Salton Sea
By Calichusetts
- 317 reads
Author's Note: This was just a story I had lying around saved on my computer. Since my first entry here was about Massachusetts, one half of my username, I thought it fitting that my second should be about California, the other half.
Salton Sea
1986 – The oppressive ninety-seven-degree May air choked the semi-artificial landscape outside the United States Post Office in Indio, that community in which the Coachella Valley transitions from caddies and masseuses to real working-class folk. On the curb next to the Post Office’s mirage-green lawn, a cargo van idled. Two men were present, one observing, the other, sweatless, middle-aged, acclimated to the heat, groaning as he hoisted the last of the freight into the hold. He stepped back, caught his breath, and examined his work, hands on hips. He motioned to the observer.
“These,” Walt Rysumpentz said, with a violent, careless slash of a hand, “are window panes.”
“Where we takin’ ‘em?” the observer, the protégé, the deliveryman-in-training, inquired casually.
“They’re building a new community center down in Brawley,” Walt explained, circling around to the driver’s side of the van and hopping in. He motioned for his trainee to take the passenger’s side.
“Brawley’s pretty far down from here,” Damien Glendening mused, with a slight undertone of exasperation.
“Couple of hours maybe,” Walt, about fifteen years older than Damien, said reassuringly, gearing up the van. “If y’remember that time a few months back we took those packages from Gilroy over to Chowchilla, that drive was longer than this one’ll be.”
The van meandered through the streets, filled with their terra-cotta-roofed homes meeting the first signs of uninhabited desert brush. It was only a few minutes after the van had departed the post office when they reached the sign for Coachella, that oven-baked town that would transform into a music box of youth in the years to come.
“I’m hungry,” Damien said, his words sounding much younger than his voice.
“You’re hungry…” Walt repeated, one hand on the steering wheel, the other rubbing his chin, slowly, methodically. “Yeah… yeah, I’m hungry, too. There’s a McDonald’s down the street here a bit. We better get food. There won’t be any to get further down 111.”
And so, as a method of saluting the last sight of corporate America they would see for the next few hours, they parked under the red-and-yellow covering of Big Calories. Walt ordered a Filet-O-Fish, Damien, his appetite at the largest it would be in life, got a Big Mac. They carried their comestibles back out to the van.
Amidst the rustling of bags opening and wrappers coming off, Damien complained again. “I don’t know why we couldn’t have eaten in. I hate eating in these vans, you lose half your food—“—he stopped to lick a ketchupy finger—“stuff ends up flying everywhere.”
“Time can be your friend or your enemy in this business. Don’t know ‘bout you, but I’d rather make it my friend.”
“Well, ‘tain’t like we’re taking lifesavin’ medication to a hospital. By the time we get down there it’ll be seven-clock anyway, they won’t be building that community center at seven-clock in the evening, now will they?”
“Don’t know if they will be or not,” Walt said, “but if I were down there, casting my eyes on all them migrant farmworkers without a safe place to sleep at night, I’d work round the clock to get that place up, tell ya that much.” Damien wasn’t listening, still preoccupied with licking wayward ketchup off of his fingers. These were the last words that would be spoken for some time.
The white-hot landscape beckoned increasingly. Palm trees, organized vegetation, plants—they all shied further and further away. The aptly-named outpost of Thermal came around, the site of the old airfield. Then it was Mecca, the hamlet with the last reliable gas station for miles. A temperature sign outside the town’s only bank read 105—a mark its namesake in Saudi Arabia would envy. Mecca, California, was dreary and limp, though. Nobody was pilgrimaging here.
“Grief!” cried Damien, head tilted toward the back of the van. “That was the last tree back there and I don’t see any of ‘em ahead!”
“Oh, you’ll only see eight, ten trees over the next seventy-five miles,” Walt said. Suddenly, his affable, calm demeanor warped into an excited one. “Look! Look!” he shouted, two fingers jabbing off to the right. “There it is!”
