His days in Africa caused him a heart condition that led to occasional heart attacks. A forced lifestyle change had given him a reconsideration of what to do with his life. He said, "I can grow anything. I learned from hemp, but see, this is all hydroponics. No soil, just water and nutrients. It's a very complicated process. I want to do this for the rest of my life."

"Grow hemp?"

"No, actually I'm going to do aquaculture. I just bought a trailer downtown. I'm going to put tanks in there and raise tilapia."

"Tilapia? You're nuts." Tilapia, the so-called Nile Perch, is a dirty fish, a brackish bottom-feeder from the Northern Nile. Despite African origins, tilapia is known as a Southeastern-Asian standard, and with growing Asian populations on the Pacific Coast of the U.S. and Canada, a market is developing.

I told him, "Tilapia is already being farmed in Arizona. It's one of the cheapest imports from Asia. And besides, it's a disgusting fish!" I have landed at Bombay Beach, coincidentally this has recently been cited as the exact spot as a primary suspect for California's next great faultline. I am at the center of the apocolypse, only it gets worse.

There are thousands of birds here, perched on a number of vacant buildings. Although it is true that this area has become a sanctuary for migrating birds, the pelicans and egrets and seagulls do not fly when I approach. They are sick, many of them. Dying perhaps. Birds in the Salton Basin routinely go through bouts of cholera and botulism.

I am treading through a thick salted crust. Since evaporation is the Salton Sea's only outlet for water, low sea levels mean excess salt. Where there is no salt, there is water and mud, and decaying mobile homes. It wasn't the suspected earthquake that pushed the old Bombay Beach Trailer Park underwater, but rare tropical storms in 1976 and 1977. What was once a booming trailer park community, sank. Now, the half-submerged skeleton is a strange backdrop to the fluttering birds and the tinkle-tinkle of fish bones lapping in the waves.

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.

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