On the Back Roads Read Online Free Page B

riled up its shallow waters. Looking out at the lagoon, they swapped sea stories until the birds had done what they do here every morning and had moved on.
    Once billed as California’s largest recieational lake, the Salton Sea is
big.
It is thirty-five miles long and nine to fifteen miles wide.
Recreational
is now debatable, at best. Technically,
lake
never was right because it has no outlet. Geologists instead qualify it as a
sink.
    At 232 feet below sea level, the Salton Sea is the collector of irrigation runoff from the sprawling farms of the Imperial Valley. It’s also the dump for the disgustingly poliuted New and Alamo Rivers, which originate in Mexico. Water leaves only by evaporation. The foul pollutants go nowhere. They collect.
    The 110-mile shoreline of the Salton Sea once had long, sandy beaches spotted with South-Seas cabanas and beach houses. Weekend crowds of swimmers and water-skiers flocked to the water, which registers summertime temperatures of ninety degrees. Marinas filled with shiny new boats as quickly as slips could be built for them. Bathing-suit manufacturers staged national beauty contests here. Boat races and regattas drew excited and colorful crowds from as far as Las Vegas and Phoenix. Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, and other Hollywood stars dined at the beautiful Salton Bay Yacht Club. Its floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the blue sea, the desert, and the Chocolate Mountains.
    Offering exciting promise, the Salton Sea was a glamorous place in the 1950s and 1960s. Only 150 miles from Los Angeles, this 300,000-acre saltwater lake in a mountain-rimmed desert, was also a real-estate promoter’s dream. The promoters moved here in 1958, creating a place called Salton City and began selling lots at $200 down. Responding to TV and radio ads, speculators flocked to the barren desert to scoop up the raw land. A million-dollar freshwater distribution system was built for a population of 40,000. Power lines and 265 miles of streets were laid out on the sand. Some were paved. Every intersection had a sign—as they do today—bearing the names of the empty streets.
    Spread over 19,600 acres of flat desert, the seaside paradise was ready for a city that never came. In the late 1960s, the whole thing collapsed, as speculative land promotions often do. The promoters packed their tents and disappeared.
    Today the Salton Sea is an ecological disaster. Irrigation runoff dumps 4 million tons of salt, plus fertilizer and insecticide residue, into the sea every year. At Salton City, a foul smell often hangs over its hard, salt-encrusted shores, washed by water that is the color of cloudy tea and 29 percent saltier than the Pacific Ocean. The rising water of the sea has claimed its beaches and marinas, their crumbling structures half submerged and covered black with barnacles. Hot desert air blows through the empty windows at the abandoned, bankrupt Salton Bay Yacht Club.
    Obviously, the Salton Sea has had its share of bad press. CBS’s
60 Minutes
reported the New River has been dumping raw sewage into the sea for forty years and called it the nation’s dirtiest. Local residents had hoped the
60 Minutes
piece would wake up the political bureaucracy to the ecological tragedy happening here. It did just that. But it also ran off the fisher men.
    Next to Johnson’s Landing is the RV park where Curt Goodpasture lives. He has fished the Salton Sea for over thirty-five years. “Better than half my life,” he says. “Fish aren’t as big as they were. But all this talk about the fish beinggone, it ain’t so. It’s serious fishermen that’s gone. These guys who come out now just like to drink beer in a boat.”
    People here grieve for their desert sea, but science and politics may yet save it. While they wait, life here is otherwise serene, unrushed, uncrowded, simple, and healthy. The sun’s entry and exit behind the mountains is gorgeous. And so is the