The Neon Size of California: Visiting the Salton Sea

My first glimpse of the Salton Sea was from the top of a rocky hill at Joshua Tree National Park. Looking north was a desert basin filled with crumpled, dry sagebrush. But I rotated, searching, through the panorama, and finally, through a gap, there it was, its shimmering, whistling chemical blue standing out in the gray day.

I had come east that day from Los Angeles, where my boyfriend and I were living temporarily. Both of us are well traveled in California: he grew up in the Central Valley and went to college on the eastern side of the Sierras; I was born in Santa Cruz and took time off of college to live in the Bay Area. But neither of use had ever been to this part of the Mojave, with its Mormon/Motorcycle gang sprawl, trucker and steel mill sprawl, Palm Springs D.A.R. golf course sprawl, and–we didn’t know what to expect beyond all that.

When I am in California I think a lot about space and time of travel. A couple of lines bounce around in my head. “It is very easy…to share in the pervasive delusion that California is five hours from New York by air,” says Joan Didion, initiating the essay “Notes from a Native Daughter,” about the Central Valley. “The truth is that California is somewhere else…a longer and in many ways much more difficult trip than [most people] want to undertake.”

And then there is Edward Abbey, who I read as a high school junior and never again. “A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile that the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles,” I cannot shake. I think of it when I see “Merced 270” in white on green and think that I can be there by, oh, four.

All morning on I-10 I expected the desert to open up into nothingness. It never quite does. You think it will, and then around the bend there’s a casino, or a Sketchers factory, or Palm Desert. Maybe the Central Valley or the Mojave are more than five hours from New York by air, but the endless matboard communities attest that almost nothing in California is outside the commuting distance of a megalopolis.



After the day in Joshua Tree, we decided we’d stay the night in Indio. I knew of Indio because I had once seen a black and white photograph of Indio’s “Date Girls,” dressed to bellydance as they peddled Medjools at some kind of early California ag expo. We saw the date farms from the highway: they rise up off the desert in rectangular groups, like strange living smokestacks.

Since the date girls’ era, however, Indio has skyrocketed in population, and suburbanized accordingly. As Orange County once did, it straddles the divide between suburban and agricultural economies. After checking into a motel, Dylan and I naively tried to walk to get dinner; a few minutes on the dark sidewalk of a five-lane boulevard, and we gave up and went back to the car. Though it is hundreds of miles away, Indio’s sprawl is identical to the purlieus of Los Angeles. Nothing in California is far apart.

The road the next morning took us again alongside date orchards, adding grapevines and their clothesline crutches, sprung from desert gray, past an outpost Starbucks, and towards the western edge of the sea. Approaching the Salton Sea State Recreation Area, we saw abandoned boat rental and tackle shops; many trailers. Yellow and brown riparian thicket grew up between us and the water.

Not long ago, the Salton Sea was the Salton Sink, a Saline deposit where Southern Pacific once employed Indians to plough salt. But the melon and date fields required more water than the desert had, and development companies got to work irrigating. They were hasty and distracted, and before long, disaster. “High water comes early,” writes William T. Vollmann in his comprehensive and tortuous testimony Imperial. “An engineer now describes the levee as sandy soil that eats away like so much sugar.” It took years before the gap was closed (with “eleven thousand flatcar loads of gravel to save the world!”), by which time the entire sink–towns and salt works all alike under the impetuous eyes of the fugitive Colorado River–had been filled in by water: salty, salty water.

The sea continued, and continues, to be fed exclusively by agricultural runoff, and all the additives therein. In the first few years of the sea, boosters marketed it as a “new Riviera.” The highway backed up for hours with tourists. But it is so salty that when the temperatures climb to 130, as they do in the Imperial in the summer, the sea’s fish float to the surface, dead en masse. The bloodbath and its ensuing stench quickly killed off the region’s tourism ambitions. Walking out to the edge of the water, we believed at first that we were walking on white sand, or gravel; on a closer look we saw that the entire beach is crunched fish bones.

