Free Imperial by William T. Vollmann Page B

by the Salton Sea would mean more to me if I knew the extent to which her grandchildren mourned at her funeral and whether she ever once swam there, whether in her time it stank half as much as it does in mine with half-mummified birds and fishes crunching underfoot, which latter point would interest me extremely because some folks have told me that the Salton Sea is poisonous while others insist that there’s nothing wrong except an extra pinch of salt perhaps. And what should we do about the Salton Sea, which is to say what should we think, and on what basis, not to mention how should we live? Without a past, no matter how controvertible, the present cannot be anything other than a tumble through darkness towards the darkness which neither past nor present can illuminate. Because I’d rather fall through patches of illuminated air, no documentary caption can possibly contain overmany facts to please me. Let the reader beware. At least the following attempts at delineation may entertain you by proving how badly I draw squares.

THE OFFICIAL LINE
    Starting, then, at the county’s southwest corner, where map-marks for Smugglers’ Cave and Elliot Mine squat below the authoritative red downsnake of Interstate 8, we find the straight line of the Mexican border sloping slightly northeastward, prying apart those kissing cousins, Mexicali and Calexico, and from their severed embrace, memorialized by a sign which advises that WE PAY CASH FOR SCRAP METAL, the line continues to shoot alongside rusty segments of American wall, with Mexico dim on our right, the music from the stripshows fading now, shrill and distorted. A century earlier, it had been like this: A step over the ditch, and I was in Mexican territory. The contrast was noticeable. North of this imaginary line were modern structures, stores, shops and the commodious offices of the Imperial Water company, with vegetation on all sides, while on the south of it the eye rested upon a few Indian brush teepees scattered among the mesquite bushes that spread over a vast desert beyond. And before that, of course, all this had been Mexico. The line hugs a dark road, then seals off a forest of lights along the edge of a richly sexually smelling kingdom of hay, reenters the desert and inscribes itself all the way to the Colorado River just north of Algodones. Here where California gives way to Arizona, the Colorado has bitten a ragged arc from Imperial County’s southeast corner. It was within three miles of this spot that in 1904 a gambler’s cut, made by American engineers without undue regard for Mexican sovereignty, gave the thirsty settlers of the Imperial Valley all the water they’d demanded, and more—and more, until flood-waves opened their fingers all the way from the Imperial Canal up to the New River, and an entire painfully shimmering whiteness of saline flats which had just begun to turn a profit for the New Liverpool Salt Company and then also for the Standard Salt Company was drowned by the county’s new centerpiece, that Salton Sea. Well, well, what could be more imperial than the purplish darkness of winter over water, the broken line of lights of some town along its far side (did I mention that either side is the far side?), some lonely town, decrepit town, ghost town whose beach adorns itself with salt-baked strata of carcasses? To close their breach, the saviors of what would soon be Imperial County had to throw in not only railroad cars full of gravel, rocks, boulders and clay, but the very railroad cars themselves. In 1907 that forfeit was paid and accepted. The farming could go on (hay brought in a decent ten dollars per ton in those days, and California’s yields per acre exceeded the national average although Arizona’s were twice as good), the sea subsided a trifle, and we pretended that our accident had been nature’s. Appropriately enough, from this corner northward the county line is the Colorado River itself, which as it separates from Mexico