A Return to Salton, and the Blue Haze of Death

When you stand on the shores of the Salton Sea, it takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the strange, misty mirror of the water.

Your nose will twitch at the smell of decay, and the heat bouncing up from the milky white bones covering the ground is oppressive. Watching gulls waddle over a seemingly endless field of desiccated husks, you wonder how anyone could ever live or play or love here again.

The reality is, they won't.

The salinity of the water that's killing the fish and wildlife is not the only bringer of death here. The incredible heat of California's spring and summers is baking away the lake itself; where brackish shallows recede, alkaline mud is exposed to shrink and crack. The wind picks up the toxic dust and sweeps it inland, towards civilisation — the county has the highest rates of hospitalisation for asthma in the state. (This is a very, very cool Atlantic article, minus that whole horrifically collapsing ecosystem thing. You should read it if you get the chance.)

the original version of this panorama is over 30,000 pixels wide, and it is kickin' rad. When it's small like this, you can really see the fog rising off the water.

As I stood in the sucking sludge, with the water lapping around my ankles, I flicked back through the photos I had just taken. In each, the unmistakable haze was there... a pall hanging over the water and the destroyed town; a visible sign of the wrongness of the place. But I'll be damned — I just kept thinking how pretty it was, you know, outside of the unwavering stench of the inevitable death of everything.

When I got back for the night, I found out that the haze isn't just a trick of the eye, or dust motes playing havoc with the sunlight. It's actually hydrogen sulfide, and it's adding to the already out of control smog issues in the state. It's coming from the rotting corpses and plant matter still trapped under the water, and it will only get worse as this whole terrible, fascinating, beautiful process continues. And yeah, it really, really smells.

I honestly don't know why I liked Salton so much. Is it possible to feel sorry for a place? Because that's what I felt there. Wistful. Nostalgic. Humbled. And, as one of the reasons I chose these pictures today, a bit blue. If you want a better look at the sand-that-is-not-sand-but-bones, then I have a previous (already paid out) post with some neat pictures in it that you might like.

A glassy lake under a cloud of misery; lifetimes from now, it may live again.

But we'll have to watch it die, first.

All of these photos are my own, taken on my travels all over this pretty blue marble of ours. I hope you like them.