MERCED -“”mdash; Through the window of a 1956 taildragger
airplane, longtime Merced County resident Hans Marsen points on
Saturday to the site where the University of California’s
newest campus will open this September.
He explains over the choppy din of a whirling front propeller
that development in the city of Merced and adjacent areas is
branching out to meet the school, located next to Lake Yosemite on
a sparse piece of land that used to be a golf course.
From the air, the new housing below looks like many tentacles,
stretching outward from densely populated areas into barren
stretches of tan and gold.
The view is one with which Marsen is intimately acquainted.
A self-employed chimney sweep who performs inspections for
realtors, he has indulged in digital aerial photography for the
past three years, capturing the construction of UC Merced from a
birds-eye angle.
He posts his pictures of the university, dated between Nov. 2003
and April 2005, on his Web site ““ UCMerced.net. They show the
transformation of dirt plots and foundations to pillars, wooden
wall paneling, glass finishings and paint.
“Aerial photography has everything for me,” Marsen
said. “I guess it’s like saying ““ like being able
to take and show something in a way I know you haven’t seen
it before.”
“I get a high out of being able to get an image like
that.”
The view from the ground
Walking into Paul’s Place, a local restaurant Marsen calls
his watering hole, patrons pass by an aerial photograph posted by
the entrance.
Marsen updates the frame with a new image of UC Merced each time
he flies.
He says a university would help Merced because it would employ
people year round in this agricultural society, bringing stability
to a region whose economy depends on the weather.
Marsen acknowledges that the tight-knit community of friends and
neighbors he loves so much will change as Merced grows.
But he sees the addition of a university as “the natural
evolution” of the area in the best way possible. Building
around a campus is preferable to developing with an auto factory,
he said.
With the university will come music, sports and education
““ all the facets of culture one might hope for, Marsen said.
Children could grow up and get the highest quality of education the
state offers without having to leave home, he added.
“Nothing in this world is static,” Marsen said.
“There’s … no city that can simply put a fence up and
say, “˜We don’t want change.'”
Over lunch at Paul’s Place, Marsen chats with Merced
residents Bob Pinney and Lynn Wychunas, an engaged couple, about
what the new UC means for the area.
“It’s really turned this little town around,”
said Wychunas, a retired fire inspector who believes that while the
campus will benefit the county in the long run, Merced’s
infrastructure isn’t ready to support the campus.
“They planned it way the hell out in the middle of nowhere
and they forgot to budget for a sewer line,” she said.
Pinney, a general manager for the ladder company Werner, thinks
of Santa Cruz, saying a “sleepy little beach town”
became a college-centered city when the university moved in.
Residents like Gilbert Arguelles, one of Marsen’s good
friends, aren’t completely enamored with the idea of UC
Merced.
“It’ll probably be the big dog in the
neighborhood,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve
seen it. You go to Riverside and Irvine, look what’s
happened.”
“Who knows really,” he said. “It’s very
difficult to see the future. … If it’s good, bad, who
knows? I guess it’s all of the above, really.”
With different opinions floating around Merced, Marsen stands
firmly in believing the university will be a positive influence. He
said he can’t afford to donate large sums of money to endow a
chair there, but that sharing photos with the UC is his
contribution.
His introduction to UC Merced didn’t anticipate the cozy
relationship he has now with administrators.
They wrote to him a few years ago, asking when he planned to
hand over his site’s domain name to the UC.
He asked Arguelles, who owns a company that offers Web hosting
and Internet services, for help. Arguelles told him to ignore the
message.
“So I hung onto the domain and I ignored it,” Marsen
said.
A while later, university officials asked if they could use some
of the photographs. Marsen agreed, on the condition that they let
him shoot on campus grounds.
The bargain still stands. Marsen has become a regular visitor to
the school, and every image of the construction is donated to the
UC.
Passion in a frame
Propped up against a back wall of an office adjacent to his
garage, Marsen keeps a stack of 15 framed photographs. Besides UC
Merced, the county and Atwater, the city in which Marsen lives, are
central to his art.
He and his wife Gloria moved to the United States in 1976, six
weeks after visiting friends in Atwater, where Marsen is a planning
commissioner.
Born to a German father and Estonian mother at the end of World
War II, he had never lived anywhere for more than three years
before settling in Atwater two-and-a-half decades earlier.
Here, he can buy fresh strawberries from the farm for $10 a flat
and find cheap wine by the gallon.
He loves the sunshine, and remembers that in Yorkshire, where he
and his wife operated an inn, people had to go on vacation to find
weather like California’s.
“If you live in a country like England and you have money,
you can afford to go to the south of France,” Marsen
said.
“I figure if I can live in it permanently, I’ve got
it made.”
For a photographer, Merced is a special privilege, Marsen says,
taking quick drags from a cigarette he smokes to a tiny stub.
It’s two hours to San Francisco, two hours to Yosemite, two
hours to Monterey and Pebble Beach, he says.
The red-and-white taildragger named Red Top Ranch in which
Marsen first shot aerial photographs belongs to his longtime friend
Gail McCullough, a realtor and pilot.
Marsen would always take pictures at parties and other
gatherings of the real estate agents with whom he worked, so
McCullough asked one day if he wanted to go up for a ride with his
camera.
He was enthusiastic, and the two began flying regularly.
“There are times I had to discipline him,” said
McCullough, who has a sharp sense of humor and jokes back and forth
with Marsen. “He’s a little feisty about getting too
low, so I had to tell him I’m pilot in command. I’d
have to say, “˜Hans, shape up.'”
Marsen now shoots out of helicopters because they hover low and
move slowly, giving him time to focus on composition. The pilots
take the door off his side of the craft so he doesn’t have to
deal with any glass.
“It’s like a crapshoot otherwise,” he said.
“When you’re going 100 miles an hour … some pictures
are good and some are bad.”
Sitting at his desk in the early afternoon amid stacks of CDs
filled with photos, Marsen pulls up image after image of Merced
County. They saturate his computer’s two screens with velvet
greens and ochres, rich blues and the dazzling white of the
snow-capped Sierras.
He can’t quite explain why he loves aerial photography,
but says there’s something about the grandeur, the majestic
scale of the images he can fit in each frame.
“It’s almost like toying with, being a part of
nature,” he says. “You know what I mean? I don’t
know.”