A New Endangered Species Blooms in Gorman: Beauty Itself

If you have ever driven from Los Angeles to Bakersfield and beyond, you have passed Gorman on the top of the Ridge Route before dropping down into the San Joaquin Valley.

Gorman has a few gas stations where you may have stopped for a refill, a store, a restaurant or two, a motel or two, and not much of anything else. Behind Gorman is a set of steep, rounded hills. Those hills tend to be bare and brown for about eight months of the year, generally from late May through December; they turn white with snow in winter when cold storms sweep through, then green when the snow melts away. We had two such storms this season--in December and again in February--and the hills were quite lovely then.

In April those hills will burst into a rainbow of flowers. Yellows, blues, oranges, purples, light greens, reds--it’s almost garish. The only flower in the mosaic whose name I know is our state flower, the California poppy. But it’s not the names that matter, it’s the spectacle.

Winds usually blow across those rainbowed hillsides, and if you stand on the road at their base or walk up into them (feeling guilty as you step on the thick carpet of flowers), you can see waves of colors rippling like a psychedelic ocean.

For one month each year, those hills above Gorman may be the loveliest place on Earth. By late May, they will turn colorless again.

I have often wondered why the state hasn’t purchased those hills as a park, to be protected and enjoyed for the one month each year that nature puts on its show. We should have done so long ago.

It may be too late now. The winds that ripple those lovely flower-bedecked hills are proving attractive for developers of wind power. A proposal has been made to build an array of wind turbines there. Concrete pads with their tall towers and noisy propellers would replace the flower show.

Of course, poppies aren’t an endangered species, nor are the other flowers that grace those hillsides. We can grow them all in our backyards. But somehow it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, we need energy, and wind certainly supplies a clean, non-depletable source. It’s hard to argue against the proposal.

Do we really need beauty? And do we need it if it’s there only one month out of a whole year? The way I see it, we do. Let me draw an analogy. Do we need to eat? None of us spends more than two hours a day eating. That’s only one-twelfth of a day, one-twelfth of a year. But that intake of food nurtures us and keeps us going. I think that beauty nurtures us as well,and I think that one-twelfth of a year is worth it.

We’ve lost so much already. Just look around us. The California flag features a grizzly bear, but the last free-roaming grizzly in California was shot to death in 1923. Today we simply honor its memory.

The California condor, with its 8-foot wingspan, used to fly over the flowered hills above Gorman. But man encroached on the condor’s habitat, and today the 24 remaining condors are all captive in a breeding program started in the hope of eventually returning them to the wild. Shall we encroach still more on their shrunken range while they remain caged, further diminishing the possibility of their return to nature? Will we honor the condor only in memory?

We’ve lost California’s largest mammal, and it appears likely that we will lose our largest bird, too. Are we setting our sights on our state flower next?

Doesn’t nature count anymore?

Doesn’t beauty mean anything?

Can’t we make a state park out of those hills?