Imperial (14 page)

Over there, you have grapefruit, you have Chinese cabbage. We have a local mango grove, she added with a smile.

My taxi driver was amazed. Mangoes! he kept exclaiming in delight.

I asked Señora Solario whether Mecca was a community or merely a bivouac of mutually suspicious strangers, and she replied: My husband, people come here with no money, as long as he eats, they eat. It’s ’cause he knows how it is to be hungry. And me, I remember how in the Philippines I was lucky to get one meal of rice a day. It’s the Golden Rule.

GHOSTS AND OUTLINES

So that was Mecca, which was—what? I may have delineated Imperial, but as yet it resists my characterization. Imperial is pinched and infinite. Imperial is those tired old workers from Guanajuato. Imperial is Señora Solario. Imperial is the self-declared coyote who invites me home, then hides behind his fence and dogs, leaving me nothing but the gravel-scented breeze whipping across the railroad tracks, which begin to lead someplace special when the sharp bleak planes of the mountains behind them go slowly blue and fabulous. Imperial is Cortés the conqueror, as represented by a certain factotum, Francisco de Ulloa: Sailing as far as he could up into his master’s eponymous sea, Ulloa very likely reached the mouth of the Colorado River, since we’re told about “the bay at the end.”
The sea there is vermilion in color; the tides rise and fall regularly. Along the coast are many little volcanoes; the hills are barren; it is a poor country.
That poor country is Imperial, the year 1539. And Imperial is a Border Patrolman calling into his radio: We just spotted eight El Sal juveniles and an obese Hondo female a mile east of the one-one-one check . . .—Fruitful and desperate, kingdom of recluses, shy folks and identity criminals, Imperial remains unknown. A Mexican-American inhabitant said to me: Near here, there’s an Indian place full of ghosts and energy, and your hat, something takes it from you. I never been there but I heard about it. I wanna go there. I’m just kinda curious. I wanna see a ghost. People say they’re just kinda clear, transparent . . .—I wished to see ghosts, too. And I wished to ask the Mexican illegals whether they were ridden (as was I whenever I wandered alone in Mexicali at night) by the feeling of being far from home. Now that I’d marked out, however approximately, some of the boundaries and difficulties of this mysterious place, it was time to begin work. Next time I’d traverse Imperial no more, but stand within the cool dark center of somewhere and try to
perceive.
Just as the humming and soughing of a fast long train reverberates more richly when it’s heard from within a windy palm-orchard’s dim, rustling aisles, so the qualities which make Imperial itself might well become more apparent to me should I write about a place in depth—perhaps Mecca, or one of the more sunstruck settlements to the south. Or maybe I ought to write about a given crop: dates, grapefruits, dense fields of corn with pale honey-colored tops, the tall grey fur of an onion field at night, or, if I felt “political” enough, grapes. Regardless, there seemed to be nothing for it but to return year after year, deepening friendships, exploring sandscapes and ruthlessly studying people’s lives, until Imperial became as shockingly bright in my mind as the bands of sunny grass between the aisles of a palm-orchard.

For a more exact (and reasoned) delineation of the entity which I call Imperial, the reader is invited to study the comments on the maps at the end of this book (page 1127).

Chapter 3

THE WATER OF LIFE (2001)

And let him who is thirsty come; let him who desires take the water of life without any price.

—Revelation 22:17

I
n the year 1997, the town of North Shore, shuttered, graffiti’d, ruined resort which, as you might have guessed, lies on the northern edge of the Salton Sea, was not very different from the way it would be in 2000, the beach literally comprised of barnacles, fish bones, fish scales, fish-corpses and bird-corpses whose symphonic accompaniment consisted of an almost unbearable ammoniac stench like rancid urine magnified. Fish carcasses in rows and rows, more sickening stenches, the underfoot-crunch of white cheek-plates like seashells—oh, rows and banks of whiteness, banks of vertebrae; feathers and vertebrae twitching in the water almost within reach of the occasional half-mummified bird, such were the basic elements of that district. Meanwhile, the dock was crowded with
live
birds—longnecked white pelicans, I think. Their coexistence with the dead ones jarred me, but then, so did the broken concrete, the
PRIVATE PROPERTY
sign (vestige of Americanism), the playground slide half-sunk in barnacle-sand. Could it be that everything in this world remains so fundamentally pure that nothing can ever be more than half ruined? This purity is particularly undeniable as expressed in the shimmer on the Salton Sea, which is sometimes dark blue, sometimes infinitely white, and always pitted with desert light.

