--Abandoned Places--
the Salton Sea
The water looks like french onion soup as it laps at the shore.
The town is Desert Shores, California. Over 100 miles from my home town of Oceanside, in the Imperial Desert. Lying on the western shore of the Salton Sea, Desert Shores sits 235 feet below sea level. In the 1950s, the plan was to make the area into a resort destination- a desert oasis. Regular summer temperatures in the 110s, lack of funding or interest, and a less than pleasant odor caused by the high salinity of the sea are what probably kept this from happening. Roads were put in place along with sewer systems and water, initially drawing a few thousand residents to the western shores. But over the years, with no sign of the growth of any sort of tourist destination, the population dwindled.
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For reasons unknown to me, many of the people that left, seem to have taken nothing with them. Trailers sit abandoned with records laying on the bed, books, radios, clothes. Just left there. I wandered into a motel with tiny rooms, beds still in some of them, sure to find a dead body, or at least some rodents looking for a shady place to cool off. The sign above the door to one house reads "Casa Joanne." They left cars in driveways. Old cars, leading me to believe that they've been there for some time. Everything has begun to sink into the crusty sun baked mud that makes up the terrain of the area.
The Palms Motel, open to snoop around in on my first visit to the Salton Sea is now surrounded by barbed wire fence. Lord only knows why they might not want people to be able to get in there.
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I didn't spend much time at the Salton Sea on my most recent visit. Temperatures were over 110 degrees, coupled with the humidity generated by the sea, making it nearly unbearable to be out of the car for more than a few minutes at a time. There was a couple on the beach however, at the marina in Desert Shores. One of them was nude, figuring, I'm sure, that the likelyhood of seeing anyone else willing to brave the heat and the smell would be slight.
The potential exists for the Salton Sea to become completely deserted if plans to divert the waters that feed it to San Diego are made reality. This is currently the center of a large debate over the future of the salty desert lake. The south end of the sea is the site of a wildlife sanctuary, however, that is home to the second most diverse bird population in the western hemisphere, not to mention the myriad of fish species living in it's waters. These and several other arguments have prevented the death of the Salton Sea so far, but San Diego has money and an exploding population, so the future may still look dim for this already god forsaken place.
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People do still live in Desert Shores. A couple hundred, I believe. Where they buy groceries, I'm not sure. Where they work and how they spend their days, I have no idea. They live among the abandoned lots and dead palm trees on cracked, sun baked muddy ground. I don't know why or how they live there, but it's one of the strangest and most interesting places I've ever visited.
