Squeezed, Pressed, and What Was Left

How to hunt for Bombay Beach

“When life gave us lemons, we made this” : see a lemonade stand, decked out with plastic lemons and a tap that doesn’t work. I haven’t seen a kid for miles — the floor is ash, the drying sand in flakes. Everything that is here is scattered. Perhaps a five minute trek apart, there are even what look to be homes – RVs and cars, tents, roughly blocked off by meager walls of hay bales.

Driftwood.

Floating.

Birds.

Bombay Beach is a census-designated place born of the Salton Sea’s golden years. Advertised as a beach in the middle of the desert, many vacationers including celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, the Beach Boys, and Marilyn Monroe, would flock to the many resorts to enjoy the California sun.

The Salton Sea as it is today occupies the Salton Basin, which hundreds of years before human intervention would receive overflow from the Colorado River, creating a temporary lake that would years later dry up. However, in the early 1900s, American companies began redirecting water from the Colorado River for agricultural development. In 1905, a blocked canal had a breach that was not closed until around two years later, flooding the basin and creating what is now the Salton Sea. Over time, the sea developed its own thriving ecosystem, consisting of many bird species and fish. 

But Bombay Beach is no longer a beach for oiled skin in bikinis on beach towels, or fresh sand castles bordered by plastic buckets and spades doomed to fall to later tides. Rather, the stench feels like the only evidence that anything was ever here. I watch as a feathery corpse briefly stirs with the gentle waves of the water.

I can’t even fathom being barefoot. While peaceful, the silence is not comforting. The fish skeletons I had been so excited to see are presumably crushed underfoot. Once again, I’m glad to be wearing shoes. The sand, once solid and bound by water, is now damp and soft in its drying out. As we stand on the sea’s receding hairline, we can’t help but look to the horizon. 

The people abandoned the beach as the fish started dying. In the 1980s, the decades of runoff from the valley’s agricultural areas had pushed the sea’s ecosystem past the point of no return. Polluted with nitrogen and decay, the sea has become toxic and disease-ridden, the surrounding towns left to the ghosts. 

According to history, Bombay Beach is not supposed to be beautiful. In my research, I had been scared to take us to a town haunted by the noxious fumes of a murdered sea, left out to rot where beachgoers once flocked. A forsaken environmental disaster, forgotten fingerprint of civilization’s hubris, forlorn city emptied of its glamor. Too tragic, too terrible, to be anything else.

But any story is just that — a story. Inherently finite, it seeks to capture, to contain. To have a point, a message, a takeaway. 

And at this moment, in the alleged ruins of the post-apocalyptic, the sea is more beautiful than any body of water I’ve ever looked upon — even the ocean. Perhaps this light, the magic of the golden hour’s sky reflecting off its surface. Perhaps this finite enormity, small enough for eyes to see the end and yet too big to touch. Perhaps this ironic lack of evidence of human meddling.

Further out toward the setting sun, more people stand talking next to cars parked roughly together. As we approach, silhouettes of cameras and tripods come into view against the dying sun. If to be beautiful is to be hunted, then we have stumbled upon prime grounds, ripe for pursuit. The hunt is on.

Gingerly stepping out into the water on a gently drowning mini pier, I marvel at how water completely reflects the brilliance of the sky, lit only by the dying ember of sun, extending it. Sparsed with tiny lights sticking up from the water, and a giant fish skeleton sculpture, the view is undeniably gorgeous.

I am suddenly brave; I tell a woman with inked arms and roses that she looks beautiful. She thanks me graciously, plucking a pink rose from her bouquet to proffer to me, arm outstretched.

The golden hour begins to end as chilled shadows sink into our bones, and flower in hand, there is a sense of desperate urgency as I pick my way (avoiding sludge) further along the beach to get a closer look, run my eyes over the nearest art installations. 

A bit of wire bent

against the bluest sky —

humans were invented by the sea.

Aphrodite: go fish, go fish, go —

To swing standing in the water,

above and within, inner child

just out of reach —

A closed green door: THE OPEN HOUSE. 

