Sonny’s Sea Change

No one can say exactly when the Salton Sea was extinguished from the public mind. Roughly speaking, I would put the time in the mid-1970s. After that, the largest inland body of water in California, nearly twice as large as Lake Tahoe, no longer registered in the collective psyche. It had ceased to exist.

Let me give you an example. Before coming here, I was describing my trip to a friend. She’s an educated woman and loves Southern California passionately. When I told her I was leaving for the Salton Sea, the conversation took a pause.

“Where’s that?” she asked.

“South of Indio,” I said.

The gears turned in her brain. She could picture Indio, but she couldn’t picture anything resembling a “sea” in that vast, brown desert.

“Does it have water?” she asked.

In fact, the Salton Sea contains more water today than in the past, when the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and the Marx brothers came here to lounge at seaside resorts. A number of high-toned places dotted the shore, but the Hollywood crowd favored one particular establishment known as the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club.

It still exists today, in a sense. The ruins of the club sit at the sea’s edge. No one has bothered to fence it off, so you can walk through the bar, the card room, and the restaurant with windows facing the sea.

From the windows, it’s clear what drew the clientele. The view is beautiful and spooky, better than anything offered by Palm Springs. You can picture the movie stars drinking gin rickeys in the long afternoons, taking in that view.

That happened in the 1950s, of course, before the sea was forgotten. Today the entire town of North Shore consists of a general store where encephalitis warnings get posted each summer and a few senior citizens scuttle through the ruins. As a town, North Shore is done. Finished.

What killed the Salton Sea? The popular answer is salt. The sea was created by virtue of a monstrous agricultural accident in 1905 in which the Colorado River broke through dikes and sent its entire flow into an ancient depression called the Salton Sink.

When the breach was sealed, the new “sea” was left without an outlet. Thus, as drain water from farms carries more salt--a byproduct of irrigating fields--into the sea each year, the salinity climbs and climbs.

Tom Kirk, executive director of the Salton Sea Authority, estimates that the sea collects enough salt each day to fill a train one mile long.

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A rank, briny smell now wafts off the sea. Its salinity level has hit 45,000 parts per million. The ocean’s is 35,000 parts per million. Many fish species have been killed off already and the remaining species are poised to go.

But other plagues also visit the sea. Something has begun to kill the bird populations here. In 1996 a horrible scourge wiped out thousands of endangered pelicans and thousands more birds of other species.

The birds died so fast that wildlife officials could not keep up. They would scoop up the bodies, burn them in incinerators and come back to find still more bodies. The shores were lined with them.

“It got to the point where I didn’t feel like I ran a wildlife refuge anymore,” said Clark Bloom, chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge here. “It was more like being a mortician. Or a contaminants expert.”

Ominously, the cause has remained a mystery. One of the most polluted rivers in the world, the New River, empties into the Salton Sea from the city of Mexicali across the border. The New River contains horrendous levels of bacteria, heavy metals and pesticides.

Still, a link between the New River and the deaths has not been established. “We’re not sure of the cause,” said Bloom. “We just know that something is killing the birds. This year, it looks like we’re going to get another big die-off.”

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Conditions at the sea have become so miserable that many had abandoned all hope. But now, a miracle may be taking place.

As is sometimes the case, this miracle grew from tragedy. Over the Christmas holidays, congressman Sonny Bono was killed in a skiing accident. During his funeral, the leaders of Congress not only lionized Bono, they pledged to promote a piece of legislation that would serve as his legacy.

And what issue did they choose? The Salton Sea. It was Bono’s favorite issue, one that he never tired of promoting.

A week after the funeral, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was touring the sea in a Navy helicopter, peering at its lonely beauty and promising that a rescue plan would be passed within the year.

“The result has been truly amazing,” said Kirk of the sea authority. “You can go back for 30 years and see all kinds of plans to save the sea. I think if you bundled up all the energy from all those efforts, they would not equal the energy that’s being expended today.”

People around the sea now routinely talk about $300 million or more becoming available. No one knows exactly what plan will be chosen but there are two favorites:

* A diking proposal that would close off about 25% of the sea and make it a sacrifice area that would grow increasingly saline. The rest of the sea would gradually grow less salty through dilution.

* A pumping system that would pull water out of the Salton Sea and send it to the Gulf of Mexico. A second system would return the favor, drawing less-salty water from the gulf and sending it to the sea.

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Thus is it possible that Sonny Bono, in death, may save the Salton Sea. Many twists and turns remain, of course, but the prospects for a rebirth of the sea seem better than they have in decades.

Before he died, Bono persuaded Venice architect Jon Jerde to create master designs for new resorts that might be built at the sea if the rejuvenation efforts ever succeeded. The whimsical renderings look like modern versions of the old North Shore Beach and Yacht Club.

Will we actually see this rebirth and the attendant land rush? We just might. The same forces that led us to forget the Salton Sea could reverse and lead us to remember.

The importance of reviving tourism at the sea pales, however, compared to another issue: the survival of the birds.

The sea happens to sit smack in the middle of the Pacific Flyway, the aerial highway used by millions of migrating birds each year. Many of them come down for a few days’ rest at the sea, or to spend the entire winter here. Among them are pelicans and other endangered species.

These are the birds that are being lost by the thousands on the killing grounds of the sea. The wildlife service’s Bloom estimates that about 200,000 have died in the last five years. In one year alone, 1996, the sea wiped out 15% of the existing white and brown pelican populations.

Without change, Bloom says, the pelicans could be lost altogether. Other species of ducks and shorebirds could be hit very hard.

“Some people ask, ‘Why spend all that money on the Salton Sea?’ ” Bloom says. “They say, ‘Why not just walk away from it.’ The problem is, the birds won’t walk away from it. They’ll keep flying in and drinking the water and eating the fish. They don’t have a clue.”

In other words, unlike people, the birds have never forgotten the sea. They remember each year, they come back, and they die. That’s why Sonny Bono’s legacy matters to all of us. Pray for its speedy arrival.

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Those of you intrepid enough to reach the end of last week’s essay recall that I made a bet with Bill Patzert of JPL about the arrival of El Nino.

I bet that it wouldn’t.

The check is in the mail.