The Salton Sea

I hadn’t been to the Salton Sea (about forty miles southeast of Palm Springs) for fifty years, not since my parents bought a homesteading parcel south of Thermal on the west shore. We camped out on that parcel in the early 60’s, feeling a vague sense of ownership over the little piece of scruffy desert about a mile up from the Sea.  In the morning I encountered a gila monster near where I had slept, who looked at me with the same standoffishness I felt as I looked at him.  I had thought my father had lost the title by letting the homesteading requirements lapse, but after his death I found in his effects a recent property detail report showing an address in Thermal. Apparently he had fulfilled the requirements of homesteading by putting up a few basic structures and had retained title. Equipped with the report showing a street address in Thermal, my wife and I set out on a quest.

Thermal, as it turns out, is the perfect place to say “There’s no there there,” as in this case it is literally true: There are no signs near or in Thermal saying that Thermal is approaching or that you are in it. A bit south of Coachella, which does exist, we started to wonder where Thermal might be. Stopping at a gas station/diner next to a small park, I was informed by a gas customer that this was Thermal, a place whose name is widely known in California apparently, not because it exists, but because the area around where it is said to exist is often the hottest in the continental US, sometimes beating Death Valley.

We were saved from the confusion by GPS, which informed us that the address we sought was thirty miles south. So we set off, passing Salton City, a community of trailers and modest homes which goes down almost to the beach. Strangely, neither this nor other settlements we saw around the Sea had constructed homes down to the water’s edge, as other shoreline communities do to connect with the body of water that gives them identity. More on this shortly.

A bit south of Salton City, our GPS directed us to turn left into a neighborhood with no apparent name. There were streets that had not existed the last time I visited, and some homes with addresses. We had to approximate the plot’s location using other houses, as nothing had been built on our plot, and there was no address on the curb. Aside from the sporadic houses, the land is the same piece of desert sand and scrub it was when we camped there. Regarding property values in the area, many of the homes featured signs saying, “$99 down! Everyone qualifies!” There were no people walking around anywhere, though a car drove by with several older men looking, it seemed, for something to do.

Our quest was technically at an end, but we had a day to kill so we decided to drive around the Sea. It’s really a lake, created by various sources such as river flooding and agricultural run-off. The lake-bed features the second lowest elevation in the U.S., after Death Valley, and it lies atop the southern end of the San Andreas fault. Several other significant faults cross the area. It is thought by some geologists that the “big one” will originate with a 7 or 8 point quake beneath the Salton Sea, then reverberate up the state. On the brighter side, the area’s isolation and the lack of development has allowed the Sea to develop into a major stop for migratory birds.

The west shore is too cluttered to be beautiful, and the view across the lake seemed psychologically blocked. Down at the southern end, I can't say we got too excited traversing a trucking nexus called Brawley. But things changed suddenly on the east shore. A steeply undulating and largely unblemished bajada rolled down from the eastern mountains- which we traversed on Highway 111- and the Sea to the west looked otherworldly and strikingly beautiful.

There were no trails or accommodations for tourists to get to the shore, which lay a mile or so from the highway- the anomaly we had noticed before. We finally came to a community with roads that promised to give access to the beach. We headed in, past old and largely neglected homes and a few businesses (still no people in sight), but the beach was blocked by a large berm. There was a ruined wooden stairway going up the berm that rose out of a pool of muddy water, and this perhaps at one time led over the berm to the beach.

Continuing north on the highway we came in a few minutes to a nature preserve with trails leading from the empty parking lot down to the beach. On the beach we discovered that what we thought was sand was actually vast tons of crushed shells, a sort of marine graveyard. Coming closer to the waterline we encountered an endless vista of rotting fish carcasses, emitting the sort of reek you would expect (the smell often reaches L.A., especially when the wind roils the fetid muck from the 30 foot lake depths). There are bird die-offs too- from erratic salinity and pollution- though we saw no bird casualties that day.

The shells and fish skeletons were crunchy underfoot. Walking slowly over them towards the deserted beach felt like entering a Bosch painting of hell on earth- a wasted battlefield of death. Along the waterline regularly posted signs warned against swimming ("No lifeguard"), and across the water there were no boats. But something strange happened to the forbidding scene when I stood at the water's edge. Looking up I saw a vast calm lake, troubled only by tiny ripples, and across the lake I saw desert and small human communities, and beyond that a mountain range, and in the sky were the sun and wheeling flocks of birds, including many pelicans, who also floated majestically on the water, and I was hit with the full impact of it. Maybe I also felt the interlacing of the fault lines below, not their tension- not the grinding overwhelming pressure we imagine between tectonic plates- but a sort of peaceful overlay of borders, like a beach, where the sea lays atop the land as if it loves it. The stench of dead fish did not abate, nor did the morbid spectacle of their array, yet, for a few moments, I took in an image of peace and beauty to rival any I’d seen.

What does it mean? Is the Salton Sea beautiful in spite of its dead fish and secret-formula water? Or is it beautiful because this is a place where earth and space connect, where life and death occur, where nature’s pollution rivals ours?