THE MACHINE THAT CREATES AND DESTROYS ITSELF

SALTON SEA /// CITY // SLAB

The stories that I have heard about Salvation Mountain, and Slab City, and the Salton Sea, are further emanations of some underground movements that once seismically lifted and ground against the sky.  Things are slower now but the sea, the mountain, the city are still there and somewhat like some people describe the universe, they are helplessly spilling along their self-fulfilling routes, in the desert air like outer space with no friction but plenty of dust. We pick up two kids in Niland, CA who want to get to the Slabs.  They say that things there are much better now, still legit if you know where to look.

What I know or I have heard about Slab City:

That some sort of ex-military construction, an enormous or several enormous pieces of space, exists near Salvation Mountain, where a profusion of persons thrive or lie in wait for youngsters with something like a Honda Civic, something that can go fast and cheap, to come and be dazzled and trade that little car for the endless mushroom cluster of trailer parts that they, the Old Inhabitant, have been accruing over time.  And then they will leave the place where they have been quietly stagnating.  Next door, there is a huge, gently throbbing RV, shiny paint job, wheels carefully covered against the sun, generator pulsing with health and plumbing and a couple hundred gallons of fresh water for showers and toilet, and solar panels aimed at the sky perhaps, but certainly a satellite dish gathering the news from the world to which this roadster will return when the dust grows too dusty, or the vacation spent.  There is a camp of feral children and their dogs in the largest bush, fighting over something and laughing in their collection of tents and tarps and pieces of expired trailers.  This is behind Salvation Mountain-- the endless adobe outgrowth of a person named Leonard.

My neighbor in Saint Louis used to go off snowbirding with his lady friend, Rose.  She was a very good-looking and somewhat severe librarian who never quite approved of us, the kids next door, but understood that Norman did and so was precisely cordial as she came and went.  When Norman's diabeties got really bad they had to stop their winter driving.  This coincided with my purchase of an enormous step van and subsequent endless construction in the back alley, making it into a sort of cottage or mobile castle.  One day Rose came over to watch this splintery process and perhaps feeling wistful or interestedly sad, told me about a place that she and Norman had spent a few winters.  I had heard a little bit about Slab City.  Where you can see people actually in the process of rusting.  Rose said, very matter of fact, yes there are plenty of weirdoes.  That is what makes it interesting.

I do not know how it began.  I do not who owns the land, whether in fact anybody does. It is clay bluffs behind a power plant, behind a town, in front of mountains.  There is no water.  There is a live military testing ground not too far off.  There are real, actual sand dune type desert lands to the southeast. I can see that Leonard's endless work on the bluffs has evolved into a magnetic process of unconscious people collection.  And while sometimes a place like drives me away as I admire it, mostly because I would like to find my own forgotten land, the this-and-that-ness of the place is what I find vital, is what is compelling and good and confusing.  And the mountain is sort of a scrambled prayer, a place where one of my imaginary hot-air balloons crashed, and where a man actually decided to spend his life telling people that he loved them.  The Salvation Mountain.  It's made of adobe and tires and mostly paint.  The Slab and the Mountain are both fine examples of how people learn to train their eyes for evidence, for seeing loopholes to inhabit, and then living out a particulate settlement of a life until it sifts down to its logical conclusion.

Just to the east is a large lake.  The SALTON Sea.  A happy accident of naming, or something, I do not know. This is what I thought I knew and now know:

Once upon a time there was a mobster mayor of Los Angeles who tried to steal the Colorado River from Arizona.  This backfired.  Alternately, people were perhaps building canals in 1905 and earlier, but that year brought such flooding that the canals ended up carrying the entirety of the river's volume.  There is a wash there that sometimes held fresh water and this where the floodwater came to rest.  It is just above the San Andreas fault.  An unexpected lake in the desert, and what is better, it seemed to be there to stay.  So obviously we will build a resort, we will build a city alongside this oasis, we will get Frank Sinatra on a lifetime contract.  There will be yachts and sunglasses and beach chairs and classy dames in swimsuits.  And we will stock this lake full of the most challenging fish.  The realtors rejoice.  We will name it SALTON City.

And that name comes back to bite everyone in the fanny.

The machine that creates and destroys itself.  A beautiful failure to evolve.  A dusty street, empty trailers.  Across the lake even more so: there are acres of lonesome power lines, empty streets with beautifully self-deceiving names like Sea View and Sea Breeze and Sea Elf and Sea Log, the ruined marina of a yacht club that nobody can join anymore, having become so exclusive that it is no longer corporeal.  The SALTON Sea reached its  fingers deep into the earth and drawn-out elements and flavors and salts slowly made the place so hostile that only tilapia survive.  The tilapia survive because they are not entirely resistant to adaptation but always had the gift of being stubborn, and so the salt will overtake them at the yearly rate of 1%, and they will sit back in their easy chairs taking no notice until they give up the ghost and litter the beach with their already mummified little bodies.  But the pockets of salinity, of bacteria and algae, are always moving and the tilapia continue about their lives; breeding and working and coming home to the family to relax after dinner; they survive and die in waves that they are unable to interpret, in patterns of death and decay that seem to be part of the daily grind, in between promotions and after saving comp time for years.  The exotics, and the self-aware, and the sensitive or hopeless, they have died out in the decades previous, clearly seeing that this is a dog's life and one better ended.  But the tilapia keep living and dying in thankless gangs.  And the beaches of the SALTON Sea are so clotted with their small identical rotting bodies that nobody else can bear to stay long.  The lots of land along Sea Elf Lane were never developed, and what people remain or have arrived give the unmistakable impression of doomed out-of-staters who bought their parcel in a Growing Lakefront Communty site unseen, and will stay goddamnit, because the price was right.  You see their ranches and trailers.  They have a lot of elbow room.

….....

(It would be too easy to tie this all together.  Something about transience and permanence and expectation and doomed enterprise, something full of dramatic tension and whatever, but I don't see that the universe rewards or punishes that sort of writing.  It's probably true that I could have driven a little more slowly.  But it would have done me no good, because I was still moving fast.)

SALTON SEA
BOMBAY BEACH
SALTON CITY
CA