I never expected to feel so sentimental about Motherhood. My baby was 12 weeks old, and the last days of my parental leave had arrived.
I was excited to return to graduate school in journalism but dreading the end of spending full days with my baby.
I worried I wouldn't be able to continue breastfeeding once I went back.
For several days I had been watching from shore as birds, sea lions and seals gathered to feast during the winter herring run.
Late one afternoon, I left my baby with my mom for the first time. I wrapped my camera in a plastic bag and slid my kayak into the water.
The water was smooth as glass, and the sea and sky matched the color of fog. As I paddled out, a huge sea lion swam right under me, almost close enough to touch. The thrill of being in a wild place, utterly alone with the animals, was exhilarating. I realized I was OK without my baby. I was still me.
Classes started. For my semester-long documentary photo assignment, I photographed "the Breakwater," a manmade rock spit adjacent to Crab Cove in Alameda.
It is a physical space where people, birds, invertebrates, fish, and marine mammals intersect—a thin line between concrete and sea.
Every day, I brought my camera to the Breakwater. I established a routine: wake up, breastfeed, go to class, rush home, breastfeed, take pictures at the Breakwater, breastfeed. Repeat.
The changing weather, tides, wind, waves and light altered this single landscape into infinite possibilities: mudfats, whitecaps, sky-blue pink-colored dusk, or mysterious white fog. Thousands of birds, or just a few.
After dark, people fishing for jacksmelt would switch on their headlamps. I would watch each little light move out onto the rocks, under the moonlight.
One afternoon in early March, I sat on a rock watching a woman prepare her fishing line then cast it into the water. She told me this would be her last day fishing at the Breakwater. The Grand Princess cruise ship with coronavirus cases was making its way through the Golden Gate. Her daughter had advised her to stay home, so she would not get the virus.
Four hours before we found our classes could no longer meet in person I walked the J-school hallway. It was the last time I was on campus.
During our first Zoom photography class, we decided to document our daily lives and neighborhoods during the pandemic.
My routine shifted. Now, each day I would take long walks through my neighborhood. I spoke to my neighbors about their experiences.
One day I met Nayelin, a yoga teacher and studio owner at Alameda Beach. She sat on the sand crossed-legged, with her spine straight and her eyes closed, her presence calm and graceful, like a rock during a storm. She was practicing a meditation focused on feeling a connection to her students sheltering at home. She hoped they would be able to use this time to heal, to take the time to know their kids, to fix relationships, to do the things that they never have time to do. "Whatever they feel is what I care about," she told me. "As I meditate and pray, I ask God and the divine to make sure they have enough money for food and rent."
From the way these two men were interacting, I thought they might be father and son. But they were coworkers. Many of their construction jobs have been halted due to the ten-person limit on gatherings. They were worried about how they would earn money without work.
I stopped to talk to Nina, Remy and their two daughters as they shared a meal on their front lawn. The family moved to Alameda from Amsterdam four months ago. They are trying to adjust to their new schedule doing school and work from home. Nina took it easy on the girls during the first week while they studied math and English. Remy said he is coming down with an illness but does not know if it is the coronavirus.
Franklin's hours were cut to only two days a week at his hospitality job, and he anticipated further reductions. His dad is 88 and his mom is 77. He and his three siblings were taking turns running all the errands for their parents so they wouldn't be exposed to the virus.
On a Saturday afternoon, Rebecca Roman and Roger Rocha were practicing social distancing from their front porch. Roger's job installing billboards in San Francisco has been put on hold because it is not considered an essential service. His second job as a gig musician is also on hold.
On St. Patrick's Day, Scotty was sitting on his front porch to unwind. After being temporarily laid off from his job as a bartender, he spent his first day at home helping his two kids with the lesson plans they got from school.
Lenora and Raymond relaxed together on a bench in front of La Penca Azul. For them, nothing has changed since the shelter-in-place order. "We have everything we need. How you think your life will be is how your life will be. If you think good and positive things, good things will happen to you,” Lenora said.
Many local businesses are closed.
These are everywhere.
Besides documenting my neighborhood, I also documented life at home. I spent quiet moments chasing the light.
