Fresh Wood

Risky Invitation, 2025

They are rebuilding the piers. Three in Gulfport, the Ken Combs at the foot of Courthouse Road, the Fred Urie, the Libby Milner Roland. One in Long Beach, the Jim Simpson, where the new decking went down this month. The Gulfport piers reopened one after another this year, ribbon cuttings and speeches. Long Beach is nearly finished.

If you did not grow up watching this coast, the history takes a minute. A hurricane finds this beach every few years, and the piers stand out in open water and take the worst of it. They have been battered and built back so many times that the rebuilding is part of what a pier is around here. The last round came in 2020, when Cristobal and Zeta came through months apart and took them apart deck by deck. The gulf keeps taking the piers and we keep putting them back, which tells you something about both parties.

For six years they stood broken, and last year they became nearly the entire focus of my photography. I should try to explain that, because on paper a wrecked pier is not much. A ruined pier is mostly absence. The deck is gone. What remains is a line of pilings walking out into the water until the water wins, gray above the tide line and black below it, each one eaten to its own height. No two are the same and all of them agree on a direction. Give the shutter a minute and the gulf goes to fog and the pilings stand in it like the only permanent thing in the frame, which is a lie the photograph tells. Photographing them is an obsession.

And it is time. I want to say that clearly, because this is not a preservationist's complaint. You cannot walk on a ruin. You cannot fish from it, or teach a kid to crab off the side of it, or stand over the water you live next to, which is the entire purpose of a pier. What the storms left standing is dangerous, and a pier exists for people, not for photographers. The new ones are honest about what they are for. Concrete caps, stainless hardware, decking spaced so the next surge passes through it instead of prying it loose. They are built the way you build something you intend to keep, and after Katrina, nobody on this coast needs the lesson explained.

But I cannot help the feeling of loss when the fresh wood goes down. A new pier is beautiful the way new things are beautiful, which is to say not yet. Clean lines, bright lumber, every board the same. Everything I photographed is exactly what got engineered out of it, and I grieve it anyway.

What I keep arriving at is that the ruin was never the subject. Time was the subject. The pilings were just where you could see it. And time is not being demolished, it is being handed a blank deck. The gulf started on the new wood the day the ribbon was cut. In forty years somebody will stand at the end of the Jim Simpson with a camera, and the pier will have earned it.

So I am not mourning, exactly. I am changing tenses. I have been photographing what the water finished, and now I get to watch it start.