If I Could Just Get My Feet Under Me

My favorite line from Claire Vaye Watkin's climate novel Gold Fame Citrus, an essay on Los Angeles, photography, climate change

In Maine 2024

Did you drop it? The man asks holding up the 35 year old camera I had just purchased for my birthday. My pockets full, and leaning forward after my child, the camera tumbling out, at the zoo, or with the goats, or in the used bookstore on the Mesa, or trying to corral her into a nap in our rented rooms, hitting the floor.

There might be a little sand in it? I admit, sheepish, when the young man who came in after me laughed.

I think a lot of sand, The man says, trying to dislodge the film. The photos on Portra I don’t want to let go of. My daughter in the bath, my daughter eating breakfast in our favorite beach town, my daughter’s red cowboy boots, my daughter in the Natural History Museum pointing to the wood duck, my daughter barefoot in the river.

Did you drop it? The men at the place I get my film developed ask fluttering around the counter. A beautiful camera! They say and take it immediately from my hands. I’ve never seen one like this. The Ricoh. Oh! The Ricoh! Did you check the battery? They ask. I say yes, I say, Why does everyone ask me if I’ve dropped it? And they pause and say Well that’s usually the end. And I make them all laugh by saying I’ve been thinking I should drop it again and see if it starts working? They change the battery any way, testing it, saving my film. My self portraits blurry because I refuse to use the flash, because I can’t for the life of me remember to open the shutter a little bit wider, to let more light in. Call Edward. A man says coming from the back after they’ve passed the camera around, he doesn’t have a shop any more but he’ll be able to help you. Writing a number down on my negatives, photos from before the fires.

When asked what I loved most about Los Angeles, by three women who were visiting, who I drove the 45 minutes to see in Venice Beach from South Pasadena, skirting my past, I say the light. And then I say the movies. And laugh. That at any moment in the day I can see one, and of course, the ocean.

Will you be okay without the ocean? My husband asks. I keep wondering. When we talk about where we might go. And what I don’t say at the time is that sometimes a field can be the ocean. I thought of Wyoming as an ocean. That even though I shouldn’t trust it, I was the most comfortable in a body of water. That when I rafted down the Colorado River, and our boat flipped in Lava Falls, I was almost relieved, a friend saying, we couldn’t see you, and then I’ve never seen you look so beautiful rising out of the water. Because I knew, if I was in the water, it might end up being okay. I knew how to swim. How to hold my body straight. How to pull myself sideways. We had already gone over the rapid. Maybe I could learn to love a lake, I say, as I had loved one in my youth, swimming out to a dock, year after year after year, not worried about the snapping turtles, not even thinking about the snakes that had wound their ways into the trees to dry off. The herons that would show us their yellow feet. The catfish.

I don’t know anyone who talks about the world ending, or far too many people have already imagined the world ending, or for too many people the world has already ended, or for many people, the world is never ending. My brother’s godmother saying to me once, 20 years ago now, the world has always been ending, Jane. It was always meant to die.

When we talk about the light in Los Angeles, and how incredible it is, we often fail to mention that the colors come from particles, refracting endlessly, from the debris in the air, the incredible sunsets because of the smog.

Yesterday the light tinged orange, this morning, the rain that should have helped clear the air, didn’t seem to clear the air at all. It’s still fire light. I say. As we send our daughter back to school, trying to find some normalcy to the days, some small moments of grounding.

I stop on Los Robles to photograph the huge tree that the winds had toppled down.