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.

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