The light is on — If you open the door —

A porch with the sunset for a door, 

house number 777 is THE PORCH HOUSE. O,

Old fashioned corded phone hangs in the doorway. 

Another mailbox, a plastic cactus, dusty furniture,

door mat. I hold the phone to my ear, no ocean,

–Hello, is anyone home? Is anyone–

It’s dark now, so we head into town. We find the bare bones of a community: one church, one cafe, one bar open for dinner. We walk from one end of town to another – what feels like two or three blocks, finding more divots where art has found a place to stay. The boundaries of art and property are blurred here in a way that tempers curiosity, hesitates eager gaze.

Scrap metal plane cafe. // Fenced with lights.

       In a backyard. // Giant glowing egg two blocks down. //

            The front of a house. // Reflective purple spectacle. // The rocks are foam.

More fence. // More treehouse of disco and geode. // Midnight spectacle.

Lit. // Apothecary. // Box, sealed.

Just by existing, the pieces call upon onlookers to question the reason for existence. Their existence is their only piece — nothing more and nothing less. They exist to exist. To sit, to stare at you silently in the silence, in a way that forces you to do all the talking. They will not explain themselves to you. 

We look around to see if we are the only ones who are having difficulty with carrying our awe, our questions. The houses lining the street sit confidently, each with its own personality, and we struggle to understand how someone could live in this place. With the toxic sea and the empty five minute treks of lumpy drying sand between each new oddity, each silent poet, it is hard to imagine this as someone’s everyday, as someone’s home.

Bombay Beach is not a place easily digested. 

A month after we visit Bombay Beach, I have the opportunity to talk with Meredith Winner, who helps put on the annual Bombay Beach Biennale. Through the course of our interview, the narrative of Bombay Beach since its desertion quickly materializes. 

Bombay Beach is being “discovered”. 

When the people left, the artists came and made the beach a refuge to freely create without the bureaucracy of society. Without the constraints of permits and industry, the art has flourished. The pieces comment on everything, from the existential to the environmental – much of the art calls to the sea’s loss of ecosystem and rapid loss of volume. “It’s not the water that’s toxic, it’s the sediment at the bottom.” As we talk of the newfound nitrogen deposits at the bottom of the sea, we leave the looming what ifs unsaid. Additionally, many of the pieces throughout Bombay Beach are made from repurposed materials – old furniture, signs, scrap metal, old plastic jugs. “It’s harder to just get rid of anything,” Meredith points out. Art gives them new life. 

However, the beautiful statements left around the town and beach have started attracting attention. Meredith remarks at the “small-scale gentrification” at work, and explains that property prices are going up — higher than some artists can afford. 

I also get a peek into the everyday — and surprisingly, it’s rather mundane. The local children go to school in a nearby town, and while some residents are artists, some are also not. Some stay year-round, and some spend just a portion of the year during Biennale season. Meredith admits that the living conditions can at times be far from ideal (new addition of shockingly fantastic cellphone service aside), with fierce winds, pervasive dustiness, and lack of convenient access to many services, but this struggle seems to also foster a beautiful sense of community. Just like the installations, these people have taken the scraps society left and turned Bombay Beach into not just art, but a heart for creative freedom and connection.

I am left with a struggle to reconcile disaster, beauty, and community – the difference between each narrative seems to be who you ask, or where you place THE END. In the 2D, to choose one is to subjugate the others to its gaze. It feels to be an impossible task. Faces, always changing. Bombay Beach is alive — I know because I experienced it. Bombay Beach is alive — I tried to hunt it down. Bombay Beach is alive, so instead I have brought back for you Costco samples of its offerings.

Back in Berkeley, I recently went to a poetry show by Rudy Francisco, where he performed his poem “drowning fish”. In this version of the story, we’re in New York. The fish have died in the very environment they were built to survive in — we had once again made a home unlivable. Maybe the experts warned us, and maybe it didn’t matter. Lessons left unlearned are lessons that must be taught again — nature will repeat itself.

The seas may sink tomorrow

The ocean will remain.

//

Maybe nothing gold can stay. 

//

But I brought my catch home, gently pulling apart wilting petals

//

to press.

Words: Audrey Sioeng

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