GETTING BAUM’D WITH KENDALL

Since moving to California, I have been a witness to a number of this state’s great wonders. 

I have driven the straight shot from Crane Flat to Tioga Pass. I have seen and breathed the glory of those fine redwoods. I have heard two men bemoan the environmental plight of almond farming and coordinate a heli-skip trip in the same sitting.

I have marveled at these, all.

But never have I seen a California poppy. As it turns out, it may not be my year.

The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, this spring season, is much less a reserve than it is a grassland gravesite for the eponymous flower. In a year when other species of wildflower have achieved spectacular superbloom across the state—desert lilies, lupine, Indian paintbrush—the poppy has been stifled in its opening.

“While the wildflowers are popping out, the poppies aren’t,” reported the Reserve on its Facebook page in an April 8 post. “As everyone holds their breath waiting, the window for an impressive show becomes increasingly narrow. Signs do not support a great show of poppies as there are very few baby poppy plants on the Reserve.”

And that seems counterintuitive. 

This past winter, Southern California was inundated with rainfall. The atmospheric river that came through the first week of February drenched the region with 2.7 billion gallons of stormwater, according to the Los Angeles County Public Works Department. And, while the onslaught triggered more than 500 recorded mudslides and a near environmental disaster in the form of Malibutian raw sewage, it was a boon for water managers across the state who scrambled to capture the rainfall as a stockpile for the next drought. 

A boon for Californians and Bermuda Grass south of Orange County. A detriment, paradoxically, for the State Flower.

According to Joan Dudney, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, native species like the California poppy tend to fare better in drought events—non-native and invasive species die out for want of water, which leaves the remaining resources, completely, to those species evolved to withstand the arid climate.

Now, across the landscape, it’s a survival of the fittest and the highest consumer (oh, the irony). Exacerbating the issue is that record runoff from last year’s winter provided suitable conditions for a large proportion of invasive species to germinate this season. Native species, on the other hand, are evolved to alter their germination strategies or present seed dormancy as a coping mechanism for variability in their environment—such as (to use a technical term) biblical rainfall.

So much for “it never rains in Southern California.”

In the 8 months I’ve written for The Sheet, I have indicated that I am proudly not from California. The vocal majority of my friends, however, are. And as I understand it, education in the State Symbols (the poppy, included) is a cardinal learning event for the school-aged child here—right up there with touring the Missions and panning for gold nuggets with much the same luck that your 19th century forebears had. 

The significance of the poppy, then, is instilled early. Ironically and colloquially in the flower nomenclature, the species is referred to as “cup of gold.” It is the golden emblem of the Golden State which is, itself, replete with golden things. It signifies an idyllic American pastoral—what we would call, on the lesser East Coast, a “silver spoon.”

But unlike my friends and like the majority of Americans—whom you Californians might pity as “unfortunate souls”—I first encountered the poppy in a small, arthouse feature called The Wizard of Oz. 

You know the scene: The Wicked Witch of the West, in an effort to derail Dorothy and her oddball pack from reaching the Emerald City, concocts a field of sleep-inducing poppies on its outskirts. Dorothy, Toto, and the Lion—flesh, blood, and susceptible to the effects of opioids as they are (oh my!)—pass out on cue. The Tin Man rusts, so he’s no use, and Scarecrow hasn’t got a brain to get the Narcan. Glinda steps in deus ex machina style and the group traverses on much to the green lady’s dismay.

Now, people have written theses on the symbols conceived by the source material’s author, L. Frank Baum. 

Without getting too into the weeds, the consensus is that Baum wrote the above scene’s source material to comment on the lasting impacts of the Opium Wars, both of which arose from China’s attempts to suppress the illegal opium trade out of the country by way of foreign traders. Around the time Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, opium use in the US had reached an all-time high, and had also become associated with xenophobia and the dark imagery of underground opium dens and the gangsters, prostitutes, and miscreants that frequented them. 

The poppies in Oz, then, are emblematic of the milky opium that is derived from them, and all the languid seduction that the drug connotes.

Beyond that, the well-trodden path by a ruby-footed Dorothy and beside the field of ecstasy is one long allegory for capitalism, and the metallurgy of its wares. My U.S. History is foggy, but there’s something to do with adherence to the gold standard and the Populist movement toward the coining of silver. I don’t know, Google it. In simple terms, the Yellow Brick Road is understood to be the road to success. The Emerald City is its terminus.  

But of course, Baum’s tale is not an enduring one for its commitment to satirical commentary on 19th century America. Its inspired film endures for the charm of Ray Bolger’s physicality as Scarecrow. For the Hollywood lore behind Jack Haley’s allergy-inducing makeup. For pigtails, a blue checkered dress, and the trill of young Judy Garland’s voice as she dreams of life beyond a rainbow. This, despite living in a grayscale, dust-laden world.

Little girls love The Wizard of Oz because Dorothy is its hero. Oz, while thematically an allegory, is character-driven as a bildungsroman. As a little girl, myself, I can remember watching the movie for the first time at a drive-in theater in Mendon, Massachusetts with my sister. At some basic level, we understood what Dorothy felt. Whether it was a dream or some concussive episode, she imagined the act of growing up to be on par with stepping into a technicolor other-world. Sure, it was wonderful, and there were some great shoes. But it could be an evil world; indifferent (at best) and predatory (at worst) to the naivete of a young woman. Leaving home and growing up—even when those are the things you want—are hard, Dorothy told us.

And so, after Dorothy positively gets the shit kicked out of her by a couple of hard-slung apples and is forced to walk what we can only imagine are a couple hundred miles in stone-encrusted kitten heels, I was grateful, truthfully, when she got that reprieve in the poppy field. There was no imminent danger (Glinda had a watchful eye on her), unless you count the delayed gratification of success as dangerous. 

“I can’t run anymore,” she says. “I’m so sleepy.”

“Give us your hands, and we’ll pull you along,” says Scarecrow, and he attempts to yank her toward the glittering metropolis.

But Dorothy doesn’t go. She beds herself in the field of scarlet, if only for a little while.

If Baum’s tale is to be read as allegory, we might understand Dorothy’s stopping in the poppy field as the farmgirl’s aversion from the rat race. It is, ultimately, a detour from the capitalist Yellow Brick Road and the evils that purvey it. Impelled by the Wicked Witch though it is, Dorothy’s resting is a nearly uncharacteristic indulgence for the otherwise steadfast heroine.  Nothing is accomplished in departing from the path, but then again, nothing’s lost.

And when Dorothy does come to, wouldn’t you know it? The Emerald City remains on the horizon.

                              ***

I have not seen a poppy this season, that golden symbol of the West. But I think I’ve decided on the significance it has for me.

For those of you that are from California, you cannot understand what this state means to those of us who are not. It is the lemon-droppy, Capital S “Somewhere.” Where with a pat pat here, and a couple of brand new straws, the people really are kept young and fair. On the other side of the country, it is a ruby slipper-clicking idea.

But now that I’m here, my own personal allegory gets hazy. I have seen the Man Behind the Curtain, so to speak. And I am beginning to think that California never was my Emerald City. That maybe the best it had to offer was an intoxicated jaunt with a handful of friends met along the road and a nice long rest from the rat race. I am beginning to think that’s okay.

And anyway, even for Dorothy, the Emerald City proves illusory. There is no place like home, and a thing will flourish where it’s native. To come apart from that notion, teaches Oz, is to come apart, ourselves.

To say it a different way, as does the U.S. Forest Service: “If you pick California poppies for a wildflower bouquet, you will be disappointed when the petals almost immediately fall off … Enjoy them where they grow. “