Sheltering in place and having a new baby at home gave everyday activities a greater significance.
Jay always wakes up first. All three of us have been sleeping on the floor on a foam mattress pad since Jay was a few days old. I was afraid I would fall asleep while breastfeeding and he would fall off the bed.
Working from home.
Easter vase still life in the window light. Flowers from my mom's garden: mimulus, star jasmine, ceanothus, rose and dogwood.
The wild rose in the garden is blooming! This was the first California native plant I tried to grow. It took years before it produced a single bloom. This photo preserves its transient beauty.
While Jay took a nap one afternoon I experimented with lighting.
Our school teamed up with the New York Times to cover Covid-19 in California.
The midday sun was high in the sky when I arrived outside the wrought iron gates of the National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi. Knobbed grey bark and lush dark green leaves of mature laurel fig trees framed the view of the historic church. I climbed the steps and stood in the arched doorway for a moment as my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness inside. Delicately hand-painted stained glass adorned the windows, dimming the bright sun to a colorful, calming glow. When Father John appeared, I could feel his smiling presence, even behind his mask. Making his portrait was a conversation. When it was over, I wished I'd recorded it.
The first thing I noticed about Ashley Grace Fisher was her "Be Fierce" T-shirt. Ashley is fierce. She shows up day after day to do her job as a mental health nurse, despite the risks to herself and her family.
I photographed Davon, a birth doula, at her home for a story about giving birth during the time of Covid-19. Hospitals are limiting visitors, preventing doulas from attending births. Davon began using Zoom to provide remote services.
Camille with her spouse Reuben and their 12-week-old baby boy Cameron in front of their home. Camille could not have her doula present for her hospital delivery.
I made this portrait of Mary Hanna waiting in line for a shelter bed outside St. Vincent de Paul of Alameda County in Oakland, for a NYT story about homeless seniors, who are three times as likely to die if they are infected by Covid-19.
As events were cancelled across the country, the cut flower industry collapsed overnight. One April morning, I put on my work boots and drove to Monterey to find out how farmers were managing.
A light layer of fog blanketed Kitayama Brothers Farms, nestled into the sandy coastal dunes of Santa Cruz County, obscuring the view of the Pacific Ocean behind a wall of white. Inside the tidy rows of greenhouses, which contain one and a half million square feet of growing space, was a sight that should never have been: rows and rows of brilliantly colored Asiatic lilies, Pomponi daisies and ranunculus blooming profusely under the glass. The blooms should have been harvested with their buds still tightly closed. Each opened bloom was a flower that would never make it to market.
"When you walk in for the first time, it's such a beautiful sight to see all the flowers blooming. At the same time, you realize that you're going to have to throw away all these flowers. And that's painful." --Farai Madziva, vice president of Kitayama Brothers Farms
In July, I photographed Dr. Gail Newel, the health officer for Santa Cruz, for the New York Times. She works puzzles to keep her focused during lengthy Zoom meetings about the pandemic.
In August, everything shifted. I was assigned to photograph Kyle, the CEO of i-Fixit in San Luis Obispo for a story about his efforts to gain the right to repair ventilators. The day I left on the road trip, wildfire smoke spread throughout the Central Valley. It was smoky the whole drive south. It was smoky the whole way home.
My friend Alex told me he felt like he was trapped. Suffocating. There was ash on my car door. One day I let Jay go outside barefoot on the deck. The bottoms of his feet turned black.
On my birthday, I found out the redwoods at Big Basin had burned. Luke’s mom called and said she wailed out loud when she learned about their fate. We had no idea this would be only the beginning of her wildfire-induced heartache. We did not see what was coming.
One afternoon migrating terns arrived by the thousands. I photographed them during the smoky sunset, their bellies glowing in the warm apricot light. The next day they were gone as quickly as they had arrived.
When the full moon rose on September 1, it was brilliant orange because of the wildfire smoke in the atmosphere. The Farmer's Almanac calls September's full moon the corn moon, but I called it the Smoke Moon. Now I think of the Smoke Moon as foreshadowing what was to come.
A few days later Luke's phone rang. He took the call in the other room. When he came back in, his face was serious. "The West Side is going to burn," he told me. "The ‘M’ outside Bozeman is on fire. Our land is downwind."
