Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 richard white Photographs by Jesse White Deconstructing Mare Island Reconnaissance in the ruins The detritus still he Carquinez Strait has become driveover country. Beginning around Vallejo and running roughly six miles to Suisun Bay, Grizzly Bay, and the Sacramento possesses a T River Delta, the Strait has, in the daily life of California, reduced down to the Carquinez and Benicia-Martinez bridges. Motorists are as likely to be searching for grim grandeur. their toll as looking at the land and water below. Few will exit the interstates. Why stop at Martinez, Benicia, Vallejo, Crockett, or Port Costa? They are going west to Napa or San Francisco or east to Sacramento. Like travelers’ destinations, California’s future also appears to lie elsewhere. Once, much of what moved out of Northern California came through these communities, but now the Strait seems left with only the detritus of California’s past. The detritus still possesses a grim grandeur. To the east, the Mothball Fleet— originally composed of transports and battleships that helped win World War II— cluster tightly together, toxic and rusting, in Suisun Bay. Just west of the bridges, Mare Island (really a peninsula with a slough running through it) sits across the mouth of the Napa River. The United States established a naval base and shipyard there in 1854, and the island remained central to US military efforts from the Civil Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, Number 2, pps 55–69. ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2012.2.2.55. boom | summer 2012 55 Boom0202_06.indd 55 07/06/12 2:23 PM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Boom0202_06.indd 56 07/06/12 2:24 PM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 War through Vietnam. When base closures washed across All along the Carquinez Strait, past and present cohabit California, Mare Island Naval Shipyard shut its gates for in a grand, confusing jumble. The ugly and the beautiful good in 1996. The Navy transferred most of the island to are not so much juxtaposed as combined. Let the light Vallejo, and over the last decade the base has declined into change, or step back a few yards, and what seemed sad and a kind of industrial Pompeii. A recent quixotic attempt to derelict becomes enchanting. The Carquinez Strait can make it a national park went nowhere: the National Park appear exhausted and worn down, but like California as a Service considered even a mostly cleaned-up island too whole, it is a resilient place. toxic to touch. Until a few years ago, Vallejo presented Mare Island as a Mare Island is a partial ruin among other ruins. Some symbol of that city’s resilience. City officials, state officials, are inconspicuous, like the lines of posts along the shore developers, urban planners, and the Navy claimed to be at Benicia and Port Costa that once held wharves along successfully recycling the island. They were refurbishing which nineteenth-century workers carried bagged wheat the old buildings and constructing new ones, preserving to load on schooners bound for England. Others advertise sweeping marshlands, and cleaning up the toxic debris of themselves. The Sperry Mill across from Mare Island closed a century. They would fill the island with new homes and in 2004. A sign across it reads: “For Sale: 707-863-0188.” new jobs. The Sperry Mill succeeded the Starr Mill, which Carleton But today what they appear to be doing on Mare Watkins photographed in 1869. The Starr Mill had become Island is deconstructing California and shipping it away part of Sperry Mills and then General Mills, before burning as scrap. In a place that for more than a century built down in a spectacular fire in 1934. things and projected American power, Californians are boom | summer 2012 57 Boom0202_06.indd 57 07/06/12 2:24 PM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 now demolishing what they previously built. At first, NCM, a provider of demolition and remediation services, to second, and third glance, there is something vaguely post- handle the dirty work. The workers in the hazmat suits were apocalyptic about parts of the island. It is unclear whether a remediation crew, and given the flaking lead paint and the our past is a burden or a foundation, but clearly, we cannot toxic metals—lead, zinc, barium, and more—they needed avoid reckoning with it. the suits. An old crane swung slowly over and took the bin away. The crane then replaced the first bin with an empty one. By August, Allied Defense Recycling had cut away much First glance of the bridge, which sat like a decapitated head alongside the The dry docks at Mare Island turned out their first vessel—a partially disassembled vessel. Shipping containers belonging wooden side-wheeler, the USS Saginaw—before Abraham to the Korean company Hanjin waited nearby. Lincoln was president. Last summer workers were Dismantling the ships at Mare Island certainly makes disassembling the USS Abraham Lincoln, part of the Mothball more sense than towing them through the Panama Fleet. In June the Lincoln was still flying the American flag as Canal or around Cape Horn to Gulf Coast shipyards for three workers in white hazmat suits carried what looked like scrapping. And fifty jobs dismantling ships, while not much old metal window and doorframes across the rusting bridge employment, is something. Workers who once built ships to a debris bin. tried hard to get these jobs. They missed the shipyards, and Allied Defense Recycling took the contract for dismantling they needed the work. Judging from the parking lot, not all the ships, and it, in turn, hired Marcor, which was part of of Marcor’s jobs went to locals. In August, California plates 58 boomcalifornia.com Boom0202_06.indd 58 07/06/12 2:24 PM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Boom0202_06.indd 59 07/06/12 2:24 PM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 were a minority. Most were from Washington, Nevada, and We eat at a taco truck, a good one—the best on the Virginia. island, Jesse tells me—watching the pickups pull in. A semi The museum at Mare Island memorializes the time when leaves carrying a shipping container with a side that reads workers built ships instead of tearing them apart. In World Dongfang. The driver stops as he is pulling away to put War II workers in the yards constructed 16 submarines and something in his car parked nearby. The car is a new and 392 ships; they repaired 4,000 more. Every working day, shiny GT. As we drive back down Azuar, we pass a middle- roughly 43,000 people paraded through the gates. aged man with a shopping cart. He is bent over, scavenging the side of the road for metal. Second glance Third glance There is little attempt to reuse the island’s old naval base north of G Street. Alco Iron and Metal sits across from When the shipyards were in their prime, some of the workers abandoned and partially burned barracks. Alco seems the and most of the military personnel lived on Mare Island. perfect business for the island. The pickups and flatbed A century of the architectural and horticultural history of trucks return to the company warehouse like bees to a hive. California courses through the ruins, recycled buildings, and Warehouse workers weigh the loads and the trucks vanish abandoned gardens. On Walnut Street, old houses with their inside. My son, Jesse, who has been taking photographs columned porches have been refurbished. They are available here for more than a year, points out that the trucks always for lease. Everything on the old naval base has an identifying contain at least one bicycle frame. I watch. They do. number or letter, and these—Quarter D and Quarter E—have 60 boomcalifornia.com Boom0202_06.indd 60 07/06/12 2:24 PM Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/55/381274/boom_2012_2_2_55.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 a museum-like quality to them. Beautiful specimen trees—a On the southeastern island, near a large concentra- camphor planted in 1948, a healthy Douglas fir, a Canary tion of munitions bunkers, a fence separates the old Island palm, and one of the biggest Monterey pines I have workers’ quarters from a new natural area. The fence ever seen—have labels. A Hollywood crew was filming on simply ends there, and you can walk among the boarded Walnut Street in June. They had 1930s cars lining the street. houses. Their clotheslines remain in place. The exotics It was easy to turn the place into a prop as long as the camera people planted here—palms, eucalypti, figs, and Europe- stayed focused on a few houses.