Underwhelmed Under the Umbrellas in the Tejon Pass

My wife said, “I’m going to get up early tomorrow and drive up to see the Christo umbrellas. You don’t have to go.”

I was stunned. “You’re crazy,” I said.

“I suppose I am. I just want to see it.”

We had driven to Bakersfield and back a week or so before the umbrellas were to be opened. We could see the pads all through the foothills of the Tejon Pass. A gas station attendant at Grapevine had said traffic was going to be a mess when the show opened.

“I want to take the helicopter ride,” she said. She had read about the helicopter rides in the paper.

“You are crazy,” I said.

“You don’t have to go,” she said.

She knew I’d have to go. But I certainly was not going to take the helicopter ride. Helicopters are dangerous. One is obliged to take many risks in life. One is not obliged to take them all.

She is a great deal more intrepid than I am. She loves to experience danger, the new, the exotic. I remembered staying on the ground while she took a helicopter ride over Mt. Haleakala on Maui; staying outside the Great Pyramid at Giza while she crouched through the tunnel into the inner chamber; drinking Coke in a nearby cafe while she entered King Tut’s tomb. I always hold her purse.

“Oh, I’ll go,” I said. “Somebody has to hold your purse.”

As we climbed Interstate 5 into the mountains the scenery was gorgeous. Puffy white clouds floated in a blue sky. Thousands of new tract houses lay like quilts on the hillsides. In the distance a dark gray rain cloud glinted on the mountaintops.

“See that rain cloud?” I said

“That’s not a rain cloud.”

That brief dialogue demonstrated the difference in our views of life. To me it was a rain cloud. To her it was benign.

A few miles south of Gorman the rain cloud flashed. Huge raindrops struck our windshield and bounced on the highway.

When we reached Gorman the rain had let up. Gorman was jammed with tourists. Entrepreneurs were hawking souvenirs and box lunches. A sign pointed north to the helicopter pad. We found the pad and parked.

She bought a ticket for one. The short ride was $35, the long ride $60. She took the long ride.

We waited on folding chairs beside the helicopter trailer until her group was called. She left her purse with me, and her car keys, just in case. I waited in my chair. It was a good place to see the umbrellas from.

Christo had planted hundreds of his umbrellas right there in the vicinity of Gorman, an otherwise unalluring road stop. Some stood close by. Others marched up the ridges, scattered out in the plateaus, and soared at the top. They were large. They were yellow.

“They’re art,” I told myself, trying to understand that concept. I sat in my folding chair, looking up at the lines of yellow umbrellas. They shimmered under the rain-clean sky.

It would have been just as pleasant, though, without the umbrellas. The Tejon Pass is a beautiful drive, marked by sharp peaks, a pretty lake, green meadows, lush valleys, and, in season, vivid wildflowers. Most people rushing through on Interstate 5 are in too big a hurry to notice.

Maybe Christo’s umbrellas slowed them down. But of course that created congestion on the highway and made it even more dangerous. Was Christo’s purpose to get them to look? Was his art more entertaining than nature’s?

He was said to have spent $26 million on the project. That would build a wing to a children’s hospital. But benevolence isn’t Christo’s thing. What is his thing? Evidently he wants to do something big. As Simon Rodia said of his Watts Towers, “I wanted to do something big and I did.”

But the Watts Towers were not built out of money. They were built out of the scraps of urban life. That and Rodia’s great creative dedication. Enormous energy went into the creation of the umbrellas; but it was the energy of thousands of workers, of machine shops making pods and poles and cutting cloth, of volunteers laboring up hills. Christo had created the umbrellas the way the Pharaohs had created the pyramids: “Here’s what I want. Do it.”

The helicopter ride lasted less than 15 minutes. My wife was disappointed. She had been placed in the back; the pilot and a large male passenger sat in front of her, blocking her view. She couldn’t get any unimpeded pictures.

On the way home I was struck by the enormous amount of money and energy that had gone into the creation of those housing tracts. They dwarfed even Christo’s umbrellas.

But were they art?