In 1999 it had been worse—seven and a half million African perch died on a single August day—and in 2001 it happened to be better, on my two visits at least. Oh, death was still there, but matter had been ground down to sub-matter, just as on other beaches coarse sand gets gradually ground fine. The same dead scales, the barnacles licked at by waves of a raw sienna color richly evil in its algal depths, set the tone, let’s say: crunch, crunch. Without great difficulty I spied the black mouth of a dead fish, then after an interval another black mouth, barnacles, a dead bird, and then of all things another black mouth; here lay wilted feathers in heaps of barnacles; here was a rotting fish covered with barnacles, but at least there
were
those intervals between them; the dead birds were fewer; there must not have been any newsworthy die-offs lately.
¹⁹
Scum and bubbles in the water’s brownishness reminded me that it’s not always wise to examine ideality up close. The far shore remained as beautiful as ever. When each shore is a far shore, when Imperial defines itself gradually through its long boxcars, hills, palm orchards, vineyards, and the blue pallor of the Salton Sea beyond, then the pseudo-Mediterranean look
²⁰
of the west side as seen from the east side (rugged blue mountains, birds, a few boats) shimmers into full believability. Come closer, and a metallic taste sometimes alights upon your stinging lips. Stay awhile, and you might win a sore throat, an aching compression of the chest as if from smog, or honest nausea. I was feeling queasy on that April evening in 2001, but over the charnel a cool breeze played, and a Latino family approached the water’s edge, the children running happily, sinking ankle-deep into scales and barnacles, nobody expressing any botheration about the stench or the relics underfoot. For them, perhaps, this was “normal.” I stepped over another dead fish, proof that the Coachella Valley Historical Society’s recent pamphlet was right on the mark: the Salton Sea, it informed me, was
one of the best and liveliest fishing areas on the West Coast. Stories of a polluted Salton Sea are greatly exaggerated . . . The real problem is too much salt . . .
In 1994 the author took a drive around the sea with her husband (she’d avoided it for thirty-five years,
believing the largely negative articles in newspapers and magazines depicting its sorry decline
), and experienced
a wonderful sense of what is right with the world.

PRELUDE TO A RIVER CRUISE

How many Salton Seas on this planet already lay poisoned—if they
were
poisoned—for the long term? The Aral Sea? Love Canal? Lake Baikal? Would their new normality become normative for the rest of us? How badly off was the Salton Sea, really? One book published five years after that Coachella Valley Historical Society pamphlet described the Salton Sea as
a stinking reddish-brown sump rapidly growing too rancid for even the hardiest ocean fish. By 1996 the sea had become a deathtrap for birds . . . They died by the thousands. The coordinator of the [human] birth defect study admitted that her team was stumped by whatever was causing the deformities in the area.
But the authors of that book were not stumped at all. The Salton Sea has three inflows: the Alamo River, in whose bamboo rushes Border Patrol agents play out their pretend-Vietnam cat-and-mouse exercises with illegal immigrants; the rather irrelevant Whitewater River, which flows in from the northwest not far from Valerie Jean’s Date Shakes;
²¹
and our chief subject, the New River, which, we’re told,
claims the distinction of being the filthiest stream in the nation. Picking up the untreated sewage, landfill leachate, and industrial wastes from the Mexican boomtown of Mexicali, the New River swings north to receive the salt, selenium, and pesticides running off the fields of the Imperial Valley . . . It dead-ends in the Salton Sea . . .
There you have it, but according to that confederation of counties and water districts called the Salton Sea Authority, what you have is no more than
Myth #5: “The Sea is a Toxic Dump Created by Agriculture.” The Facts: Pesticides are not found at any significant level in the Sea.
Moreover, selenium levels are only one-fifth of the federal standard, and (if I may quote from the rebuttal to Myth #4),
water carried by the New River from Mexico is not a major contributor to the Sea’s problems.
Reading this, I commenced to wonder, as this leaflet put it,
then what are the Sea’s actual problems? The Facts,
and here come the facts:
Bird disease outbreaks
get freely confessed, and if that phrasing sounds euphemistic, well, who am I to say that the stinking bird corpses at North Shore are any “worse” than, say, the sweet-stenched feedlots, with mottled black and white cattle almost motionless under metal awnings? Those creatures likewise are destined for death. The next sad fact is
fluctuating surface levels,
which I take to be a reference to Bombay Beach’s half-submerged houses getting sunk in salty sand, the considerably submerged Torres-Martinez Indian reservation, the drowned buildings of North Shore and Salton City. Finally come (and we may as well put them all in a row, since they amount to the same thing)
nutrient-rich water, algal blooms and fish kills.
To me, this phenomenon, which ecologists call eutrophication, seems symptomatic of
Myth #5: “The Sea is a Toxic Dump Created by Agriculture.”
What else but fertilizer runoff could produce that “nutrient-rich water”? (Now that I think of it, Mexican sewage in the New River could.) The Salton Sea Authority mentions only a single cause for any of these problems, the one everybody agrees on: salinity—twenty-five percent higher than that of the ocean. Needless to say, salinity cannot explain algal blooms. But, to get right down to it,
we do not know all there is to know about the sea,
and I consider that statement definitive.

