A dream deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

 

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore–

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over–

like a syrupy sweet?

 

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

 

Or does it explode?

 

-Langston Hughes

Viewed from CA-86, the Salton Sea was a jewel; an immense, glassy mirror reflecting the blue-white sky and the Chocolate Mountains behind them. It was a postcard-grade dreamscape apropos of California, climax of the West and repository for American ambition. In the mid-20th Century the Salton Sea was seen as a worthy inheritor of this idyllic tradition, and developers and vacationers descended on it like forty-niners; although rather than removing treasure from deep holes in the earth, the new prospectors dug shallow holes and poured treasure into them. Civilization bloomed on the banks, and the Salton Sea quickly became a more popular destination than Yosemite.

 

But something went wrong. The sea, which formed in 1905 when the Colorado River overwhelmed a dike and drained into the Salton Basin for a year and a half before engineers finally diverted its flow, began to stink. As it turns out, the basin had no natural drainage system, which is why the floodwater pooled there to begin with. Anything that flows in, and does not evaporate in the desert heat, stays in. The state’s latest dream vault soon became a sump for river salt and fertilizer-laced runoff from area farms, which soiled the sea and its burgeoning resort community.

“It is better to burn out,” Neil Young famously sang, “than to fade away.” When it is one’s fate to die, it is best that death come quickly; left to leisure, it will drain a man of dignity long before his veins run dry of life. If a hero dies in a dramatic blaze of glory, he remains a hero after he dies. If life escapes him gradually, the romance and symbolism of his life will rot into farce. The death of the Salton Sea has been ingloriously slow. As we turned off the highway and crept toward its shores, we saw the dreamscape fade into a wasteland before our eyes. Many of the structures were carcasses, drafty and gutted. We ventured into a defunct tavern, startling its latest tenants, who erupted out of the ceiling and took flight out the windows. They had signed the old barstools—the only remaining furniture—with mounds of pigeon shit. Prior squatters had blanketed the interior walls with graffiti. An abandoned motel sat on the opposite shore, its rooms boarded up, its swimming pool drained. The homes that still had green lawns and cars in their driveways were closed into high-walled cages with signs cautioning us to beware of dogs.

The decay was startling to observe, but it was something else to smell. Where the visual apparatus is sanded smooth by the grain of a million images, the olfactory remains sharp; its reach is limited, but when it comes into contact with something, the friction tends to be greater. When we parked by the beach and got out, the stench of the sea was jarring. It was rancid, like moist garbage. The eutrophication of the water mixed with the putrefaction of the creatures that once dwelled in it created a taste that the salt was powerless to mask. Along the beach the corpses of tilapia fish were commoner than shells, their flesh crisp and beset by flies. Shards of fishbone mixed with the sand, replacing it completely in some areas and making the banks of the Salton Sea look less a beach than a graverobber’s pitch pile. And the smell. It clung to us like dew. Certain flies turned from the tilapia to us, and we spent the next part of the car ride shooing them out the windows. But even after the flies were gone, the smell lingered.

And while the masses that had flooded to the sea mid-century were also gone, hope seemed to linger among those who had remained. When Ben asked the clerk at a tiny general store/marina near a gated pier whether Salton Sea was not one of California’s biggest tourist destination back in the ’50s, she had corrected him enthusiastically: “It still is the largest bed of inland water in the state!”  Later, we stopped into a bar in Salton City called Captain Jim’s and joined an elderly woman named Vi for an early-afternoon beer. Vi’s white hair was cropped close to her scalp like cauliflower, and her cheeks hung from the large frames of her glasses like faded pink drapes. She looked like a grandmother in the mold agreed upon by most cartoonists, which made the image of her small, round frame perched atop a barstool and bent over a mug of Budweiser almost comical. She was chatting with Barb, a forcefully personable bartender with a wide smile. Barb—Mrs. Captain Jim, as it turned out—was also on the wrong side of 50, but her hair retained its orange hue and hung loosely in wisps.

“The sea’s not polluted!” Barb cried, waving away the suggestion with her hand as though it were an undercooked steak.

“No?” we said.

“It’s just that the water from the farms runs off into there and makes all these algae blooms,” Vi explained.

“Oh.”

“The smell comes from these sulfur plants across the way,” she continued. “The sea is just fine.”

“Can you eat the fish that come out of it?”

Barb had begun nodding as soon as I had gotten through “can you.” “Yep. People come from all over to fish the Salton Sea, it’s huge tourism.” She reached under the bar and produced a photograph of a man holding up a Corvina the size of a Christmas ham. “That one’s from 2002.”

“So there are still fish out there?”

“Yep.”

“As long as you can catch them before they die.”

“That’s right.”

We sipped our Coronas. The lime wedges Barb had fit into the mouths were dull and warpy, and I fed mine down the bottleneck with the help of a plastic straw. Ben wandered over to the jukebox, and soon The Band filled the tiny room with “Up on Cripple Creek.”

“Is it usually this quiet around here?” I asked.

“It usually picks up on the weekends,” Vi replied.

“We usually have big parties every two or three weeks,” Barb added. “In fact, if you look over there on that back wall, you can see pictures from some of them.” I stepped over to the collage. “Those ones on the upper left are from our ‘Christmas in July’ party,” Barb called from the bar. “And the ones in the center bottom, that’s from the half-birthday party they threw me.” My eyes drifted over the photos. Hardly any of the partygoers could have been below the age of 50. Their smiles folded easily into well-worn creases across flushed cheeks. Some were caught mid-sway in a rigid dance move, karaoke microphone in hand and distended bellies constrained beneath high waistbands, swung precariously away from the center of gravity.

“You guys sure like to get extra mileage out of those holidays,” I said over my shoulder.

“Well,” Vi chuckled, “anything to keep people from getting bored.”

Posted from Echo Park, Los Angeles.