Photo by Robert Burroughs

“We don’t want to kill the fish in the sea, but there’s a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar agriculture industry in the Imperial Valley which you can’t just shut down."

Driving north on Highway 111, up the east side of the Imperial Valley, it’s hard to tell if the first glimpse of the Salton Sea is real or just a desert mirage. There is nothing in the empty landscape to give an impression of size or distance — only a silver, shimmering mist against a backdrop of hazy blue mountains.

There is no gas station, which contributes to the popularity of electric golf carts.

Just eighty years ago, before the Salton Sea existed, that landscape looked much the same, except that the shimmering mist truly was a mirage, a vaporous illusion, a ghost of ancient Lake Cahuilla, which once filled the entire basin from mountain range to mountain range before it completely evaporated.

Paul Strickland first started coming to Bombay Beach with five other fishing buddies in the mid-Fifties,

To the human observer, there’s something disturbing about the landscape of the Salton Sink — a gut-level reaction warning us that this is not a place meant for man, or even life. The rocky, alkaline soil is so sterile that none but the most tortured-looking plants can tolerate it.

"You can’t begin to catch all the croaker, sargo, and tilapia. They’re reproducing in the untold billions out there.”

The 120-degree summer sun has baked everything on the surface of the ground until even the rocks look shriveled. In winter, fifty-mile-per-hour winds blast the bleak landscape with waves of sand, and rain falls in torrents that rip trees out of the ground and rearrange whole mountains of gravel. Along the shoreline of the black and ugly sea, there are long windrows, four and five feet high, of dead fish blown onto the shore, and mingled with their already putrid stench is a belch of sulfurous gas bubbling up from underwater hot springs.

Ray Vernimme: “Almost everybody here started out as a weekender.”

From the window of an air-conditioned automobile, the place looks like a catastrophe so grotesque it’s almost nauseating. But then, just when it seems certain that no living thing — human, inhuman, or otherworldly — could ever survive in such an unfortunate place, there on the horizon appears the happy little town of Bombay Beach, squatting in the sun-bleached mud flats beside the sea, with its forest of TV antennas hopefully probing the desert sky for news of some other life on the planet.

The homes along Fourth and Fifth streets were periodically flooded during heavy rains.

The hamlet of Bombay Beach lies between a dying sea to the west and a military bombing range to the east. As they say in the real estate trade, “Location is everything.’’ Some residents of Bombay Beach claim the town owes its exotic name to the once-popular local custom of taking lawn chairs down to the beach at night and watching the navy jets bomb the already rugged Chocolate Mountains into the rubble of some earlier epoch of geological time. “Most beautiful thing you ever saw,’’ one local swore. “More entertaining than TV.”

“Look at that Freddie. He’s just killin’ them croaker. Got a bucketful of croaker."

Bombay Beach consists of ten mud-crusted streets (five running north and south, and five running east and west), perhaps fifty ramshackle homes, a grocery store, a marina, a motel, a fire station, and three bars. That’s roughly one bar for every thirty-three permanent residents of the town. There is no gas station, which, along with the advanced age of many of the town’s residents, contributes to the popularity of electric golf carts in town. “It also makes the trip home from the bar a lot safer, too,” one local citizen advised. “Probably eighty-five percent of the people in this town are alcoholics, or ex-alcoholics, which is one reason they’re here. This is the kind of town where a drunk can do no wrong.”

Almost every house in Bombay Beach seems to have begun as a trailer. Then, through a series of additions and extensions, the trailer acquired a sleeping porch, a storage shed, a second and third trailer, and finally a tarpaper roof covering the entire homestead. It takes time to love Bombay Beach enough to want to live there. The lifestyle of its residents, and the dwellings they have adapted to that lifestyle, demonstrate the slow evolution of their love.

“Almost everybody here started out as a weekender,” said Ray Vernimme, an ex-Orange County resident, now retired from the military, as he sat in the cool luxury of his screened back porch. He’s a baby-faced man in his middle years, rather young for being retired. “They first come out to go fishing at the sea. Then they buy a trailer and haul it back and forth. Next they buy a lot here in town, park the trailer on it, and drive out every weekend. Eventually they can’t stand the rat race and the freeways anymore, so they just move out to stay.” Ray and his wife describe themselves as “three-year permanent residents of Bombay Beach, but twenty-year weekenders.” They live on his pension, eat lots of fish from the sea, and scavenge the agricultural fields of the Imperial Valley for produce left by the farmers to rot. “I can go to the packing house and buy a pickup load of onions for five dollars,” he said. “You know how many onions will fit in the back of a pickup? I give most of them away, and other people in town' give us what they scavenge. That’s one reason it doesn’t cost much to live here. A lot of people in this town live on less than $500 a month.”

