Huntington Beach Wetlands

Author's Comments

Most people drive past this place a thousand times without ever knowing it is there. Pacific Coast Highway runs right alongside it, and if you are looking out toward the ocean you will miss the wetlands entirely. That is part of why I love it. I came here first on a January morning, before sunrise, parked at the Magnolia Marsh trailhead because someone had mentioned it in passing. The fog was sitting low over the tidal channels, the kind of ground fog that softens everything to suggestion. Egrets stood in the shallows like punctuation marks. The levee trail bent away into the mist and the city behind me went quiet in a way that felt almost improbable, given that I was standing a few miles from Disneyland. This is not a dramatic landscape. There is no skyline, no surf, no obvious composition that announces itself. What there is, in winter and into early spring, is atmosphere - the channels going pewter in the half-light, the reeds catching whatever color the sky offers, the long-billed shorebirds working the mudflats with the kind of patience I keep trying to learn. A long lens is useful. So is a willingness to stand still. The fog usually burns off by nine. After that the wetlands become a different and less interesting place, brighter and more ordinary. Come early. Come in the cold months when the migratory birds are in residence and the light stays soft until late. Walk slowly. The preserve does not perform for you, and that is the entire point.

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