In low places consequences collect, and in all North America you
cannot get much lower than the Imperial Valley of southern
California, where one town, 186 feet below sea level, calls itself
the Lowest Down City in the Western Hemisphere, and where the
waters of the Colorado River sustain a billion-dollar agricultural
industry. The consequences of that industry drain from the valley
into the accidentally man-made Salton Sea, Californias largest lake
and a vital stopping place for migratory waterfowl. Today the
Salton Sea is in desperate environmental trouble.
A second river also ends in the Salton Sea. It is a river of
dreams, the remains of which may be seen in the failed real estate
developments that sprawl beside the sea. As the ending point of
both the real Colorado and this river of dreams, the Salton Sea has
become emblematic of much of the history of the American West. Its
troubling story is masterfully told here in William deBuyss
narrative and Joan Myerss austerely beautiful photographs.
The story of Southern California is fundamentally a story about
the control of nature. Beginning with the Yuman-speaking tribes
encountered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, deBuys traces
the subsequent exploration and development of the region through
the Gold Rush of 1849, the government-sponsored surveys that
followed, and the inept tinkering with the river by an assortment
of irrigation and development interests that resulted in the floods
that formed the Salton Sea nearly a century ago. He introduces us
to a gallery of rogues and dreamers who saw a great future for this
arid wilderness but could never refrain from interference with the
forces of nature.
The floods thatproduced the Salton Sea created a vast desert
oasis, but the agricultural exploitation of the region, combined
with evaporation, poisoned that paradise. The stark beauty of the
desert, the engineering feats that have transformed the landscape,
and the eerie spectacle of Salton City and its ruined beaches and
abandoned yacht club are the subject of Myerss photographs, made
over a period of more than ten years. In the last section of "Salt
Dreams," deBuys acquaints us with the human and avian denizens of
the region, all struggling for survival as the twentieth century
draws to a close. The history of chicanery and greed recounted in
deBuyss narrative and his empathy with the desert dwellers he and
Myers have come to knowhardworking laborers and entrepreneurs who
live on both sides of the Mexicali border, eccentrics hiding out in
the Salton Desert, pelicans dying of avian botulismare crucial to
an understanding of the border issues of today and the impassioned
environmental debate on whetherand howto save the Salton Sea.
http: //www.joanmyers.com/Saltbk.htm
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