On the Back Roads (3 page)

“Some are still there, some aren't…I guess, really, most of them aren't.” All went uncomfortably silent. I could even hear Billingsly's chain jingle as he walked.

Then Jerry said, “What you are asking—or what you are saying, really—is that we ran our local merchants out of business. That our loyalty was to the almighty dollar and not to our neighbors. Let's put it this way—and I am defending my folks here—their loyalty was first to their family. There were just so many dollars to go around. They went where they could get the most for them. OK?”

It was too dark to see Jerry's face. Perhaps it was just as well. I was enjoying my second martini and a relaxing walk. I did not want this conversation to get too agitated or thought provoking.

“Guess it's basic economics, the free-enterprise system at work,” I replied, maybe the most innocuous thing I have ever said.

“Exactly!” Jerry almost shouted. “The town is still there. Main Street didn't die. There is a generation growing up there
now—actually, my generation—renovating whole sections of it. Fact is, I'm really anxious to get back there to see it.”

June spoke up. “Well, I grew up in the town that has the Wal-Mart and the fast-food places, too. They all came at once. Then came the people from California with tons of money to buy up ranches and drive up the price of everything. The merchants loved it, especially the real-estate folks.

“Frankly, the new people didn't make good neighbors. They stuck to themselves. They were almost invisible, a cultural black hole that added nothing. And they brought big-city ideas and got mad because we didn't want to change to accommodate them. Why leave a place for a new place, then try to make the new one like the old one? I never could figure that one out.”

“Would you go back?”

“To visit? Sure. My folks are still there. But I don't know what we would do there,” June admitted. With a grunt, she poked Jerry in the ribs. “They wouldn't know Starbucks from instant, right?”

We were close to my motor home. I made a graceful exit. Jerry and June had hit the right buttons. Their timing could not have been better. They had convinced me. More then ever, I want to be there. I want to see for myself what is happening to the small towns of the West. All of them, with or without a Wal-Mart.

Charles Kuralt once described those communities: “where Third Street's the edge of town. Where you don't use turn signals, because everybody knows where you are going to turn. And if you write a check on the wrong bank, it covers you for it anyway.” Those places where the highway enters town and becomes Main Street because it was there first. That's where I'm headed.

Out in the desert, where the lights of our campground faded into darkness, other life began to stir and remake itself.

T
he gods were pushing me toward Salton City. Were I driving a car, it wouldn't happen. But my big motor home has the aerodynamics of an orange crate. A strong wind usually works against me. Head-on it's bad, broadside it's worse. But today, “it was a following sea,” as I used to hear in the Navy. The wind, combined with a slope in the road, was keeping me at a consistent thirty-five miles per hour, with the engine idling in neutral. At six miles to the gallon, it was a gift from the gods.

As if spooked by the image of sinking beneath the ocean, the gods left me the instant I descended below sea level. The free ride was over. The zero-elevation line runs almost due north and south just west of Salton City, near the golf course and Oh-My-God Springs.

The Salton City golf course can be seen from the road, but not easily. It blends into the desert, since that is what it is. It has no grass. What identify it as a golf course, really, are the flags marking the nine holes on the brown greens.

Oh-My-God Springs is even less conspicuous than the golf course, but then it's a mile off the road. It's probably named for the first utterance of some bird-watcher who stumbled
onto this seedy nudist hangout while looking for a great roadrunner. “Oh
my god! Will you look at that!”
was the full sentence, I'll bet.

Other than running around naked and lolling in a hole of hot-spring water that is condemned by the county health department, what else this crowd does depends upon whom you talk to. In Borrego Springs, I heard five different stories from three people. Actually, I don't think it's any den of ini quity, just a ghetto-resort without a landlord.

I made a turn that looked like the right one. It was one of those roads that, in the desert, is a road because it has been driven on more than once. It immediately dipped into a deep wash. Coming up the other side, there it was: a thermal oasis and a ragtag collection of old trailers, converted school buses, and random junk. Cars and pickups were missing hoods, bumpers, and occasionally a wheel. Seats had been pulled from some, maybe for a person to sleep on. Nothing appeared durable or permanent.

