Before
I lived in a trailer park myself, the only resident I knew was a policeman,
a gunsmith, and a gentleman. In the cities, it's become hip to rip on
trailer parks. But these are the same people with million dollar track-homes,
golf courses and McDonald's wrappers on the back-seat floor of their sedan.
The difference between trailer trash and blue-suit trash is not of degree,
but of self-perception. Nevertheless, I couldn't help to think that this
place was better off the way it is now. There is something frightful in
temporariness; in plastic materials, bright aluminum and man sculpting
nature to rid it of its wildness and beauty.
Like the long forgotten golf course in the foothills, brown and receding
into the desert, nature has a way of having better taste than man. There
was something oddly poetic in the beauty of decay. I saw a blue truck
coming down the road not far from here. It seemed the grounded portion
of the trailer park was deserted - at least this time of year, so I thought
I'd take a look.
The
truck slowed at my presense, and a bald man and his scruffy wife grinned
at me and drove on. While I was walking down the main street of Bombay
Beach, I noticed the blue truck had stopped, and the couple was watching
the sunrise. I had taken a recent interest in the development of mobile
home parks in the west.
The
documentary epic book Rancho Mirage followed the history of families
who moved west with the prospect of cheap land and freedom. The shores
of the Salton Sea had already begun to lose value after the short boom.
Arabesque hotels and golf-courses, swimming pools and booming harbors
that once shined here are now boarded and broken.