Damien looked off to the distance and laid his eyes on the whitest, brightest surface to which he had ever borne witness. “What is that thing? It’s blindin’ me!”
“That’s the sea!” Walt said with a grin. Seeing Damien shielding one of his eyes, he laughed heartily for the first time since they had taken to the van.
“The Salton Sea? Already? That’s the Salton Sea?”
“Sure ‘nough!” Walt sighed contemplatively. “Ohhh… wouldja look at it. It looks beautiful today.”
“Why’s it blindin’ me?”
“Sun’s reflectin’ off of it at this angle. Don’t worry, in a couple minutes down the road that’ll die off.”
“Didn’t think we’d come to it so soon. Thought it was just a little watering hole.”
“Kiddin’ me? Naw, man, the Sea’s big. We’ll be traveling along it almost all the way down to Brawley.”
“Looks pretty darn forlorn to me,” Damien Glendening said, his cheek in his hand, “but, guess it beats looking at nothin’.”
“Yeah, you’re right, it is forlorn. That’s exactly what makes it such a sight. Oh, look! Up ahead! To the right! There’s the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club.”
The rusty edifice sped past Damien’s window, and he said, unimpressed, “Looks abandoned to me.”
“We’re gonna pass about ten clubs just like that and they’re all gonna be abandoned, Damien. This used to be a prime-time spot, you know. Almost as many starlets and vacationers comin’ here as up in Palm Springs.”
“Hmm, when they’d go abandoned? Thirties, forties?” Damien asked these questions with only a polite interest.
“No, man, lot of them didn’t even exist in the thirties and forties. Naw, my friend, lot of places like that yacht club back there—they were buzzing in your lifetime.”
This didn’t make any sense to Damien Glendening at all. “In my lifetime? They went from buzzing to dead in my lifetime? Maybe I’m younger than you think, Walt, I’m only twenty-two.”
Walt did quick math. “Twenty-two … so you were born in
’64? Oh, heck, yeah! They were still alive and well in ’64! Their height was in the late ‘50s, but yeah, ’64? Oh, definitely, they were still down here in ’64. I’ve got old Palm Springs Life magazines from ’61 and ’62 with optimistic ads tellin’ people to buy land down here.”
“How’d they all get abandoned in the space of twenty years?”
Walt gave another sigh, this one longer, sadder. “Sea got contaminated. The resorts were built on watersports, you see, like people would come here, they’d waterski in the day, go to concerts—Vegas-style shows, you know—at night.”
Damien still could not comprehend this, and thought for a second whether his older companion was making up stories about the impoverished landscape. “Someone dump a bunch of raw sewage in it?”
“Actually, pretty much, yeah!” Another of Walt’s beefy guffaws. “Yeah, the river that flows into it from the south, it goes into Mexico, you see, where they don’t regulate waste disposal much—so factories, companies, and such, they’d dispose of their waste in the river and then it’d flow up here to the Sea.”
“There any of those yacht clubs left?”
Walt stopped to think. “A couple are still open, I believe. But they’ll all be closed in a few years. Very few come down this way anymore.”
“I don’t blame ‘em.”
Suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, Walt was fed up. “Now you stop that! Come on, I come down here and I really like this ol’ place and the least you can do is respect that and stop complaining and carryin’ on about what a dump it is.”
“It is!”
“You shut your trap, I don’t want to hear none of that anymore.”
They traveled for about thirty more minutes, steamy, tense, evocative minutes in which Damien said nothing and in which Walt would add interjections sparsely:
“Aw, see! Look—look over there, see the gulls over there by the shore? Man, look at how they fly, ain’t that a sight.” – “Oh, I wish we had time, else I’d turn off up here. You go off road here, it takes you to these fantastic mud volcanoes…MAN! What a thing of beauty those are.”
Eventually they drove into the ramshackle community of Bombay Beach. “Jeez … poor sight this is. I was down here a coupla’ years ago and the buildings have fallen even more into disrepair since then. Still, you gotta admire the people with the will to live down in a place like this.”
