superbloom

It’s a superbloom this year. It rained and gusted and poured and belched, and now the hills are a mosaic of color. Only once or twice a decade, scientists say, will a superbloom like this appear.

I’ve visited the flowers five times over the course of about a month. Three different locations. Just like the rest of life, with superblooms, you can never see it all. You can never be in all of the disparate places at exactly the right time. Just like the rest of life, you will miss out on some of it. There will be mountains unadventured, patches of poppies unexplored. The sun will shine and the clouds will blow over and time will pass. Just like the rest of life, nothing lasts forever.

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Visit One

It started yellow. Tidy tips and goldfields. My friend and I parked beneath an oak tree and walked the dusty road lining the golden fields. It’s all private property, but the ranchers don’t care (much), and even though it was early in the season, herd paths were already starting to develop.

Last time we were here, there was more variety, right? More purple?

The last time we were here was in 2020, the early quarantine days when isolation still felt novel and time was abundant, depression a distant meteor. Those California days feel endlessly long ago. It is hard to write about them in any proper form. But he was right; there was more purple then.

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Visit Two

For visit two, I went to the plains by myself. Swaths of yellow creeped up the surrounding mountains and filled the valley like liquid gold. Meadows of fiddlenecks stretched for acres, their gentle orange blossoms curling like rams’ horns. I sat in a bed of hillside daisies not far from the road and closed my eyes, inhaling their scent. It was peaceful until a drone flew overhead, again and again, and then the magic was lost. I drove to Soda Lake and took pictures of the larkspurs and watched a woman sink up to her knee into the soft, yielding earth as her compatriots used a walking stick to pull her out.

The plains felt rather segregated—the purples in one area, the yellows in another—except in the areas of private property where the colors dripped together, still only two, maybe three species in a place.

It was pretty, yes. There were flowers and dappled hills and mosaics of wind-blown color, yes & yes & yes. But I left feeling disappointed.

Do you ever exist in a moment thinking you should feel differently about it all? That you should feel happier, or more excited, or more in love, given the surrounding context? But you don’t, you aren’t, and you have no reason why. Something’s just not quite right. And it’s a vaguely haunting sensation because it’s all your fault. It is your feelings that don’t match the reality you’ve invented in your mind, and there isn’t a satisfactory explanation for the emptiness of it all.

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Visit Three

This is where the magic begins. Where the narrative arc begins to rise. It was fine and then it was bad, and soon the protagonist will be vaulted into the climax and every tire tread into the disappointing plains will have been worth it.

Anything can be a story if you look at it just the right way.

Point Buchon is a trail on privately-owned land. It snakes along the coastline, protected by a barbed wire fence, a security booth with a sign-in process, and armed guards who will escort you out if you stay past 5PM. The land is owned by PG&E and the local nuclear power plant (lol) is located just south. On the trail at Windy Point, you can get a glimpse of the seaside domed facility looming in the distance. The whole thing is an apt metaphor for life. The boundaried beauty. The death you only catch glimpses of. The limited permission, the limited access we have to so much of life’s enjoyment.

But the flowers. Right. About the flowers.

I went in right after opening to avoid the soon-to-be lines (again, lol). The preserve has a daily limit of visitors, and I didn’t want to miss my chance. I’d been here a couple of times before—with family, with a friend—so the trail was familiar and kind. Natural sea bridges dot their way along the trail while cormorants nest in their rocky alcoves. The first time I visited, brown pelicans soared overhead, and I still remember that moment of wonder as I watched them in the sky.

I walk and walk and walk and it’s beautiful and lovely and then suddenly, after a short uphill, I’m there. The poppy fields. It is a little before 10, and the flowers are just yawning open. I’m not sure why this is different than the plains, but it is. The moment drips with awe. The delicate orange blossoms. The blue sky. The blue water. The wind that brings them all together. I snap picture after picture and it is not even close to enough.

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Visit Four

And here it is. The climax. The superbloom peak.

I went on a Sunday morning. The place had exploded in popularity on Facebook, and I was nervous about the traffic, but there were only a dozen or so cars there when I showed up at 10 to the same spot my friend and I had visited early in the season (visit 1, keep up). Even from the road, you could tell that this time it was different. I parked, slathered on sunscreen, grabbed my phone and a notebook, and headed out amongst the flowers.

What the pictures never tell you is the smell. The smell of a superbloom is otherworldly. Heady and sweet, a scent of decadence and bewitchment. The floral notes layer on one on another on another, and the differences hit you as you walk into a patch of poppies, then lupines, then owl clover, and the breeze carries on it a new distinctive smell, floral, yes, but different, always different. I never feel more dictionally shortchanged than when I try to describe scents. It is never right. The words leave me wanting.

I walked and I snapped pictures and I felt awe in every footstep, and eventually I found a patch of grass beneath an oak tree where I shade sat and scribbled thoughts, notices, in my black notebook. I thought about Mary Oliver, whom I’ve been thinking about a lot.

It is a disappointing climax, I know. All that happens is that I spent three hours walking through flowers, sweaty & delighted & brimming with contentment. There is no conflict. No moment of brilliant human interaction to give this story more bones.

The story is this: I spent the afternoon with the flowers, and I was happy.

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Visit Five

On visit five, they were dying. The once lush carpets of gold were spotty now, the dust visible beneath the petals. A darker shade of lupines had started to emerge, as had the royal purple larkspurs, but everything else was waning. The poppies, the tidy tips, the sloping fiddleheads. My boyfriend and I walked mostly in silence. We talked briefly about pollination, about the emergences of different colors, about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s seminal thesis, but mostly we were quiet. It is hard sharing moments of wonder with others. It feels like an intrusion of the moment’s sacredness, but you share it with them because you want them to feel it too. You’re never sure if this is achieved. If the moment sits with them like it does with you.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot—what to keep to yourself and what to share with others, especially in an outdoor context. If friends don’t get the same wonder from the experience, is it better to go alone? My life used to be more solitary, and I am still figuring out how to shape this new season of existence. I am still muddling through it all.

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The End

It is July and the flowers are dead. Well, most of them. The superbloom ones. Some coastal lupines are still clinging to life, and yesterday, on a walk to the Hazard Reef tide pools, I saw a wild rose and a couple of other nameless gems. But the fields are all brittle and brown.

Fire season will begin soon and then the male elephant seals will return to the beach, and when the nights are longer, Scorpio will no longer be visible in the sky.

On my flight back from Colombia, I listened to podcasts and absentmindedly scrolled through pictures on my phone. Most of the ones I paused to look at were of flowers.