The population that persists around the sea is paltry and eccentric. It seems to take a blind belief that the place is innocuous and in some way willed by nature not to wake up every morning feeling like you live by a terror of human might, the way one would feel waking up beside an unwanted nuclear reactor, say. The communities seem to celebrate it, with a faith only possible when living with rules that are electrically divergent from those of the rest of the world.

We walked toward the water, adjusting to the sound of decayed fish beneath our feet and still confused by the sight of so much water in this desiccated place. Ten paces to the left of us was a couple taking their grandson out to go birding–it was “bird week” at the park. The grandfather knelt down to show an intact fish skeleton to his son. Suddenly a bird appeared before us, perched at the end of a rock jetty, sparkling white against the radiant blue water and distant gray mountains. So it’s true, I thought as it flew to the shallow water ahead of us. This sea does make a home for birds, something useful and necessary. The bird transformed the sea from a disastrous and terrifying disfigurement to something special and redemptive, as long as you knew where to look.

When governor Jerry Brown hit California airwaves in October with television ads promoting the $7.5 billion dollar water bond created in response to the state’s momentous drought, he promised that the bond would “even out the booms and busts”; it’s going to build new reservoirs, recycling plants and pipelines. Lesser known is the bond’s $475 million for water restoration projects, one of which is the Salton Sea.

And the sea is in need. In 2003, after a Supreme Court ruling deemed Imperial Valley crops “low-value” and inessential, farmers began fallowing their land so that their irrigation water–nearly 200,000 acre-feet a year–could go to the San Diego County Water Authority. At the signing of the pact, the Imperial Irrigation District’s water became the supply for a third of San Diego’s water needs. Since then, the amount of runoff water feeding the Salton Sea has dropped sharply. The Imperial Irrigation District’s environmental manager, Bruce Wilcox, recently told the San Diego Union-Tribune that in terms of maintaining habitat, “We’re running out of time.”

To fully rehabilitate the sea would cost $10 billion, according to a California Natural Resources Agency report–the “habitat cells” and other remedies the water bond offers won’t come close to fully restoring it. But they would make a crucial start. If action on the sea is delayed, the Los Angeles Times reported in September, “the damage to public health, property values, agricultural production, recreational assets, as well as the ecology, could cost between $29 billion and $70 billion over the next 30 years.”

These days I am living in Bishkek and fashioning myself a scholar of Kyrgyz literature, and thinking of the Salton Sea reminds me of the novel The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, by the novelist Chingiz Aitmatov. The story’s main character, Yedigei, is from the Aral Sea region. NASA released pictures this summer showing that the Aral has now been nearly entirely evacuated of its water; the process was underway when the novel was written, in 1980. Together with an elderly friend, Yedigei goes to visit his sea.

“It would have been better if they had not gone, as the trip had upset [the old man]. The sea had receded. The Aral’ was disappearing, drying up. They had had to walk for ten kilometers over what was once sea bed until they reached the water’s edge. Here Kazangap had said, ‘How much this land cost–it was at the price of the Aral’ Sea. Now it is drying up; one can say much the same about a man’s life.”

Thinking of the Aral and the Salton Seas, I think not only of the costs to humans, but of the birds. In addition to my crane, it turns out that the sea is on the Pacific Flyway: it’s a rest stop for migrating geese, swans, ducks, shore birds, warblers, orioles, buntings, and many more. Burrowing owls live there. It’s possible to see blue-footed boobies in the summer. The water bond will offer the Salton Sea and its fauna a tiny bit of the attention it deserves, would gesture at making up for treating it as ugly and ignorable since its very creation. But it deserves even more from us. As Aitmatov says in a more optimistic moment, “Say what you will, everything from the heart is harmonious at sea.”

To keep the most distant place in California vital–it seems worth it to me.