Where The Sea Used To Be

Yesterday, I went with my sister Linda and her husband Dustin to the Salton Sea to take a few pictures and look around some. It's a bizarre and inspiring place for me -- I've set a couple stories there in the past, including "Rise, John Wayne, and Rebuke Them" from Simplify and a new one called "The Salt" which will be appearing in an anthology soon -- and Linda has always wanted to go and see what there is to see for her own artistic purposes. We only visited a small portion of the Sea -- the small towns of Desert Shores, Salton Beach and Salton City along the south side of the sea running along 86S, but it still chewed up three hours.

Since it's not yet summer, the smell wasn't too awful, but there were a ton of dead fish to be found rotting along the banks, as well as enormous pelicans (or, at least I think they were pelicans) with these beautiful black-striped under wings. I was creeping along what I thought was sand, but which was actually a well-disguised salt bog in order to get a shot of the birds when, well, I learned that sand was a bog, let out a little yelp, and the birds went flying Jurassic Park-like into the wild, thought Dustin got a shot of them midflight. Dustin has already posted a bunch of really excellent photos in his flickr, which you can see here, and I'm sure Linda will upload hers soon, so I'll put up a link to that shortly as well. 

Comments

[Jan Curran]

I have been to that area, and the smell made me feel like I might get suddenly very sick. Glad the smell wasn't too bad. Great photos and I saw Dustin's and Linda's -- all super. What, didn't the four of you take a shot in a bathroom mirror??????