephemerals” burst forth by the millions in desert country after
wetter winters to flower, make seed,
shrivel, and die within a month’s time. Individuals may be less than two inches
tall and their threadlike stems may produce only a pair of leaves and a single
flower. Others, not much taller, will put out flowers so long as their roots
reach moisture. Their practically microscopic seeds sometimes wait years for just
the right conditions and then GO FOR IT!
en masse in a tremendous burst of dazzling
vegetable vitality. They’re what’s painted the ground so lavishly hereabouts. And
during these big blooms the perennial plants grow twice as tall and make three
or four times as many blossoms (which are also larger than normal). Shrubs put
on added foliage and their flowers, too, are much more numerous.
So this normally somewhat austere landscape—and
especially because of our years-long drought—is bursting at its seams and I wake
at dawn, full of anticipation, to the delicate songs of black-throated sparrows
and rock wrens. This is what springtime always
does to us—but I’ve seldom felt such an urgent need to use up every day, to see
as much as I can and try to absorb impressions and details. These times don’t
last; in my remaining days I might get to see a few more mega-blooms like this
one…if I’m lucky.
The great
strident color-patches, the lushness, I can see and feel. On my knees, I focus
on, identify, and reduce the wondrously improbable individual living entities
to things I think I know. But can’t get far on these morning strolls before
stopping yet again to try and grok what my eyes are seeing. For some reason, it
won’t leave me alone—something’s tap-tap-tapping at my neocortex, trying to
explain the mystery in simple terms—because it must be simple, because
it just is—but I can never make out
the message. It registers as something urgently demanding attention; something
about what this phenomenon called Life actually is. It’s too close and too
familiar, so we continually take it for granted.
Then,
three days ago I saw this bit of
visual poetry. More of the same….
One of the showy, daisy-type flowers
out here is “yellow tack-stem.” This seems an odd name until you look through a
15X hand lens
(like I did) which reveals slender, green stems liberally dotted with little
reddish hairs, each capped by a miniscule, round plate that look just
like…tacks!…stuck into the stems. The flowers, somewhat over an inch wide,
aren’t just yellow but a pale-ish, white-hot yellow like the sun and like the
sun they seem to radiate their own light. Scores of narrow petals arising from
the blossom’s very center are arrayed in concentric layers with the outermost (bottom)
layer being longest. Each individual petal is tipped with several tiny teeth.
The effect is that of a geometric star-burst pattern, a classic living mandala.
And as a mandala this glowing flower draws one’s eye inexorably toward its
center where it awakens both heart and mind with mental imagery hinting of
infinity or wholeness or perfection (the way symbols can…and exactly what
mandalas are specifically designed for). I’ve looked into the yellow tack-stem’s
flower long and hard, many times.
Though abundant elsewhere they’re
not a common plant in the Alabama Hills. But on this walk I passed one and it
caught my eye: in the very center of this flower was a tiny heart…a tiny heart
made of moth.
And then I was on my knees again.
The “heart” was two little
fat-bodied moths, mating. Lovely creatures, less than half an inch long. I’d
seen their kind before, fluttering around other daisy-like plants. One that I’d
looked at through the hand lens several years ago, much enlarged and in great
detail, faintly resembled a tiny man wearing a close-fitting Russian hat made of
shaggy, grey wolf fur and a floor-length cape with broad wolf-fur muff about
the collar. The gray cape was horizontally divided by narrow grey stripes separating
three broad maroon bands and its bottom was fringed with iridescent maroon-colored
feathers; scores of them, painstakingly attached. The medium grey and rich
maroon were a fine chromatic pairing, well-suited for royalty. (Through my lens
I could see the individual scales on its wings shining in the brilliant sunlight.)
Silly, but at the time I thought this handsome moth looked like a tiny king
wearing his imperial cloak and decidedly regal wolf-fur hat.
These two, joined at the tips of grey,
furry abdomens, were perfectly still in their coitus. Forming a very-much
heart-shaped “V” in the center of the fiery flower and dusted with its golden
pollen, the little king and his little queen were nestled in the sweetest
nuptial bed imaginable; a radiant and fragrant starburst bed fit for royalty. It
was a picture of blissful repose, two creatures lost in love, the finest hour
of short lives.
I was there to witness this silent drama on a
perfect spring day. For all three of us, is that moment, nothing else in the
world mattered. Generally, I’m not inclined to blatantly anthropomorphize like
this and not sure why I did in this case, charming as it was. The two moths
certainly were not in love. But—I
must say—they looked very happy to me.
16 Apr 1995,
3 Apr 2014
©2014 Tim Forsell
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