They looked to be an antisocial bunch. At least they had set up housekeeping a good distance from one another. I saw no activity. Nobody worked or wandered. They just sat in front of their crude quarters with no clothes on. It was hot, though. These people were in no way related to the organized nudists who spend family weekends at health spas and earn a living fully clothed the rest of the week. This scruffy bunch was a long way from earning anything.

This was a sight indeed, a site of insignificance. No stone pyramid with a historic marker at this spot. Just a weathered sign warning of a health hazard.

Tragically, I suspect the road ends here for some. I mean the big one, not the mere tracks in the sand on which I drove in, and fortunately, would drive out again. My good fortune was not just that I could leave but that I had a place to go.

I parked and walked to the thermal spring. It was surrounded with tall vegetation. Propped up on one side was a plywood windbreak. The hot water bubbling from the ground was diverted into a hole that someone had dug. Around the top, the hole was lined with flat rocks.

Gathered were a half dozen well-sunned people, some in the muddy hole, some sitting on the side. Everybody had long hair. Empty Old Milwaukee cans floated in the brown water. No clothes in sight. Not even towels.

An ample woman, half in the hole—I would guess her age somewhere between thirty-five and sixty years—was tracking me with sunken eyes even before I got there. No one else, though, seemed to care about the arrival of a newcomer. She asked me, “Do you know how to fix a
tellyvision?”

“No, don't even watch it much,” I replied,

“Well, I ain't watched a bit since Friday. Quit dead in the middle of
The Flukes of Hazzard.”

One of the guys said quietly, “It's
Dukes,
Dummy.”

“Well, it quit in the middle, and I'm after someone to fix it.”

A head of hair moved from the side to the center of the hole. It was a husky fellow in his late thirties. His arms and hands were half the normal size. Waist-deep in the hole, he moved to the edge, bent over, and picked up a pack of cigarettes with both of his tiny, deformed hands. Tapping the pack on a rock just once, a cigarette popped out. He put it between his lips without touching it with his wet fingers. Using a butane lighter, he lit the cigarette in a single, fluid motion. He had this procedure down to an art form.

A man with his back to me turned his head my way. “Did ya bring the beer?”

“Forgot it,” I said, assuming an honest answer wouldn't work.

“The guys in helicopters never showed, neither. We is gettin' really low.”

Dummy said, “There ain't no helicopters. You thought that up, just like always.”

“They was here…when was it? They brought us that whatever it was. We played that good shit-kickin' music you like. Remember? Where the hell was you?”

Dummy didn't answer. She was sinking in the hole.

“They promised they'd come back and bring some more.” Pointing at me, he said, “I thought he was one of ‘em.”

He rose on one elbow to face me, surfacing multiple tattoos, “You sure you're not one of ‘em?”

“Sorry!”

He studied me for the longest time, then sett led back in the hole.

I drove to Salton City, depressed by what I had just seen. For centuries, people have gone to the desert to lose themiselves. The desert makes it easy. It happens almost as a matter of course.

Unable or unwilling to play the cards dealt them, lost souls drift from one shuffle to another in a desperate search for better ones. For many, the hunt invariably ends here in the desert, where the days are warm and life is undisciplined, unpoliced, and simple. In the vastness of the desert, a man can walk away from life yet still never take that last step.

“There is always hope,” you might say. But only if you look for it. The ghettos, the mud holes, the pits of the desert are filled with those who have quit looking.

T
he windows at Johnson's Landing all face the Salton Sea. So does the bar. I took a stool between a lady and a couple of older guys. I was offered a Salton martini: a glass of beer with an olive. Too early. My breakfast had not yet setttled. Besides, the fresh coffee smelled pretty good when I came through the door.

Beginning at 6:00 a.m., Dorianne Fries sees anything that happens around the lagoon in front, though not much ever does. She has been the morning waitress here for a decade.

