Salton Sea--Victim of Salt and Apathy

There is a quiet that descends over the dying, and perhaps that explains the absolute stillness of the Salton Sea. No bulldozers rattling across the desert here, no resorts abuilding, no hum of money anywhere. Only this silence, and the peacefulness accorded the soon-to-be-departed.

The Salton Sea is undergoing death by salt. Each year millions of tons of it washes down from the rivers and irrigation canals that feed the sea, and none of it ever departs. The sea is a sink without exit, a vast lake of warm brine growing more concentrated until it extinguishes all life within it and around it.

For years the authorities have watched this process evolve and done nothing to stop it. Scientists have logged the upward ticks in salinity month by month, and when a major species of fish failed to reproduce this spring, most of them saw it as the beginning of the end. The tilapia was regarded as the Salton Sea’s canary in a cage.

When it comes, the collapse of life at the Salton Sea will be a very big deal for California. No one argues about this. The sea is our largest inland body of water and most prolific motherland for fishes and birds. It serves as a major stopover on the Pacific flyway, and a dozen threatened species can be found along the sea’s edges. In terms of pure biological muscle, the sea overpowers the productivity of a Mono Lake or a Lake Tahoe.

You would think this kind of crisis would produce a surge of response from the resource agencies and environmental groups. It hasn’t. Why do all avert their eyes as the sea slides toward its demise? The answer is most curious.

No one can argue that solutions don’t exist, because they do. The state has devised various desalting plans that, albeit expensive, would eventually produce great economic returns. And no one can argue about the sea’s unsullied beauty, which is remarkable, or the need for recreation.

The real answer lies elsewhere. It seems there are certain wilderness areas that have been abandoned by the white middle class in much the same way that parts of our inner cities were abandoned. The Salton Sea is one of them.

Even its creation amounted to a bad omen. Back in 1905 engineers were cutting a canal to feed the Imperial Valley when the gates holding back the Colorado River failed, and the whole project came apart. For two years the canal ran wild and filled the desert sink until it became, incredibly, a huge inland sea.

This place never attracted the money crowd. A series of abandoned resorts now rotting on the sea’s shoreline attest to that failure. The salty water corroded power boats, and the sea’s location at the far end of the Coachella Valley made it a long drive from Los Angeles. The sea was left to the blacks, the poorest whites and later on, to the Southeast Asians.

You can come out here now and witness scenes that--if you are familiar with the typical white-bread wilderness in California--can only seem amazing. Jetties populated totally by black fishermen. Skiffs filled with Vietnamese families. Robert Foster, superintendent of the recreation area here, has worked in parks all over the West, from Yellowstone to Big Sur. In no other place, he says, has he found a wilderness area where most users were not members of the white middle class.

There are no El Toritos here, no La Quinta Inns. You can stand at the seaside, watch a fat sun sink behind the mountains, and nowhere hear the whine of a Jet Ski. The whole place seems to spring from another time, say the 1930s. Out on the jetties the black fishermen are hooking what remains of the tilapia. The same tilapia so prized by the Japanese that they will pay $35 the pound, F.O.B. Tokyo docks.

And none of this counts for much. The Salton Sea is a resort of the ghetto, and the plans to save it will cost $350 million, maybe more. If Tahoe was this close to dying, that bill would be paid. With the sea, the outcome promises to be different.

Now, there is a Faustian bargain that could be made. It turns out that the big resorts have slowly clawed their way down the Coachella Valley over the last decade and have arrived at the door of the sea. Only its imminent death has protected it from the clutches of the developers. No one wants a villa with dead fish on the beach.

You could fantasize about a certain quid pro quo here. The developers see to it that the sea gets its money and then they bring on the bulldozers. Instant Palm Springs. The only catch being that the golf course types would quickly drive out the blacks and the Vietnamese. And we would have something new in California: our first gentrified wilderness.