Where the Ghost Bird Sings by the Poison Springs (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine February 2002

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Where the Ghost Bird Sings by the Poison Springs (Cont.)

FROM THE MOUTH OF the New River, on the southern edge of the Salton Sea, itís a straight shot halfway up the seaís west coast to Salton City, followed by Salton Sea Beach, then the nearly defunct Sun Dial Beach, and finally Desert Shores, where beside the rickety dock stinking white fishes gaped in the sun, swirling with each algal wave. A couple backed their boat down the boat ramp, the man steering, the woman craning her head with extreme seriousness. Fish corpses squished beneath their wheels. Meanwhile, Salton Cityís attractions included a broken motel with drawn-in palm fronds and shattered windows. Emblems of stereotypical cacti and flying fish clung to the motel just as a fool clings to his dying love; its customers were heat, rubble, and cicada song.

The article on California in the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911, states that irrigation along the Colorado River, which naturally bears only desert vegetation, has made it a true humid-tropical region, growing true tropical fruits. Wasnít that the golden age? Actually, the golden age hasnít ended even now. Looking around me at the Salton Seaís green margins of fields and palm orchards, I spied a lone palm tree far away at the convergence of tan furrows, then lavender mountains glazed with confectionerís sugar; this is the landscape where all is beauty, the aloof desert mountains enriched despite themselves by the spectacle of the fields.

Fertilization, irrigation, runoff, wastewater—the final admixtures of all these quantities flow into the Salton Sea. I couldnít condemn the state of the Sea without rejecting the ring of emerald around it. About the continuing degradation of that sump, José Angel of the Regional Water Quality Board very reasonably said, "Itís a natural process because the sea is a closed basin. Pollutants cannot be flushed out. You could be discharging Colorado River water directly into the Salton Sea, or for that matter distilled water into the Salton Sea, and you would end up with a salinity problem, because the ground is full of salt! The regulations do not provide for a solution to this. You have to build some sort of an outlet."

Will they? Are they? The Salton Sea Restoration Project, that congressional marriage of the Salton Sea Authority and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, attended by a wedding party of some dozen other agencies, is following the favored bureaucratic course of studying the problem some more, and maybe some of its proposed alternatives will even do something: evaporation ponds, fish harvesting, carcass-skimming barges, wetlands habitats, displacement dikes, diverted Colorado River inflows, desalination ponds. But what about the salt and chemicals rolling in from the fields? "What can you do?" Angel had asked me. "Because fertilizers have a legitimate agricultural use."

I could see that legitimate agricultural use, reflected in the stylized elegance of a palm groveís paragraph of tightly spaced green asterisks and in the ridge-striped fields south of Niland, where sheep and birds intermingled, the cotton balls on their khaki-colored plants so white as to almost glitter. And in a brilliant green square of field, a red square of naked dirt on the left, a double row of palms in between, with their dangling clusters of reddish-yellow fruit. Legitimate use, to be sure, from which I benefited and from which bit by bit the sea was getting saltier and fouler with algae and more selenium-tainted, creating carrion and carrion-stench, which kept seagoers away.

Legitimate use made the half-scorched rubble of the Sundowner Motel, whose rusty lonely staircase used to offer a vantage point across the freeway to Superburger and then out to the sparse pale house-cubes of Salton City. On a clear day one could see right across the Salton Sea from those stairs, but if there was a little dust or haze, the cities on the far side faded into hidden aspects of the Chocolate Mountainsí violet blur, and then the stairs too were carried off by the myrmidons of desert time. Meanwhile the Alamo flowed stinking up from Holtville, with its painted water tower, and the Whitewater flowed stinking, and the New River bore its stench of excrement and something bitter like pesticides. And Imperial County flowered and bore fruit. Through that lush and luscious land, whose hay bales are the color of honey and whose alfalfa fields are green skies, water flowed, 90 percent of it not from Mexico at all, carrying consequences out of sight to a 380-square-mile sump.

From a distance it looked lovely: first the hand-lettered sign of mayís oasis, then the Salton Seaís Mediterranean blue seen through a distant line of palms, and then the smell of ocean.

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