I decided to undertake a course of aquatic exploration. Specifically, I thought to ride the New River, which I’d never heard of anybody doing lately. An elderly lady at the Imperial County Historical Society Pioneers’ Museum said that she used to swim in it all the time back in the 1940s. In 1901 a traveller found it studded with beautiful blue lakes, the most impressive of which, the eponymous Blue Lake, was “bordered with mesquit trees, which hang gracefully over its banks,” and “alive with fish of different varieties, sea gulls, ducks and other fowls”; all in all, he found it “very pleasant to the eye.” Five years later Blue Lake would be gone forever. An album in the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali bears a photo dated January 7, 1918: West Side Main Canal Flume Over New River, Mexico. There’s the bridge across the tree-lined raw dirt gorge which the Río Nuevo made during the great floods of 1905-06. Through this wavery slit, destruction flows toward the border mountains; and everything remains open, uncrowded, the new water tower in the distance on its way to putting any and all “mesquit” trees in their places; Imperial is wild, empty and clean.—How navigable the river might now be, how dangerous or disgusting, not a soul could tell. My acquaintances in Imperial County said that yes, it did sound like a stupid thing to do, but probably not that unsafe; the worst that would likely befall me was disease. As for the Border Patrol, they advised against it, calling it “extremely dangerous” and incidentally promising me that should I cross from Southside to Northside by means of the New River, I’d infallibly be arrested.

MEMORY-HOLES

The New River curves and jitters in a backwards S sixty miles long from the Mexican border to an estuary (if I may call it that) of the Salton Sea equidistant from the towns of Calipatria and Westmorland. On a map of Imperial County, the towns and road-crossings of its progress are traced in blue, right down to the last demisemiquaver. We comprehend, or think we do, exactly what, or at least where, the New River is. We know how it got its name, for at the Irrigation Congress of 1900, Mr. L. M. Holt, who was one of the two eponymous heroes of Holtville, explained that some four decades back an engineer under contract to the state of California decided that the reclamation of Imperial’s desert would be quite practical, thanks to
unmistakeable evidences of water having flowed
from the Colorado River
through innumerable channels, and finally concentrating into one of some magnitude, by which the water was conducted far up into the basin, or more properly speaking, far down into the basin. This stream was known as New River because of its comparative recent origin.
So really we do know everything. (In fact, we find the name in Bartlett’s old narrative of 1850-53.) But immediately southward of Calexico’s stubby fan palms, in bank parking lots, pawnshops and Spanish voices, runs a heavy line which demarcates the very end of California and the United States of America, which is to say the beginning of Mexico, and the state of Baja California. Here the New River becomes the Río Nuevo, and if we try to follow it upstream, it vanishes from all but one of the maps I’ve ever seen, each time in a different way.