Three Coasts

I’ve been planning my family’s trip to California. We’re leaving in September and staying away for 2 weeks. It’s sort of to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, but more than that, it’s because, damn it, we haven’t done anything like this since the honeymoon and that’s a long time to stay put. Of course, we don’t just stay put—we do travel, to exciting locales like Cairo, Illinois, where my in-laws live, or Columbia, Missouri, where my sisters live. A couple of trips down to Houston (my brother) and Chicago (Mike’s work takes us there occasionally) and you have a solidly boring travel log.

I tend to obsess, and so I’ve planned out our route, down to the hour on some days. I have hotel reservations where appropriate and cabins reserved in various national parks. I am becoming an expert on our trip to California. Most of my evenings are spent with guide books, the internet, and a beat up atlas.

One such guide book that I grabbed from our local library right before closing time, and therefore didn’t really look at what was inside, is Lost America, by Troy Paiva. It was shelved with the Southwest travel books, and since we are driving through Nevada, I figured I’d find something worthwhile, some tidbit about a ghost town on US 6 at least. I got it home and stayed up long past my bedtime perusing its pages. It is a photographic exhibit, full of ghost town images, old drive-in theaters, salvage yards, and the Salton Sea. Paiva takes pictures at night, using a long exposure, sometimes up to 10 minutes. But during this exposure, the pictures aren’t just lit by the moon, but also by eerie strobe lights covered with theatrical colored gels, thus producing strange glowing images in otherworldly colors. This enhances the creepiness that is already present in images of broken down junkyards and decrepit movie theater lobbies. There is a post-nuclear feel to many photos.

The Salton Sea chapter, though, is the one that stuck with me. See, I lived just north of the Salton Sea, in Palm Desert, when I was 5. Granted, I was only 5, and not expected to know much geography, especially not of abandoned resort spots. Still, though, I had never even heard of this place. Now I figure, it was because by 1979, this place was an unclean embarrassment for Southern California.

The story goes, accordng to Paiva, back at the turn of the 20th century, a private company diverted water from the Colorado River down into what became the Imperial Valley, trying to irrigate the area. It wasn’t too successful at first—the canals broke down a few times, and then in 1905, the Southwest had this really wet winter, the wettest on record up to that point, and the Colorado overflowed its banks. Well, there was this canal to flow right into, and flow it did—sometimes at the rate of 100,000 cubic feet per second. This went on for two years. The end result was the Salton Sea, just north of the Imperial Valley.

Throughout ancient geologic history, this area flooded and dried up again on a (geologically speaking) regular basis. But this time, the Salton Sea didn’t leave, due to runoff from fields in the Imperial Valley. So while it evaporated, the runoff replaced it at the same rate. Suddenly, in the middle of the California desert, there was this beautiful salt lake. Developers started thinking about it as a desert resort, and rushed in to build up golf courses and hotels along the northern edge. Sure, it was hot as hell, but it was beautiful.

This area boomed in the fifties and sixties, but starting in the late sixties, the Salton Sea started to have some problems. That runoff, for instance, was filled with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It wasn’t simply new clean river water—so as water evaporated, the sea became saltier, and then new water arrived, but it was laden with chemicals. Then more water left, and more chemicals arrived—the sea began to grow murky, and algae moved in to eat the fertilizer. I'm sure it was lovely.

But wait, there’s more. In the late 70s, the whole place flooded two years in a row. When the waters receded, there was this gross salty crust on everything—the resorts, the golf courses, the beaches. Then in the 80s, the fish started to die, and then the birds started to die. In the 90s, 7.6 million tilapia died, and according to Paiva, their corpses still ring the beach. The latest news I can find about it involves pet food companies considering harvesting fish from the sea to feed to our cats.

The California government runs a website dedicated to the debunking of myths about the Salton Sea, but, ironically, confirms everything Paiva says in his book. The website’s pictures, however, are of happy vacationers in hip boots fishing on the shore. It downplays the smell and suggests that the bird deaths are due to the tilapia carrying infection. Then it goes on to suggest that more people should come on down to the Salton Sea and fish those tilapia out! The idea is that fewer fish would make a healthier place, which, based on my experiences with fish tanks, sounds about right. But then, do I eat the poisoned fish, or just feed it to my cats?

Paiva’s photographs of crusty trailers (in a spooky yellow-green light) and dead fish almost make me want to take a side trip and see this place for myself. That’s a big almost, however. I don’t think my daughter the pretty princess would take too kindly to an afternoon in a resort ghost town filled with crusty trailers and fish remains.