Salton Sea

Off to Salton Sea just a short drive east from Anza Borrego National Park with high expectations and hopes. 

We have never visited Salton Sea and don't know much about it except it is a very big lake and was created by accident about a hundred years ago.

Here's Salton City. Oh my. A pretty depressing sight: nothing much-- a gas station-- a home supply store-- a cafe.

We drive toward the lake. We can see the flat sheet of water in the near distance. There are a few more widely separated houses--they look like fifties ranch-style lookalikes--maybe three bedrooms and two and a half baths--each on a good-sized empty dirt lot. Not much in the way of trees or landscaping. 

There's a new-looking bright orangy-yellow high-school gym and related buildings.

Here's a disintegrating four-lane street called Yacht Club Drive.

Sounds promising so we take a right and follow it a block. It ends suddenly in a disused beachside parking lot. There is no yacht club. Sand is encroaching and sad, blackened stumps of Mexican fan palms are all that remains from someone's dream of tropic splendor.

We park and get out of the car. No people. No traffic. Far out on the water, which now is about thirty yards away, we see a line of sea birds--maybe pelicans--none flying. 

There is an odd smell in the air--a bit  like sewage--a bit like road-kill. No breeze. Everything still.

We have been talking gaily about "...dabbling our toes in the Salton Sea," and now we are close enough to be thinking about doing it--but, Holy Smokes!--there is a brown line of something at the water's edge and when we get closer we see that that brown line is thousands of dead fish--fish about nine or ten inches long--past the fresh rotting stage but not yet totally decomposed. Dried skin and fish bone skeletons. An awful sight!

I know it is some kind of die-off, but since we never heard about it it is a miserable shock.

Looking at the skeletons I immediately think: it is the future of the human race. This is how it ends. So many people--not enough whatever it is that killed these fish. Polluted water? Polluted air? Not enough food? Toxic waste? Atomic war?

Subdued, we drive home and I Google Dead Fish Salton Sea and find that a massive die-off of tilapia, the only fish that can live in the lake's warm, salty, fairly poisonous fluid these days,  had occurred recently.

Unusually high summertime heat had done something to the chemistry of the salty water which had somehow taken the oxygen out of it. Millions of fish had literally suffocated. A horrible death.

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