This town is proof that there’s no place on God’s earth so ugly that somebody won’t love it,” one slightly inebriated resident swore from the bar stool of the Ski-Inn, a bar and restaurant that also serves as something like the town hall of Bombay Beach. Its name is a misnomer, since nobody has ever skied into the Ski-Inn. Not only is it several hundred feet from the water’s edge, but nobody dares water-ski at Bombay Beach anymore since the Imperial County health department warned the public not to have skin contact with the water because of sewage and chemical pollutants.

Every day at noon a group of World War II-age men gather at the Ski-Inn to watch the afternoon cartoons on TV. “This place might not be paradise to everybody,” one of them said, “and thank God for that. If everybody from the cities decided to move out here, Bombay Beach would be just as screwed up as the rest of the country.”

His partners all nodded and drank to that, then stared at the cartoons in silence. Soon one of the men started in on his standard lament: “I got one son, forty-four years old, and he still ain’t married yet,” he cried. “I don’t know if that sonuvabitch ever will land on his feet.”

Everyone nodded sympathetically, having heard the man tell of his heartbreak many times before.

“You may not believe this,” a somewhat younger man said, “and to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn if you do. But I got an aunt who used to go out with Willie Nelson.”

Everyone nodded that they did indeed believe. The cartoons droned on. And on. A sign above the bar read: “Nothing much happens in this town, but what you hear makes up for it.”

Along the dike was a line of black men, sitting in armchairs and fishing. The air must have been a dry 100 degrees, but most of the men were sheltered from the direct intensity of the sun by wide-brimmed straw hats. An every white mist rose off the sea, making it appear as though the water were about to boil — a hellish scene. One of the men had a ghetto blaster as big as a suitcase, and it was at full volume, blasting jazz tunes into the steaming mist. The men gently rocked in their armchairs as they watched the tips of their fishing poles. “Look at that Freddie,” one of the men said with mock jealousy. “He’s just killin’ them croaker. Got a bucketful of croaker. Makes you think he knows something we don’t know.”

“You wanna know my secret?” Freddie replied. “You’re all buying mud-suckers and all that fancy store bait. All I got is canned corn. Shit, croaker love canned corn.”

A little white boy watched Freddie take another Fish from his line and drop it in his bucket. “Them croaker good to eat?” the boy asked.

Freddie frowned as he carefully weighed that question. After he’d finished baiting his hook, he replied, “Taste good to me. You might not like ’em ”

As the boy walked away, his older sister teased him, “Why can’t you catch fish like that?”

“Maybe I ain’t black enough.” “Watch your manners!” she said and kicked him in the leg.

Among the many weekend fishermen who flock to Bombay Beach in trailers and RVs, blacks seem to be in the majority. There are also several blacks who live in town, and, as small rural towns go, the residents of Bombay Beach have worked out a polite, if strained, relationship. “You wanna know why the blacks are such good fishermen?” one local woman asked. “It’s because they’re more patient than the rest of us. Notice I said ‘patient,’ not lazy. They’ll sit out there with a pole in their hand all day and night just to catch a fish.”

And, of course, a black man’s money is as green as anybody else's. “The blacks spend lots of money in this town,” another man said. “They might drive out here in a big RV, but somehow they never remember to bring the corn meal and cooking oil to cook their fish. I seen ’em just packed into that little ol’ grocery store, cleaning out everything on the shelves.”

One major advantage of the trailer-based lifestyle in Bombay Beach is that it can be loaded up and wheeled away in a hurry if necessary. Not that anybody wants to leave town, it’s just that, because of a whole series of mishaps and catastrophes, the future of Bombay Beach has always been uncertain, and now it appears that Bombay Beach is once again on its way to becoming a ghost town.

It’s hard to talk about Bombay Beach without talking in terms of catastrophes. In a way, the town owes its very existence to a catastrophe — California’s first eco-disaster, the creation of the Salton Sea. The sea was a result of an engineering error when developers of the Imperial Valley, in 1905, tried to divert water from the Colorado River into their irrigation system. The river flooded into the poorly planned diversion, and for a year and a half it flowed uncontrolled into the Salton Sink, before 3000 boxcars full of rock, gravel, and clay finally plugged the breach.

