The tilapia came first, millions of them, introduced to help the tourists fish. Then the algae blooms took the oxygen from the water, and the fish died in waves that deposited their bones along every shore. You can walk on the bones. They crunch underfoot like dry pasta.
This was in 1999, the worst of it, though the dying had been happening since the early 1970s. The Salton Sea is not ancient. It was created by accident in 1905 when an irrigation canal broke and the Colorado River ran unchecked for nearly two years into the desert basin. Before that there had been ancient Lake Cahuilla, and before that, nothing.
Bombay Beach sits on the eastern shore. Population roughly 300, though the number shifts. The mobile homes list at odd angles. There is a bar called the Ski Inn where the walls are covered with dollar bills and license plates, and outside there are rusting boat hulks in the sand, and the sand smells of sulfur and rot. Not unpleasant, exactly — just present, just there, a fact of the place.
The egrets don’t mind. You’ll see them standing in the shallows, white against the gray-green water, hunting what’s still alive. Corvids pick through the debris on the shore. The birds are not being ironic.
In winter the sea looks like a painting of itself — flat, reflective, the Chocolate Mountains going purple and rust at dusk. A pair of pelicans. Some kind of hawk turning slow circles over the parking lot of the abandoned marina. The roads here are labeled but many of them end in sand without ceremony.
There’s a phrase in the environmental remediation literature: “the Salton Sea is in a death spiral.” It appears in reports from 2003, from 2011, from 2017, from 2024. The death spiral has a long duration. It is a feature of the place now.
A woman named Doris has lived on Karachi Road for thirty-one years. She moved here from Indio, for the quiet, she says. She has a wind chime made from aluminum cans. She grows tomatoes in pots on her front steps. The tomatoes are very good. She gives them away when they come in faster than she can eat them.
A mile offshore the water is clear to about four feet and then goes the color of green glass. Schools of tilapia still live out there, the survivors, adapted somehow. In summer the water temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the evaporation rate accelerates and the salinity rises and will continue to rise. The fish don’t know this. They turn in their schools, flashing.
The desert here before the sea was just desert. The desert reasserts itself at the margins, creosote and brittlebush coming back through cracks in old boat ramps. The mineral flats at the south end are beautiful in a specific colorless way — white and pale gray, fissured, with a sheen in the early morning. State wildlife biologists come for migratory bird counts. The numbers are still very high. The sea is dying but it is still what the Pacific Flyway birds have, so they come: avocets, stilts, white pelicans, eared grebes in numbers that can turn a section of water dark.
At night the town is quiet. A few lights. The sound of the water, which isn’t really a sound unless you’re standing at the edge of it, where it laps against the bone shore. The stars are clear here, thirty miles from the nearest city of any size. Something is moving along the waterline — a coyote, maybe, or a dog gone feral — pausing to investigate the debris and then moving on, not hurrying, working the shore the way it has been worked for a long time.