Damien broke his silence violently. “Y’know, what’s there to admire about them anyway? What sort of self-respecting person would choose to live in such a garbage heap?”
“I told you to shut your trap!” Walt hesitated, and then, against inner protests, actually answered Damien’s question. “You know … I don’t think they’re self-respecting people. I honestly don’t. They’re good people, hardworking people. No, they’re not self-respecting. They respect the land, not themselves. You’re a self-respecting person. I can tell that much. Maybe respecting yourself ain’t all what it’s cracked up to be. These people respect real California. This is what California is, after all. Not L.A., not Palm Springs, not San Fran. Those places are fabrications. This is real California down here, in Bombay Beach and all these other places. And I respect it. And if you’re going to keep going on whining and complaining about everything down here I don’t even know why you came. You could’ve had yourself a fine life delivering windowpanes to movie star homes in Holmby Hills ‘stead of community centers in real California. In fact, once you go back to the postmaster’s HQ in L.A. next month, y’oughta just stay there. That’s where you belong, quite obviously.”
Damien sat and sulked, thinking the dour mood would permeate the van for the rest of the way, and was quite surprised when Walt broke off again with a jab of two fingers, a “Look! Look!” and a cry of “There’s a stack of painted haybales off the road there. Jeez, it looks like a mountain of rainbows. And a fellow next to it. Strange. Wonder what he’s up to?” The haybale-painting man gave the van a short wave, and the van hurtled on, past the southern shore of the Salton Sea, from the parched desert into the green fertileness of the Imperial Valley…
“I’m hungry,” Damien said again.
1995 – “Two hundred post offices in small towns across Southern California are understaffed,” a man of tall stature and firm bearing told Walt Rysumpentz. “And there are over a thousand workers based out of this post office who are not needed. Your first task, as Assistant Postmaster, is to transfer personnel to those understaffed towns.”
Walt ran a finger through now salt-and-pepper hair. He picked up the “G” folder by chance, and began leafing through it. Garrison—Gaylord—Gentry—Glencross—Glendening. The name struck him, though he wasn’t quite sure why. He pulled out the file. “DAMIEN GLENDENING – D. O. B. 1/27/64 – TO BE REASSIGNED.”
“Sir?” Walt asked.
His superior looked back at him.
“Any method to where these people should be reassigned?”
“They can go anywhere personnel are needed.”
Walt leaned back in his chair and thought hard for a few minutes. Then, without regret or hesitation, he wrote, in black Sharpie ink across the top of the file, “REASSIGN TO BOMBAY BEACH POST OFFICE.”
March 2014 – A family in a blue sedan pulled up to the colossal mound of colorful haybales at the side of the road, now known as Salvation Mountain and hailed as folk art. A man, gruffly bearded, wearing a small cowboy hat, observed them, and, noticing that they were taking longer than most people to view and take pictures of the edifice, decided to go over and chat them up.
“Hey folks! How you doin’? You like what you see? You know the guy who created this whole sculpture just passed ‘way bout a month ago. We just had a memorial service for him.”
“We know. We saw it in the paper. That’s why we came down to see it,” the head of the family explained.
“Well, hey, y’know, if y’don’t have anywhere else to go tonight, we’re gonna have a little dance party down the road a bit. There’s a makeshift stage there with some old sofas and things, and they filmed a scene from Into the Wild there—y’ever seen the Sean Penn film Into the Wild?—and so what we folk here in the community do is every Saturday night we go down to that stage and recreate the dance scene from the movie. So if you like you could load up on some bread and meat like we do and come on down and join us. We’d be delighted to have ya.” Having made his offer, the man waltzed away.
He observed them more. The family did not approach him again or ask him any further questions. Eventually, they piled back into their blue sedan and drove off to the north.
The man rubbed his beard and looked wistfully off to the shore of the sea.
“Well… more food for me, I guess,” Damien Glendening said to himself. But he knew it had been ages since he had actually told anyone he was hungry.
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