Three Stops at the Salton Sea
North Shore — “Can we swim in it?” The man in the parking lot squinted out at the water. At the North Shore Yacht Club, the quickly fading…
North Shore — “Can we swim in it?” The man in the parking lot squinted out at the water. At the North Shore Yacht Club, the quickly fading community center that replaced an abandoned resort, it’s almost possible to imagine that the sparkling blue water would be welcoming. Until you get close.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” said my husband with a laugh. I explained to the man and his family how the sea was formed from an irrigation overflow that filled a prehistoric lake. How the sea is full of dead fish, that the shore susurrates with the bones of everything that ever lived there. It’s beautiful and weird and terrrible and smelly.
What I didn’t give him was a sense of what it had been, the ghost of a dream. As a nation, we take a lot of bets, some of our deepest bets are on the land, on the potential of some place to become something greater. Looking back it’s easy to see how, in the early 1900s, the formation of an inland sea could seem like the most amazing opportunity to hit California in years. Palm Springs with a beach, miles and miles of waterfront property.
It’s that vision and dream and history that led me to be fascinated with this place of abandoned hotels and long-shuttered stores. The signs offering land with a $500 deposit.
I haven’t visited in seven years and somewhere along the way, the sea has slipped into a place where the previous billion-dollar plans to rescue it no longer seem possible. The life is slipping from it. The birds are leaving, the dead fish and bugs are diminishing and fewer hearty tilapia inhabit its murky waters so green and dank at the shoreline.
All around the sea, the lines of white dust are getting wider and wider. The sea recedes into itself leaving whirls of dust in its wake. It’s folding in on itself like a star collapsing.
Niland — There’s nothing out here and no one. Life is hot and dirty and sere. This is Earth, this is every part we hide from. Trash and dead things and the train whistle slicing through the thick, dry air.
The sun does not care about you. Here, in a place without mercy, a man built a monument to his God. We did not invent god for our hearts and minds, we created him for our human bodies that he might shield us from the wrath of earth. People pose here in front of Salvation Mountain, it’s the type of spectacle that was instagram-bait before the app was created. What we forget sometimes, the love of god can be colorful, garish, exuberant. What remains is not just the paint and the straw and the cooled archways, but the sense that you can be on fire for spirit. To do the truly unusual, you need a community that supports you or at least doesn’t tear you down. There aren’t many people in Slab City in the heart of August, but enough to keep the community going. A heartbeat of home.
Salton City — Like many cultures, our maps betray our ambitions. The layout of the Slaton Sea includes both a north and south Marina Drive. The community centers on the idea of it being a waterfront town. Now the goal for those living there is to blot out the smell and dust coming from the sea. Just survive.
If you are hardy, you can make a life here. The Salton Sea attracts the retirees, the local farmworkers, those who have jobs at the state prison or the nearby casino. There’s still hope here, newer homes amid the abandoned shacks. Sometimes in life, you place a bet and just ride it out, even if you are afraid you’ve got the losing hand.
The state floats out plan after plan to save the sea but nothing much ever changes out here except the receding waterline.