But the Salton Sink suffered from an identity conflict centuries before man’s meddling with the course of the Colorado River. It once existed as part of the Sea of Cortez, and twice as ancient Lake Cahuilla. Maybe it is only natural that a region some 250 feet lower than sea level would suffer from cyclic flooding, and perhaps it is doomed to a series of catastrophes, both natural and man-caused, until some final cataclysm resolves its identity conflict once and for all.

In the real estate boom of the 1920s, optimistic developers surveyed the roads and lots for the future hamlet of Bombay Beach. In the meantime, the Salton Sea, which was receiving irrigation water from the Imperial Valley, plus run-off from the natural rainfall, rose steadily for several years, and half the surveyed town was underwater before a single house was built. That incident might have foretold something of the precarious future Bombay Beach would have. Still, in the late Fifties, during another real estate boom, when the recreational fishing at the sea had developed to a degree no one thought possible, lots in Bombay Beach began selling at a substantial $300 apiece, mostly to weekend fishermen, and the town began to grow in its own haphazard way.

The water level of the Salton Sea has always been uncertain and, to some extent, uncontrollable. The Imperial and Coachella Irrigation districts, through their regulation of surplus irrigation water that flows into the sea, have more control than anyone else over the water level. But there is also water coming into the sea from Mexico by way of the Alamo and New rivers, the latter of/ which Imperial County residents have cynically titled “Americas dirtiest river” because of its untreated sewage, industrial chemicals and heavy metals, plus agricultural pollutants like DDT (which is still legal in Mexico).

There is also the natural run-off from rainfall entering the sea, and in wet years that can have a drastic effect on the water level. In 1976 and 1977, two hurricanes within nine months of each other caused the Salton Sea to rise several feet, flooding a large portion of Bombay Beach. That part of the town, sometimes called the “sunken city,” is still four or five feet underwater, and the rotting, corroding wreckage of that disaster is a daily reminder to the residents of Bombay Beach of their vulnerability to nature's whims. Along what used to be Sixth and Seventh streets, the hulking wreckage of aluminum trailers and wooden shacks slowly sinks into the muddy brine, while sea birds scavenge through the watery rooms. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers later built an eight-foot-high dike around the western edge of the town to protect it from the rising waters of the sea, and a large sump pump was installed to protect the homes along Fourth and Fifth streets, which were periodically flooded during heavy rains. But a rise in water is no longer the greatest peril facing the town of Bombay Beach. Exactly the opposite — a drop in the water level of the Salton Sea — threatens to be the final blow to this peculiar little town.

In 1985 John and Steve Elmore, two brothers from Brawley who own farmland on the southwest side of the Salton Sea, sued the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) over the rising level of the sea, which had caused flooding on their lands. In May of 1985, the suit was decided in court. Besides a payment of $900,000 by the IID to the Elmores for the maintenance of dikes to protect their properties, the settlement included an agreement by the IID to decrease water levels in the sea by one foot per year, up to ten feet, or pay an additional amount to the Elmores.

A ten-foot drop in the water level for an area periodically plagued by floods might have seemed like good news. But it wasn’t. The California Department of Fish and Game predicted that a ten-foot drop in the water level of the sea would increase the salinity of the water to a level that would very likely prevent fish eggs from hatching and, of course, eventually destroy the sport fishing business, which is the lifeblood of towns like Bombay Beach along the shore of the sea. The Imperial Irrigation District has agreed to consider the option of paying additional fines to the Elmores (and possibly other ranchers who might file suit) rather than allowing the water level of the sea to drop. But the IID is in an impossible situation, forced to make a decision on the water level of the sea that is sure to infuriate somebody. And it’s important to remember that the IID’s basic sympathies in Imperial County lie with agriculture, not sport fishing. “We don’t want to kill the fish in the sea,” Ron Hull of the IID said recently. “That is not our goal. But we have to get down to the bottom line, which is, there’s a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar agriculture industry in the Imperial Valley which you can’t just shut down because the sea is going to perish. Plus, there are 20 million people living on the coast of Southern California who are going to be needing water in the near future, water which could be conserved in Imperial County.”

