I am endlessly fascinated by failed civilizations, abandoned places, and the ruins left behind. The promise of a Salton Sea Renaissance is held in the great Lithium deposit beneath the lake floor. In the next fifty years the people living there may tell a different story. This is what I imagined driving through it. This isn't a pleasant story, but it's the one I found.
The Salton Sea isn’t a sea at all but the largest lake in California. It sits below sea level. It’s saltier than the Pacific Ocean.
I know this because Linda explained it on our long ride in her Subaru. A hatchback. Blue. Metallic blue. The other thing I know about the Salton Sea is that it was polluted with industrial runoff from Mexico and that everything died there. The fish died in such great masses it may have been suicide.
“There were a few beach towns out here in the 60’s, believe it or not. They’re all gone now. But people still live here.”
Living is a subjective word. What some call living may look like surviving to others. People live in Syria and Detroit, too. Burned-out trailers and roving packs of feral dogs do not define life. The streets in the Salton Sea have melted under the sun but have refused to disappear. Everything that remains in this place does so in defiance of the will of God. The Salton Sea is a dystopian dream factory.
“They say the people began fleeing when the fish started dying so much. They washed up on the shores, and they just melted and rotted in the heat. The smell was so bad people were throwing up in bed.”
“So they left.”
“They left.”
Everything is brown and rust and dirt and gray. I can’t make out the shape of anything after long because everything became the same color. Amongst these graveyards, like Oz in the distance, I see the brown give way again to primary colors that have been vanquished from the fish graveyard.
A Crucifix sits on top of the hill.
“Salvation Mountain,” Linda explained. “A man built that. From clay and one hundred thousand gallons of paint. Took him 25 years.”
There are abandoned cars there, too. Still, these are painted in memories of blue and red and yellow, adorned with bright words of hope - like salvation. Beyond the painted skeletons of the machines, more colors seem to pour from the sky and are frozen like yogurt but not melting in the sun. A mountain of concrete blocks rises from the desert, covered in every color of house paint ever imagined.
I stare out the window through the dust into the paint and try to understand the man who would do this. Salvation Mountain. Salvation for whom? There wasn’t anyone left to save.
The people were gone, and so were the fish. If Jesus returned today, would this be his Golgotha? The Romans didn’t crucify Jesus within Jerusalem’s walls. They marched him along the Via Dolorosa to a hill outside the city. It made sense to me that if Jesus ever returned, arrived, or existed, he would find his way to Los Angeles. Everyone famous moved there. The Salton Sea, in this desert, far outside its city walls, with its crucifix waiting for Jesus to hang from. If he came, who would follow him here? I squint but can’t see him in the dusty distance.
We drive past Salvation Mountain, the abandoned school busses, and deeper into the lost. Eventually, we reach a road that appears better than the rest. There were tire tracks that we followed, turning off the dirt highway onto this private road and climbing a mountain.
She parks the Subaru in front of a shotgun shack, and when Linda gets out of the car, I realize she has changed into a very shabby and long gray skirt and a white blouse. She bent over towards the ground and then threw her head back as she fitted a nun’s habit to her head.
She carries a black case, which I assume contains the money I gave her. We walk into the shack without knocking. The road up the mountain was long enough that we certainly could not have surprised anyone.
The single room is half-consumed by a twin hospital bed facing a television on a dresser. Judge Judy screams into a television camera, but the sound is muted.
A woman rests in the bed.
Breathing, sleeping, and not sleeping. Linda pulls a wooden Shaker chair next to her bed. She opens her black case, removes a smaller case, like a makeup compact, opens that, and sets it on the bed. There is a small round silver vessel inside, and she unscrews its cap. Linda touches the contents of the vessel with her fingers and rubs the sign of the cross on the lying woman. First on her forehead, then her lips, and finally her chest, across her heart.
“Linda?”
“I’ve been to Catholic service before. Now, shush.”
Linda retrieves Rosary from her black bag and holds it tightly as she takes the woman’s hand into her own. She bows and appears to be praying—whispering words but not words from her lips.
A door at the rear of the shack I had not seen opens, and a man bows his head to enter. His legs are tree trunks inside of his overalls. His thick workman’s boots are worn at the toe caps and covered in sawdust.
The man stares right into me.
“Matthew, this is my friend. Say hello.”
“Hello.”
He holds a ball cap between his hands. They are vice grips. I try not to picture my neck snapping between his palms.
“I need you to go with Matthew now.”
I freeze.
“Go.”
Matthew does not move. I worry that if I don’t move just now, he will become upset. I do not want to upset Matthew.
I walk towards him, and he turns and ducks back through the concealed door. I follow. We walk silently across a dirt yard with rusted tractor parts and farming tools. A rusted sickle has been implanted into a decaying wine barrel. We are walking towards a barn, and inside of the barn is a woodshop—old woodworking tools and machines and piles and stacks of reclaimed wood. Wood is saved from landfills and stolen from abandoned houses. Stacks of table legs and piles of scrap.
“What is this place?”
“This is where we work the wood.”
“We?”
“Me and Mr. Man. Me mostly.”
Something moves in the back of the barn. I can see its eyes. Her eyes.
“Matthew, who is that?”
“She. That’s She. She my sister.”
She crawls on all fours and stays close to the back wall of the barn, arching her back. She is dirty. Her dress is torn and frayed. She wears a leather collar around her neck, fixed to a chain leading to the wall.
“She’s chained.”
“I didn’t have time to watch her today 'cause the Sister was coming, and She likes to run off. Mr. Man said these boxes are for the Sister.”
Matthew points at two plastic milk crates filled with fairly ornate table legs.
“Did you make these?”
“Some of them. Some of them I just fixed up the way Mr. Man says. From the old ones.”
Matthew and I walk around the shack and place the crates in Linda’s car. We return to the room inside the shotgun shack, and the old lady still lies sleeping or dying. Linda is watching the television.
Matthew stands directly in front of Linda, ignoring all sense of personal space.
“Ah, yes.”
Linda reaches into her bag and retrieves a giant chocolate bar, handing it to Matthew. Matthew smiles. I wonder why Linda did not bring one for She. We drive back towards the Valley for nearly an hour without speaking.
“Pull over.”
We are on the highway and the sun is falling. Linda eases the Subaru to the soft desert shoulder. I kneel in the sand and I puke. Then I puke again. I get back into the seat and shut the door. Silence.
“Are you okay?”
My eyes are watering. My throat is burning. I cannot speak.
“It’s not a great idea for us to be stopped like this.”
“What the fuck are you doing? You crazy lunatic! What was that?”
“I suppose you think this shit comes from a nice place? Grow up!”
“Look, we cannot leave her there. We have to do something.”
“Her? Her who?”
“She.”
“The girl? That’s what’s got you? The girl is fine. That’s his sister. Her daughter.”
“She was chained to a goddamn wall in the barn!”
“The girl is near feral. Touched by the hand of god.”
“Did you see how old that woman was? She’s been dying for ten years, they say. What do you think happens when an egg that goddamn old hatches?”
“So she lives chained up, like a slave. God knows what he does to her.”
“Matthew? He wouldn’t hurt anyone. He’s a child. If she was chained up, it was because she needed to be. So do what? Call the authorities so they can lock her in a padded cell instead of chained in a barn. It doesn’t matter because we can’t. If we do, he’ll kill me, and before he does, he’ll make me tell him who you are. And you know what? He wouldn’t have to try very hard. Now stop judging everyone’s life and handle your own.”
I pictured the dirt rubbed across her chest, or was it feces--Christ, I don’t know, and the inhuman way she moved and how that moved me.
What have I become?