On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
JanieM
A Sense of Place
After OTR and WaterGirl introduced us, Steve from Mendocino and I emailed mostly about pictures for a while, then expanded to include music, food, and just shooting the breeze. One thing we found we had in common: we both spent our early years wandering and our later years planted as close to the end of the road as we could get.
Steve grew up mostly in southern California, but he also lived in Michigan, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, and New York City, not to mention long stretches in France. I grew up in Ohio, but I also lived in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Wisconsin, Oregon, and finally Maine. Later on I spent a lot of time in Ireland with my Irish girlfriend.
Steve thought of settling in a rural part of the French Basque country, but his life didn’t go that way. I thought of settling in Ireland, but my relationship ended and my life didn’t go that way.
So where, after all this wandering, did we end up?
I fell in love with Maine and moved to a rural community with a couple thousand people, nine lakes, and one blinker light.
Steve ended up in a tiny, laid back, unincorporated community in the hills above Mendocino. Paraphrasing Wikipedia, it’s a “census-designated place” in Mendocino County, seventeen miles southeast of Fort Bragg at an elevation of 187 feet. There’s a K–3 primary school, a small store with gas pump, a post office, and a church. The population was 167 at the 2020 census.
There’s no blinker light.
Our regions have logging and fishing in common, plus the long-term effects of hippie back-to-the-landers from the seventies. Mendocino has pot farming, Maine has organic farming. (And no doubt there’s some crossover. :-) )
The weather in Mendocino is mild and even-tempered, while Maine’s is dramatic and fickle. They have the threat of fire, we have the threat of blizzards. We have white pines and maple trees, they have redwoods and Douglas firs.
Each place has taught me something about photography, and vice versa. Taking pictures has reminded me that the landscape is one of the main reasons I moved to Maine. Visiting Mendocino surprised me photographically, because the colors, light, and subject matter are so different from home that they required me to think more instead of just falling into the shot.
I have to confess that it made me nervous to have Steve looking over my shoulder as I took pictures, but in the long run it has helped me become more conscious of what’s in front of me, whether it’s familiar or not, beloved or not, even beautiful or not.
*****
This set of pictures is a sampling of springtime in Mendocino County. Most of the pictures are from up in the hills, but a few are from one of the treks Steve took me on for picture-taking.
Old swing.
Cherry blossoms.
Old stump, cherry trees, English ivy.
Dogwood with raindrops.
Little white flowers and last year’s leaves.
A path to mystery.
Strange rhino mailbox on a stump, somewhere along the coastal highway.
Keene Ranch, up in the hills.
Old orchard.
Photographer with tripod.
tybee
Great photos. Thanks.
Mendocino always reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy3V2BGQKAk
Benw
I love cherry trees! Awesome photos.
This Steve guy sounds like a sweetheart :)
Lapassionara
I’m a big fan of dogwoods. Thanks for sharing.
Spanish Moss
Love that old swing picture!
oatler
@tybee:
Funny how those late-60s Youtubes always had Barbi Benton dancing in them for some reason.
eclare
Lovely photos, especially the dogwood.
MelissaM
I love that swing and its cushion of moss and the lichen taking over!
apieceofpeace
Very drawn into the swing in nature pic, full on picture of summertime feelings. And the winding dogwood branches remind me of my hometown in the PNW that covers itself in pink-laden trees block after block.
I know a bit about photography, enough to appreciate your what you capture in your lovely photos and give to someone looking.
apieceofpeace
The Fat Kate Middleton
Wonderful photos. And this becomes my ear worm when you … talk to me of Mendocino:
mcgarrigle sisters talk to me of mendocino
Yutsano
Every time I see さくらblossoms 🌸 I get happy. Mendocino looks so lush in the spring.
Kabecoo
That dogwood! Beautiful
Madeleine
It seemed to me that your photos, JanieM, of Mendocino environs are different both in content and hmmm style. But the Keene farm photo returned to Maine. The two yellowish lines of the track caught my eye first, in its green field, and a bit later the scattered sheep. But then I noticed layers—very Maine, I think—the dense wall of evergreens, a backdrop to the individual greening trees capturing the house, and forward to the bright green field, scattered sheep, and parallel lines of track.