The West Side is Luke’s family ranch in Montana. It was his grandfather's land. When Luke was a baby, his dad, Bob, designed and built a cabin there with his own hands. Luke spent his childhood summers at the cabin. Without running water or electricity, he spent his days wandering every piece of the land. He knew the paths, the rocks the trees and the animals.
That night we were too tired to cook. We went to bed pretending everything was fine.
The next day Bob texted us a "thumbs up" emoji and a picture of the West Side. Three hours later Luke walked into the kitchen. "It's gone," he said.
We would learn later that just after Bob sent us the text and photo, he drove to the western edge of the property and sat in the big meadow, watching firefighters drop water buckets on the flames four miles away. Suddenly the wind picked up, and the flames jumped over the ridge. Bob decided it was time to go. The fire tore through the land within the hour.
One morning, the sun went down. Or at least it seemed to. As I watched bay swimmers glide by, it grew darker by the minute. The higher the sun rose above the smoke and cloud cover, the darker it became. Unprecedented amounts of wildfire smoke in the atmosphere combined with fog to turn the sky orange.
Luke has a habit of doom-scrolling on Twitter. He told me he'd been reading news stories about how unhealthy smoky air is for babies’ developing lungs. He decided we should go to Montana where, despite the fire, the air was better. He also wanted to see his land, to grieve the loss. We packed up the car and left the Bay Area at 8pm so that Jay would sleep all the way to Reno.
Luke reacts to seeing his family’s burned land for the first time.
When we got back in the truck, Bob told me his deepest desire had been to pass the land to Luke and Jay.
The night the land burned, Bob didn't sleep. The next morning, he convinced the firefighters to let him through. He went to the land every single day after that. It was like he was by his sick child's hospital bed. He only missed one day--the day he had to go to the doctor himself.
As I walked through the burned fir forest, my footsteps landed softly, almost inaudibly. My boots were insulated from the ground by inches of matte black ash. 300-year-old trees were uniformly charred matte black. Soft and spongy to the touch, their bark crumbled when I pressed into it gently with my finger. The texture and color of the ground and trees matched: soft, matte black. But the lack of footsteps couldn't fully explain the quiet.
The sound of the wind blowing through the branches was missing. There were needles left. There were no animals rustling in the brush. No birds were calling in the distance. The animals, the brush, the birds were gone. Making my way across the landscape had never been so easy: No woody obstacles to step over. No grasses to brush against my cotton leggings and no seeds or burrs to velcro themselves into the cotton. No thorny shrubs to cut open my skin. Only crisp mountain air and soft empty quietness, shockingly beautiful despite the ravages that had just taken place. The enormity of what happened to this single piece of burned land is hard to describe. The losses that occurred within the bounds of the viewfinder of this single photograph are incalculable. The landscape, as we knew it has changed forever. And yet this change represents just a drop in the bucket of the ravages of wildfires in the west this year.
I flew a drone over the burned area.
After we left Montana we drove to Michigan to visit my parents and get some help with childcare.
As the West was burning, the Great Lakes region was drowning. The water levels were so high this year that critical infrastructure was washed out. Houses fell off cliffs. Basements flooded.
The combination of storm winds and unusually high water levels blew water from Lake Michigan over the road.
The migrating geese flying overhead marked the change of the season.
We dressed Jay up as a bunny for Halloween. But we stayed home.
As cases of Covid-19 surged ahead of Thanksgiving, I walked the streets of Grand Rapids, asking people how they were doing, just like I did last spring in California. The nail salon was taking extra precautions with a plexiglass wall and mask wearing.
A man wearing a mask walked in front of a storefront display of two masked sculptures.
Hat and wig shop owner.
Many storefronts were boarded up.
Window cleaner. He said he has to handle a lot of spiders. Some are huge and squish like gushers.
At the bridal shop, business is still good because brides buy their dresses six months ahead. They are always optimistic that by the time their wedding date rolls around the pandemic will be better.
Two people wearing masks waited outside a coffeeshop.
The snow and ice arrived.
As the door closes on 2020, our collective reckoning with the events of the year has only begun.