Paul Strickland, a seventy-three-year-old retired army artilleryman from Chula Vista, parked his golf cart in the muddy ruts outside the Waterfront Tavern. Redfaced from years in the sun and sporting a wide-brimmed straw hat, the somewhat impatient man stomped into the bar to have a few beers with his friends from the local Bombay Beach Hunting and Fishing Club, of which he is president. Because of this title, and because he is by nature a tough and cantankerous old coot, Strickland has become a kind of spokesman for the citizens of Bombay Beach on matters relating to the sea. Strickland first started coming to Bombay Beach with five other fishing buddies in the mid-Fifties, when the sea’s reputation for outstanding fishing first started to grow. Of his original group of fishing buddies, he is the only one still alive. “That’s part of the trouble with trying to save the Salton Sea,” he growled from his bar stool. “A lot of us who have been fighting to save the sea for years are getting old now. A lot of our members are dead and gone.”

Ray Vernimme, sitting on a stool beside Strickland, nodded sadly in agreement. “The worst thing about living in Bombay Beach is watching so many of your friends die.”

The view through the window of the Waterfront Tavern is typical of Bombay Beach — twisted junk rotting in heaps of salt-encrusted mud below a flawlessly clear blue sky. Sea birds with startled-looking eyes squawked greedily over scraps of fish guts floating in the scummy water, while drunken fishermen tottered along the top of the narrow dike. For Strickland, it was a scene of heaven on earth. But aside from the pastoral beauty of the place, Strickland’s love for Bombay Beach comes down to one thing: “Fishing. I love to fish. I’ve never had such a good fishing hole in my life as the Salton Sea, and that includes some pretty good fishing in the Pacific. This is by far the best fishing in California, and maybe the whole country,” he said, pointing out the window with a tilted beer glass at the squalid mess of sea and wreckage spreading to the horizon. “There is no other body of water anywhere producing the volume of fish coming out of this pond. You can’t begin to catch all the croaker, sargo, and tilapia. They’re reproducing in the untold billions out there.”

What Strickland says about the sea being the best fishing in California is true. According to a study done by the department of fish and game in 1982, the catch of one-and-one-half fish per angler hour in the Salton Sea was much higher than any other non-stocked fishery in the state, marine or freshwater. Ironically, the biggest reason the Salton Sea is so fertile is that it is an agricultural sump. The nutrients from the agricultural run-off feed algae, which feed zooplankton, which in turn feed the fish.

People like Strickland who are fighting to save sport fishing on the Salton Sea have always felt like underdogs compared to the huge corporate and government institutions fighting for a piece of the sea. “We’ve fought against big oil companies who wanted to drill for natural gas under the sea. We’ve fought against people who wanted to drill geothermal wells in the sea — if just one of those wells got loose, it would be a catastrophe that would ruin the sea in a matter of days. The corrosive brine, the arsenic, and lead would kill everything,’’ Strickland says. “We’ve fought against the sewage coming in from Mexico. We’ve fought against the agricultural pollution from irrigation drainage — the Army Corps of Engineers told us once this sea was just an agricultural sump, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. And we’ve fought against the tons and tons of salt coming in from the Colorado River system. We went to meetings all over the goddamn place and objected to everything. We were pretty small fish up against the big oil companies and agribusiness, but at least we let them know we were in the background trying to prevent anything foolish from happening to the sea. And in a way, we were successful. The oil companies never drilled a well. But now, with this water-level problem, we’re right back in the same goddamn situation.”

To further complicate an already impossibly complex problem, the Imperial Irrigation District has reached an agreement with the Metropolitan Water District, which delivers water to all of coastal Southern California, to develop conservation measures in the IID’s 1600 miles of canals. These conservation measures would then make some 358,000 acre-feet of water available to the urban areas of Southern California — water that might have otherwise ended up in the Salton Sea. It is just one more reason the water level in the sea is almost certain to begin dropping sometime in the near future.

“If the Imperial Irrigation District drops the level of the sea ten feet, like they say they’re gonna do, the salinity in the sea will go up so high it’ll kill all the fish,’’ Strickland warned. “But that isn’t the only bad thing that’ll come from it. We have a wind out here called the Borrego Wind. When fishermen out on the lake see a black line on the water, they know that’s a Borrego coming, and they head for the shore as fast as they can. That Borrego wind comes across the lake in a blast that can pick up one of these little aluminum trailers and rattle it like a tin can. If the sea level drops ten feet, there will be acres and acres of bare ground covered with salt, and the Borrego winds are gonna blow that salt across everybody and everything downwind from the lake. By dropping the water level, the irrigation district may save a few farmers’ farmland, but they’ll also ruin property around the sea for everybody else.”

From the seat next to him, Ray Vernimme adds, “Everything my wife and I have saved for all our lives would be worthless.”

