Toad in the Hole
June 02, 2007
Last Weekend
We took a stroll through Guadalcanal Village with our friend Sally and her workbud (now our friend too, hey!) Linda. The place isn't open to the public. It's a CalTrans mitigation site, a former patch of housing on the Mare Island navy base being turned back to tidal marsh. Sally has been photographing it for a few years now, and has official permssion to be there; she got permission for us too.
The place is engagingly off-color.
By that I mean just a little spectrum-challenged.
It's the chemistry of the place -- not all toxic, just... tidal marsh and associated strangeness.
Talk about yer sea change.
Part of it is the intersection of fresh and salt waters.
Part of it's, well, I don't know what the hell it is. Not particularly an industrial site, as far as I know. But there's some strangeness in the waters
just a bit beyond the usual saltmarsh parameters.
If you look close, you get those colorful denizens too.
And some of its inhabitants are perfectly normal; they just look Martian in this place, like this purslane.
That's a common garden weed, edible (tasty, IMO) and evidently tough as all hell.
The place has that life-and-death thing going on,
that old slow dance,
and some of that's just a matter of seasons
or tides.
We had the place pretty much to ourselves, except for a couple of brief incursions: science
and commerce.
Lots of birds too, but I'll have to do some cropping to make any of them visible.
Thanks, Sally!
Posted at June 2, 2007 04:55 AMComments
You're welcome, Ron. It was a kick, going out there with you, Joe, and Linda. You're right, it's not industrial, not commercial, but also not pristine, a weird mix of. . .returning back to nature?
I've been photographing Guadalcanal Village now for several years, always thinking it can't offer much more to photograph but it does.
More photos of GV can be seen on my website (http://www.sallymack.us) under "Wetlands" and my most recent ones under "Exhibits".
Posted by: Sally at June 2, 2007 04:42 PM
Very interesting, very cool. I like how that odd, rusty palette you mention is evident in every shot, even in the red-painted boat and the artificially redheaded young scientist's hair.
Thanks for the tour!
Posted by: Sara at June 4, 2007 08:22 PM
so fascinating.
Posted by: kathy a at June 6, 2007 02:03 AM
