Weekender: Among the ruins
Floating above the delta, plus some weekend longreads
When I first moved to Louisiana, an acquaintance invited me to attend an opening at a photography gallery, which is how I stumbled upon a set of stunning images: the Mississippi River delta, as rendered from above, was at once familiar and disorienting.
Only later did I learn the challenging process behind this work: photographer Ben Depp travels above the marsh in a motorized paraglider. He sometimes camps for days on remote islands, waiting for viable weather.
Ben’s first book, Tide Lines, is out now. It offers a powerful way to see—and rethink—this hard-to-reach landscape. I spoke with Ben to accompany a preview of images published this week at Garden & Gun. Give that a read, then pick up your own copy of the book.
What survives
For Emergence, Lacy M. Johnson visits a nature center on the Texas coast, built atop a site that once featured a luxury housing development for oil executives and their families.
What strikes me here today . . . is that sometimes we try to protect the places we love and end up losing them anyway: a neighborhood, a peninsula, a marsh upriver, a riverine woodland. We need space and time and ritual to grieve these losses, but we also have to love whatever emerges in their place.
Beachfront fiasco
The Washington Post takes an interactive deep dive into the North Carolina beach town where three houses collapsed into the ocean last year—including one that was captured on a viral video.
[Tom and Amy Urban] bought what the why envisioned as their retirement house in January 2022, when there appeared to be a healthy stretch of beach separating them from the sea. Now? hardly any. Their back fence and pool were destroyed by a storm in September. . . . “We looked at a lot of houses. And we chose the wrong one.”