The smell comes first — sulfur and brine, the particular rot of fish that died in numbers too large to be mourned individually. Then the sight of it: water the color of pewter in overcast light, flat and still, the far shore invisible in haze. A pelican stands on a concrete dock that ends in air twenty feet short of the waterline. The sea has been retreating since before the pelican was born.
This place wasn’t meant to exist. In 1905 an irrigation canal near Mexicali ruptured, and the Colorado River spent almost two years routing itself into the Sonoran Desert before engineers managed to stop it. What they couldn’t stop was the sea itself, which was now there — thirty-five miles long, fifteen miles wide, the largest lake in California by surface area — and receding.
For a while people tried to make it into something. Resorts went up along the north shore in the 1950s. A yacht club. A marina. Celebrities drove down from Los Angeles: the water was warm, the desert air was dry, the fish were plentiful. There are photographs from those years — women in swimsuits holding drinks, men in short-sleeved shirts looking pleased with themselves, a particular brightness in the images, a forward-leaning certainty. They built boat ramps and concession stands and a beach, and for a decade the beach worked.
Then the salinity rose past tolerance and the fish started dying en masse — tilapia, mainly, though everything went eventually. 1976. 1994. 2002. Each year a fresh line of bodies at the shore, drying and bleaching until the white margin of the sea was as much fish as salt. Birds came to eat and stayed to die and left their bones beside the fish bones. The resorts emptied. The boat ramps kept pointing at water that kept moving back from them, as if the water were shy.
What remains: the concrete infrastructures, the mobile homes still in their lots, the silence that isn’t really silence but the absence of what used to fill it — boat engines, voices, the resort sounds. Some people never left. They’re in communities like Bombay Beach, which sits below sea level and smells like the sea smells, which is to say: like death held at a comfortable distance, like a reminder that most things in the desert should not persist but do.
In March the light is particular — winter low and still cold in the mornings, the air clean enough to see the Santa Rosa Mountains to the west in unusual detail. The mountains look too close, like a backdrop rolled down behind the flat scrim of the sea. You can walk on the white crust at the shore and it makes a sound underfoot, a crunch-and-give like walking on thin ice, except what’s under it isn’t water but more salt, more fish bone, compressed strata of what arrived and died here, all the way down.
The sea will be mostly gone in thirty years, or fifty. The projections vary. What will remain is a playa — which is to say nothing, which is to say the desert reasserting what it was before the canal broke. The exposed lakebed will generate dust carrying pesticides from a century of agricultural runoff, the kind that causes valley fever, the kind that when the wind is right will blow north toward Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley and the golf courses there, the ones that are still operating, the ones watered by the same river system that made this mistake.
But for now it persists. The pelican on the dock that ends in air lifts its large, impractical body and crosses to the other dock. It lands and becomes still. The water is flat. The haze holds.