On the Back Roads Read Online Free Page A

quit looking.

6
The Story of the Salton Sea
Salton City, California
    T he windows at Johnson’s Landing all face the Salton Sea. So does the bar. I took a stool between a lady and a couple of older guys. I was offered a Salton martini: a glass of beer with an olive. Too early. My breakfast had not yet setttled. Besides, the fresh coffee smelled pretty good when I came through the door.
    Beginning at 6:00 a.m., Dorianne Fries sees anything that happens around the lagoon in front, though not much ever does. She has been the morning waitress here for a decade.
    One morning a while back, a pair of stretch limousines rolled up to the boat ramp at the lagoon. They got her attention. Dorianne was well into this story when I sat down, but she was nice enough to start over again for my benefit. No one here seemed to mind.
    According to Dorianne, silt in the channel had made the boat ramp useless years ago, but that was of no interest to the modish bird-watchers who stepped from the limos. They opened the trunks and pulled out long-lens cameras. Without a word, they spread along the salt-encrusted jetties surrounding the lagoon. Hundreds of birds, their twiggy legs knee-deep in the briny water, were busy scooping up bugs. Their briefexcursion over, heads shaking in apparent dis appointment, the bird-watchers returned to their limos and drove off.
    â€œThey saw not one blue-footed booby,” Dorianne recalled. “That’s it right there, supposedly.” Leaning across the bar, Dorianne pointed to a dog-eared page in a bird book, which had pushed my coffee cup aside. Edie Dean, sitting on the stool next to me, had retrieved it from somewhere. It said that the blue-footed booby “is shaped somewhat like a fat cigar with a pointed-at-both-ends look.” Although the bird is found mostly in western Mexico, the book reported sightings in south eastern California, including here at the Salton Sea.
    â€œHow do you know that’s the one they were looking for?” I asked.
    â€œBecause that’s what those people all come here to see,” said Dorianne.
    â€œHave you seen one?”
    â€œCould ‘ave! I don’t know.” Dorianne shrugged and flipped pages of the book. Reading upside down, she had driven a spoon into the drawing of a large white bird. Its neck was looped like a sink drain. “It says
heron,
right? OK, two birds over, the exact same bird is called a
common egret.
Now, I ask you, which is which?”
    A man seated a couple of stools over interrupted in a raspy voice. “Who cares what they call ‘em. Just look at ‘em all. Must be three generations of those big buggers crapping on the dock right now.”
    Dorianne rapped the page with the spoon. If it had been a knife, the page would already be shreds. “But how do I know what I’m looking at, which bird it is, when the book doesn’t even know?” Frustrated beyond reason, Dorianne moved down the bar with the coffeepot.
    Something grievously wrong had been festering here for a long while. The bird book had nothing to do with it. And it wasn’t the layers of bird dung messing up the dock, either. Nobody has used it in years.
    What distressed Dorianne and the other locals who sat with me that morning was more ominous, more tragic. It wasn’t the birds so much as what they represented: the tag end ofbetter times, perhaps the last gasp of life for their beautiful desert sea.
    Then, like tears, their story started to flow.
    â€œYou should have been here back when people came to fish. On weekends, this parking lot was so full of boat trailers we couldn’t even get in here,” Dorianne remembers. “And the Saturday night fish fries lasted into Sunday.”
    Edie goes up again. This time she brought me pictures of men holding up big fish. “These are from the corvina derby we used to have every year.”
    Others at the bar told of hair-raising rescues on the sea when a sudden wind