One morning a while back, a pair of stretch limousines rolled up to the boat ramp at the lagoon. They got her attention. Dorianne was well into this story when I sat down, but she was nice enough to start over again for my benefit. No one here seemed to mind.

According to Dorianne, silt in the channel had made the boat ramp useless years ago, but that was of no interest to the modish bird-watchers who stepped from the limos. They opened the trunks and pulled out long-lens cameras. Without a word, they spread along the salt-encrusted jetties surrounding the lagoon. Hundreds of birds, their twiggy legs knee-deep in the briny water, were busy scooping up bugs. Their brief
excursion over, heads shaking in apparent dis appointment, the bird-watchers returned to their limos and drove off.

“They saw not one blue-footed booby,” Dorianne recalled. “That's it right there, supposedly.” Leaning across the bar, Dorianne pointed to a dog-eared page in a bird book, which had pushed my coffee cup aside. Edie Dean, sitting on the stool next to me, had retrieved it from somewhere. It said that the blue-footed booby “is shaped somewhat like a fat cigar with a pointed-at-both-ends look.” Although the bird is found mostly in western Mexico, the book reported sightings in south eastern California, including here at the Salton Sea.

“How do you know that's the one they were looking for?” I asked.

“Because that's what those people all come here to see,” said Dorianne.

“Have you seen one?”

“Could ‘ave! I don't know.” Dorianne shrugged and flipped pages of the book. Reading upside down, she had driven a spoon into the drawing of a large white bird. Its neck was looped like a sink drain. “It says
heron,
right? OK, two birds over, the exact same bird is called a
common egret.
Now, I ask you, which is which?”

A man seated a couple of stools over interrupted in a raspy voice. “Who cares what they call ‘em. Just look at ‘em all. Must be three generations of those big buggers crapping on the dock right now.”

Dorianne rapped the page with the spoon. If it had been a knife, the page would already be shreds. “But how do I know what I'm looking at, which bird it is, when the book doesn't even know?” Frustrated beyond reason, Dorianne moved down the bar with the coffeepot.

Something grievously wrong had been festering here for a long while. The bird book had nothing to do with it. And it wasn't the layers of bird dung messing up the dock, either. Nobody has used it in years.

What distressed Dorianne and the other locals who sat with me that morning was more ominous, more tragic. It wasn't the birds so much as what they represented: the tag end of
better times, perhaps the last gasp of life for their beautiful desert sea.

Then, like tears, their story started to flow.

“You should have been here back when people came to fish. On weekends, this parking lot was so full of boat trailers we couldn't even get in here,” Dorianne remembers. “And the Saturday night fish fries lasted into Sunday.”

Edie goes up again. This time she brought me pictures of men holding up big fish. “These are from the corvina derby we used to have every year.”

Others at the bar told of hair-raising rescues on the sea when a sudden wind riled up its shallow waters. Looking out at the lagoon, they swapped sea stories until the birds had done what they do here every morning and had moved on.

Once billed as California's largest recieational lake, the Salton Sea is
big.
It is thirty-five miles long and nine to fifteen miles wide.
Recreational
is now debatable, at best. Technically,
lake
never was right because it has no outlet. Geologists instead qualify it as a
sink.

At 232 feet below sea level, the Salton Sea is the collector of irrigation runoff from the sprawling farms of the Imperial Valley. It's also the dump for the disgustingly poliuted New and Alamo Rivers, which originate in Mexico. Water leaves only by evaporation. The foul pollutants go nowhere. They collect.

The 110-mile shoreline of the Salton Sea once had long, sandy beaches spotted with South-Seas cabanas and beach houses. Weekend crowds of swimmers and water-skiers flocked to the water, which registers summertime temperatures of ninety degrees. Marinas filled with shiny new boats as quickly as slips could be built for them. Bathing-suit manufacturers staged national beauty contests here. Boat races and regattas drew excited and colorful crowds from as far as Las Vegas and Phoenix. Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, and other Hollywood stars dined at the beautiful Salton Bay Yacht Club. Its floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the blue sea, the desert, and the Chocolate Mountains.