The Southern Marshes
Pre-Collapse Identity
Salt evaporation ponds — Cargill's industrial salt works and the Don Edwards Wildlife Refuge, where migrating shorebirds stopped on the Pacific Flyway. Alviso was a forgotten town at the edge of a forgotten bay. Coyote Creek drained the hills into shallow water that nobody swam in. From the air, the salt ponds were geometric art in impossible colors — magenta, ochre, jade — produced by halophilic bacteria thriving in concentrated brine.
Current Character
The transitional zone between the drained bay and the South Sprawl — where people go when even the Dregs push them out. The ground is unstable. Buildings lean on pilings driven into marsh mud that shifts with the tides that still exist in the shallow water to the south. Platform settlements extend across the marshland on improvised stilts, connected by plank walkways that flex underfoot. The old Cargill salt evaporation ponds persist as surreal, rainbow-colored shallow lakes where chemical concentrations have intensified over decades of neglect, producing colors that shouldn't exist in nature and don't — magenta from halophilic archaea, jade from copper leachate, a sulfurous yellow that means don't touch the water.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Shallow marshland, ten to fifteen feet below surrounding terrain. The ground is not ground — it is mud with pretensions, saturated clay that squelches underfoot, accepting pilings grudgingly and shifting them when it feels like it. Salt flat geometry stretches across the landscape in precise rectangles inherited from the industrial salt works. The old evaporation ponds hold shallow chemical water in colors visible from the surrounding hills. Reed beds grow in the transitions between dry and wet, providing cover, building material, and the constant rustling soundtrack of wind through vegetation.
Corporate Presence
Ungoverned. Wholesome sends food distribution outreach from the south — building dependency maps of the marsh population. Relief deploys medical boats into the deeper marsh. Scavenger communities harvest salt, reeds, and whatever the marsh produces. No corporation plants a flag because no corporation wants responsibility for a population living on pilings in the mud. The marsh people are useful precisely because they are uncounted.
Key Locations
The Platform Settlements (improvised stilted communities stretching across the marsh), the Salt Ponds (former Cargill evaporation ponds — chemical rainbow lakes), the Reed Beds (transitional vegetation zone providing cover and materials).
Sensory Detail
Everything is wet. Humidity hangs at ninety percent year-round, coating every surface in a film of moisture that never fully dries. The smell is organic and unavoidable — decomposing vegetation, salt mud, the methane burp of marsh gas escaping clay, and the acrid chemical tang of the evaporation ponds. Sounds travel oddly across flat water and reed beds — voices arrive from unexpected directions, distance collapses and expands. Buildings creak on their pilings with every tide shift. Light is flat and gray, diffused by permanent low fog that rolls in from the remaining open water.
Daily Life
You walk on planks, sleep on pilings, and learn to read the mud — which patches hold weight, which ones swallow boots, and which ones bubble with gas that you don't want to breathe.