The whole group of Mendocinos is quite wonderful. Thanks.
JanieM
Thanks, you-all. I too love the dogwood and the swing. :-)
And the songs, especiallly the McGarrigle one, although the Sir Douglas Quintet certainly brings back memories!
@Yutsano: It was lush indeed! And maybe that’s part of what I had to make such an adjustment to. Maine is utterly beautiful in the spring, but it’s a sparer beauty. Lilacs and daisies, as a gardener friend of mine once said, and that’s about it. You see a magnolia here and there, but certainly no dogwoods around where I live.
@Madeleine: Thank you for that comment! It helps clarify what I’ve been struggling to understand about the effect of that trip. Not to get too mystical or anything, but I think of taking pictures as a collaboration between me and the universe — and the universe manifests itself in so many different ways that it’s only natural that I should have to adjust what I’m doing depending on where I am. The deeper I get into it, the more fun it is, even when I’m a bit frustrated.
JanieM
@Benw:
I can’t believe my good luck in having connected with him through this almost-top-10000 blog. He is a great teacher, and our joint photographic enterprises are an ongoing adventure.
Origuy
I have to get up to Mendocino sometime this month. A friend of mine is running a couple of orienteering events there in November. I have a conflict that weekend so I told him I would go up and vet (i.e. test) his courses. One is in Hendy Woods near Philo and the other is in downtown Mendocino. When do the leaves start to turn around there?
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Since I live in Mendocino County and have never visited Maine, I wish you would talk a bit more about this – I find it fascinating.
THanks for the pics!
JanieM
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I have been trying to find words for this since I was there. I used to have the same challenge, although not related to picture-taking in those days, when I spent a lot of time in Ireland.
Will think more about it, but the most obvious and easy to put into words aspect is the plant life. The mix of trees is different — which is to be expected, since the climate is so different. That makes the colors and textures different — and all the relationships between ground-level growth, foliage, etc.
The shape of the land itself is also part of it — I’ll try to come back to that. But it’s the light that I find hardest to put into words…
Meanwhile, a couple of related memories:
I spent December and a bit of January in Fullerton when I was 11 years old, and was sent back to Ohio on a train with a couple of friends of my grandmother. I remember waking up in the middle of the night when the train stopped at a station, and looking out the window to see soft snow falling on a classic midwestern small town’s main street. I had had a month of palm trees and California architecture, and now I was home. Or close enough. And that was because of the architecture and trees as much as the snow.
Similarly on one of the three driving trips I took across the country as a young adult. We had to get back into approximately Minnesota for me to feel like I was back in home territory. This had to do, again, with both the landscape and the buildings.
As to the shape of the land — I don’t live in a mountainous part of Maine, though the land is rolling and hilly and the roads curve all over the place. But it’s softly rolling, whereas the hills above Mendocino are much steeper, and the valleys plunge correspondingly fast. At least that’s my impression.
Plus the forest is different —- this may be totally wrong, and I would be glad to be corrected, but the forest around where I live (central Maine) seems more randomly mixed. There is nothing like the orderly patterns that the redwoods (and maybe Douglas firs mixed in?) make as they march up and down the hillsides. (I saw this in ONP as well…..where it looked like a beautiful patterned blanket had been thrown over the hills.)
Maine’s state tree is the white pine, and they grow like weeds here, as Steve says redwoods do in northern California. But to me the iconic tree in New England (as in my home town in Ohio) is the maple tree. And again, that shape is nothing like the tall straightness of a redwood. Neither is the shape of the white pine, for that matter.
It’s the light that I don’t know how to talk about — except maybe to start with the theory that it matters a lot that the sun rises over the ocean here (though I’m an hour from the ocean at my home) but sets over it in Mendocino. (Back to the McGarrigle song! )
I’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll end this off the cuff meditation right here for now. :-)
Thanks for asking!
J R in WV
Beautiful photos. The Dogwood blooms in rain is my fav, but they are all great.
I don’t use tripods much any more, used to long ago, slow exposures of falling snow, etc. But too much like work now…
Tehanu
Nice photos, thanks.