Where Are the Wild Things?

I’ve been on the Gulf Coast for over two weeks now. I wanted to come home to document, through photography, this beautiful area before the inundation of oil begins to move from the holding pattern, just south of Mobile Bay, inland. I realized when the oil flow started that I didn’t have many high quality images of this magnificent place I call home.

Even with all the white-sand beauty surrounding me, I have been frustrated and unable to make progress toward my goal. I have felt tormented trying to get unstuck.

Yesterday I finally understood my lack of success as I drove along the main beach highway in Gulf Shores, Alabama. I was asking myself questions trying to unravel my two-week inertia when the answer came to me.

I have been looking for the Gulf Coast of my childhood–the gentle, moss-draped, wild place softened by warm, salty breezes. As I tried to connect with that place I was only able to see walls of concrete and glass, monuments to the gradual destruction of the raw, wild beauty that once infused this place. As well, gas and oil rigs now dot the horizon, a constant reminder of the life force being sucked from the region.

The place where I grew up no longer exists in the physical realm, it dwells only in my heart and mind. I catch glimpses of it in the Bon Secour Wildlife Refuge or Gulf State Park, two rare and fragile jewels surrounded by the push of development. I cannot create photographs of a place that is no longer here.

Yes, it is beautiful here, but if only you’d seen it fifty years ago. The local news reported yesterday the oil is just offshore of the Alabama coastline. Within a few weeks I could be saying…if only you’d seen it three weeks ago.

So I begin at a new baseline and work to capture the essence of this place now. I celebrate the wildness still here, in small, sacred realms too precious to imagine losing. And I grieve for what has been lost and the losses yet to come.