Strickland has seen Bombay Beach survive other problems over the years, and he wants very badly to believe it can survive this latest one. He even pretends the town is growing, rather than shrinking. “A good lot in town would cost you $3000 dollars!” he boasts. The trouble is, with Bombay Beach’s uncertain future, there aren’t any lots in town any reasonable investor would consider good, and Strickland admits that “sooner or later somebody in town gets into a financial bind, and you can usually pick up a lot for around $300 dollars.” Bombay Beach may not be dead just yet, but it’s definitely on the critical list. It always has been.

Several solutions to the salinity problem have teen proposed. One of the plans involves putting in a pipeline to run Salton Sea water to the Sea of Cortez, then pumping less-salty ocean water back to the Salton Sea. The pumping costs would be enormous. A more practical plan involves diking off a shallow, fifty-square-mile pond within the sea; evaporation within this pond would occur at a more rapid rate than the rest of the sea (the evaporation rate on the entire sea is six feet per year); the salts within this pond would be removed, either for commercial processing or by piping them to a dry lake bed east of the Chocolate Mountains; less-salty Salton Sea water would constantly be replacing the water evaporated within the pond. Nobody knows what the price tag on this system would be today, but it certainly would be in excess of $100 million. “Let’s face it,” Ray Vernimme said. “Anything they might do is going to be expensive.”

Senator Alan Cranston has called for a study of possible solutions to the sea’s salinity. “He’s lookin’ for a few votes down here,” Paul Strickland guessed. And Governor Deukmejian has called for a task force to meet for the first time in mid-April to begin discussing possible solutions. The dilemma of the Salton Sea is an issue everyone is going to be hearing a lot more about in the next few years. But the unavoidable question that has to be raised sooner or later is, why should public funds be used to save sport fishing on the Salton Sea? Doesn’t that amount to subsidizing somebody’s pastime?

Some fishermen are arguing to save the sea for ecological reasons. But that argument can’t be defended very easily, since the very creation of the sea was an eco-disaster to start with. “That’s true, the creation of the sea was an accident,’’ Strickland conceded. “But this sea existed three other times in prehistory.” And it was destroyed three other times in prehistory, too. Maybe this is simply the fourth time.

Except for the desert pupfish, which is the only fish from ancient Lake Cahuilla to survive into modern times, none of the other fish in the sea can be considered native to the area, and they hardly need government support to survive elsewhere. The tilapia, for example, was introduced accidentally to the sea by the irrigation district, which used them to control weeds in its canals. The tilapia is rapidly becoming the dominant fish in the sea, but even Strickland admits it is so foul tasting, from living in the sulphurous muck of the Salton Sea, that most fishermen won’t even eat it. The tilapia’s reputation for survival is such that, as one fisherman speculated, “If the Salton Sea dried up tomorrow, the tilapia would probably grow legs and walk to the ocean.” So it is difficult to make an ecological argument for saving a nonnative, inedible fish that can survive virtually anywhere.

One ecological argument for saving the sea will draw serious attention, though. The Salton Sea has become a wildlife habitat for 350 species of birds. The sea has helped to replace bird habitat that has been lost elsewhere in California to agriculture, housing, and industrial development. Many ducks, geese, and shore birds use the sea as a stopover when migrating along the Pacific fly way. If the fish in the Salton Sea die, the birds will have to find someplace else to go — but there may not be anyplace else available.

The residents of Bombay Beach find themselves in the same situation as the birds. “If we don’t solve the salinity problem in the sea, Bombay Beach won’t survive,” Paul Strickland groaned. “Then I’ll be moving on. I gotta be able to get a fishing line wet once in a while. I’ll have to find someplace else, but where am I ever gonna find another place like this?” Ray Vernimme added, “There’s no other place like it.”

At seven o’clock at night, a full moon was rising over the Chocolate Mountains. A warm, soft wind blew down from the mountains. White, luminescent sea birds quietly flew across the sea. In the parking lot of the marina, a group of black men was cleaning and filleting buckets of sargo in an outdoor sink. They worked silently, by feel, concentrating on the delicate skill required to slide a knife blade along the backbone of the fish and peel away a clean piece of meat. A one-pound fish yielded maybe one ounce of meat, plus an ounce of fish eggs, which some fishermen claim are as good to eat as caviar. After a long silence, one of the men looked up, pointed at the moon with his knife blade, and said, in almost a whisper, “That’s the moon these sargo been waitin’ for. Come in on a full moon and lay their eggs close to shore. I been wanting three years to see the sargo come in like this. Now here they are. They finally came.”

Another man nodded, then said, just as quietly, “I wonder if they’ll be coming back again?”