The fish have been dying here for fifty years and the shore is made of their bones now, white and granular, indistinguishable at a distance from sand. You walk and what you hear is a dry crunching underfoot, billions of tilapia compressed to something like a mineral. The smell comes before the shore comes, salt and sulfur and something beneath those, something organic and enormous, the long work of decomposition that the desert heat keeps accelerating past any natural end point. You are breathing what was once a lake. You are breathing what was once a resort.
Somewhere under what’s left of the water there are concrete pilings that supported marinas. In the 1950s they ran speedboat races out here, and celebrities came from Los Angeles, four hours through the desert to Bombay Beach and Desert Shores and the Salton Sea Yacht Club with its painted sign and its good years. The water was stocked with corvina and orangemouth, with sargo and gulf croaker. There were tournaments. There were photographs of men in short sleeves holding fish up by the gills, grinning at some camera that no longer exists.
The accident that made this place happened in 1905, when irrigation canals feeding the Imperial Valley failed and the Colorado River spent two years pouring itself westward into the Salton Sink, filling a dry lakebed that had been dry for centuries. The people who built the canals worked frantically to stop it and could not. The river did what rivers do when given a new direction: it went. By 1907 there was a sea here, four hundred square miles, thirty feet deep in places, fed now only by agricultural runoff from the fields to the south. That runoff brought nutrients. That runoff brought pesticides. That runoff, over decades, raised the salinity past what fish could tolerate. Die-offs began in the 1980s. By the 1990s the shores were white.
A brown pelican lands on the water fifty yards out. Then another. Then six more, dropping in from some direction, banking low over the surface with that prehistoric unhurriedness, landing in a brief explosion of white. They have been coming to this stop on the Pacific Flyway for longer than the sea has existed. They remember a route that was old before the canals failed, a migration corridor that runs from the Baja coast northward through the California interior, and the Salton Sea sits exactly on it, a waystation, one of the only significant bodies of open water for hundreds of miles in any direction. The birds arrive regardless. They don’t know what they’re arriving to. They know only that they stop here, that there is water here, that there has always been water here in the sense that matters to a bird, which is the sense of their own embodied memory, their muscles and magnetic cells, the knowledge passed in some form through generations of birds who flew this same path when there was no road, no canal, no resort, no collapse.
The pelicans float. They dip their bills.
On the eastern shore at Bombay Beach the buildings that remain are mostly not buildings anymore, they are their own ruins, the studs showing through, the wallboard expanded and bubbled with moisture and then contracted and cracked, the roofs in various stages of disappearing into themselves. Someone has painted murals on a few of them in the last few years, bright figures, faces, eyes looking out from walls that have stopped being walls. The paintings look new against the decay; they are incongruously intact. A few people still live in Bombay Beach. A few hundred, in trailers and houses that have not yet finished falling, and they have a bar and a general store and the annual event called Bombay Beach Biennale where artists come out from Los Angeles and make installations in the ruins and on the shore and take photographs and leave. The residents watch. The pelicans don’t notice.
What happens to a mistake that gets this big is that it becomes a place. It becomes its own argument for existing. The Salton Sea was an accident and then it was a resort and then it was a collapse and now it is an ecosystem, degraded and strange, but real, with its own food chains and its migration patterns and its smell and its particular quality of afternoon light in winter, which is extremely clear, the sky a hard specific blue above the brown water and the white shore and the dead palms. Proposals have accumulated for decades to save it or to manage its dying or to pipe water in from somewhere or to divide it into smaller managed ponds. None of them have happened. The sea shrinks. The shore extends. The exposed lakebed dries in the wind and the dust blows into the towns of the Coachella Valley to the north, fine particulates, selenium and salts, into the lungs of agricultural workers in Mecca and Coachella and Thermal, towns that do not appear in the resort photographs.
The pelicans are still there when I stop watching. They will be there after I stop watching. They are not waiting for anyone to save the sea. They have no concept of saving. They have only the old instruction, this place, this water, stop.
The bones crunch. The air is enormous with its smell. Somewhere to the south a crop duster crosses the sky in a long slow pass over a field I can’t see, trailing a white line that the wind begins to soften almost immediately, and then it’s gone.