The sands of the Salton Sea are at complete odds with each other. In some areas, they’re soft and flour-like, more Caribbean island than Southern California desert. In others, they look as though a giant clay pot has exploded and all of the subsequent fragments were drenched in oil. Their only real similarity are the calcified fish bones that line every part of the beach, no matter its terrain. The sea water shares this dichotomy. Up close, it’s vast and clear enough that you expect to see dolphins surface along the waterline. But from a bird’s-eye view, it looks as though it’s helping to contain a snarling dust storm.
This is all why you’ll hear people say that the Salton Sea feels “like being on a different planet.” But that’s not exactly right. Because everything is too familiar. Too much like Earth.
It’s an early evening in June, and the sky in Bombay Beach — population: 215, and the remaining community along the Salton Sea — is bleeding red and orange. The sun is disappearing behind the San Jacinto Mountains, a sign that there’s an overabundance of pollution in the air. The smell, due to an algae bloom, has been described as “fetid,” “noxious” and like “rotten eggs.” It supposedly gets worse as the heat becomes more tyrannical. But although the temperature is approximately 100 degrees (fairly common for this time of year), I’d describe it as mildly septic.
From the berm that was built in the 1980s as a failed attempt to prevent the sea from swallowing up the town, I can see a Tesla charger station made of scrap metal and a wood confessional near a phone booth with its handset dangling inches from the sand, along with a metal sign in the shallows that reads “The Only Other Thing Is Nothing.” It’s here that I meet April, a Bombay Beach local who makes me promise I won’t use the terms “post-apocalyptic,” “abandoned” or “ghost town” to describe her hometown of the last six years. Like many of Bombay’s residents, she’s tired of visitors misrepresenting its soul. It, of course, used to be none of these things. In fact, Bombay Beach was once a blue-collar paradise — the best-kept secret in California.
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