In a short time from now, the sun will rise, and the sky will burn red. I am two-hundred and twenty-eight feet below sea-level, paddling by headlight from an abandoned harbor on the Salton Sea. Although I understand that the color of the sea is green, I cannot yet see it.

Certainly I can feel the weight of the salt-inundated water on my paddle. This sea, the largest inland body of water in California, and certainly one of the largest inland seas in the Americas, did not exist a century ago. It was 1905, and farmers had been irrigating crops in California's Imperial Valley by circumventing canals out of the Colorado River. But floodgates clogged, irrigation routes broke, and in two years, the salton sink had become a sea, albeit an accidental one.

Landowners were angry and confused. Apparently, the snakes were also unhappy about losing their land, and their retreat to higher ground caused land to be filled with 'hundreds of 'em.' The smell is rancid; not that clean smell of fresh cut-fish in a harbor, but a wafting smell of decay, windless plumes of fish-stink rising from the sea.

When I land on the beach, the boat makes a harsh scraping. This beach is made from the spines of dead tilapia; some fish-heads still have flesh. Others, near the shore, are still alive, but barely. By now, the thin line of white pre-dawn allows me to see my way up off the shore. Some time ago, my landlord spotted me walking out the door. He looked both ways and whispered,

"Hey, I got something to show you." He walked me into the back room of his apartment.

"They're six feet tall," I said. "Yup." "But you just planted them three weeks ago?"

"Yup."

"So what exactly are you going to do with six foot hemp plants?" "Give them to my family. You know I don't smoke marijuana anymore."

Of course I knew that. Landlord was raised the son of a mining expeditioneer, who taught him how to scout in the mountains of Canada. By age twenty, Landlord was leading gold expeditions in West Africa, a prospect that would allow him to retire at age twenty-three, and merited two cases of malaria.

Maps and Journals Salton Sea Map

Desert Southwest Anza Borrego The Barren Desert The Channel Islands Windblown zoology off the coast of Los Angeles Colorado Plateau, Navajo Country Mesa to Canyon along the Plateau Death Valley The Saltwater Fish of Death Valley Mojave National Preserve Wandering the Eastern Mojave High Desert Stories from California's High Desert Areas Los Angeles Gray River in the Sun Los Angeles Map Imperial Valley Death and Salvation on the New River Panamint Valley Panamint Valley Roach Motel White Sands and Southern New Mexico Atomic Agriculture on the Rio Grande The Salton Sea Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea Slab City and the New River Death and Salvation on the New River Trona, California Trona and the Unusual Lake Searles Western Mojave Four Seasons of the Mojave

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