Imperial (17 page)

Now we dragged the dinghy out of the back of the truck, and Jose, who from somewhere had been able to borrow a tiny battery-powered pump, tautened his previous night’s breath-work until every last wrinkle disappeared. From the weeds came another old man, evidently a
pollero,
for he, after laughing at the notion that Jose and I were about to be literally up Shit Creek, began very knowingly and solemnly to warn us of obstacles. We would not be able to reach even Highway 98 without a portage, he insisted; ahead lay a culvert through which the wiriest illegal field worker could not fit. He gazed at me with begging eyes, hoping, I think, to be hired as a guide. But our brave yellow craft, rated at four persons, appeared barely capable of keeping Jose and me afloat, so I could not encourage his aspirations. We dragged the boat down a steep path I’d found between the briars, and then the stench of the foaming green water was in our nostrils as we stood for one last glum instant on the bank, whose muck seemed to be at least halfway composed of rotting excrement. I could no longer see the palm-tree shadow, dark on grey, on the supermarket parking lot. Everyone waited for me to do something, so I slid the dinghy into the river. A fierce current snapped the bow downriver (the flow here has been measured at two hundred cubic feet per second). I held our conveyance parallel to the bank as Jose clambered in. Then, while Jose’s father gripped it by the side-rope, I slid myself over the stern, while Jose’s trapped breath jelly-quivered flaccidly beneath me. I had a bad feeling. The old man pushed us off, and we instantly rushed away, fending away snags as best we could. There was no time to glance back.

What a deep, deep green river it was! (It’s
always
been green! Señor Ramón Flores had sighed.) Shaded on either side by mesquite trees, palo verdes, tamarisks (or “salt cedars” as they’re sometimes called), bamboo and grass, it sped us down its canyon, whose banks were stratified with what appeared to be crusted salt. An occasional tire or scrap of clothing, a tin can or plastic cup wedged between branches, and once what I at first took to be the corpse of some small animal, then became a human fetus, and finally resolved into a lost doll floating face-downwards between black-smeared roots, these objects were our companions and guideposts as we whirled down toward the Salton Sea, end over end because Jose had never before been in a boat in his life. I tried to teach him how to paddle, but he, anxious behind his smiles, could not concentrate on what I was telling him, and kept dipping the oar as far underwater as he could reach, then pulling with all his might, like a panicked swimmer who needlessly exhausts his strength. Nor could I help him as much as I wanted to, on account of my self-appointed obligation to take notes and photographs. Every few moments I’d see us veering into the clutches of a bamboo thicket or some slimy slobbery tree branches, and I’d snatch up my oar, which was now caked with black matter (shall we be upbeat and call it mud?). Sometimes I’d be in time to stave off that shock. But frequently these woody fingers would seize us, raking muck and water across our shoulders as we poled ourselves away. Already we were sopping wet and patchily black-stained. The first few drops on my skin burned a little bit, but no doubt I imagined things. What might they have contained? In the Regional Water Quality Control Board’s poetic words,
the pollutants of major concern are the pollutants identified by the Board in its 303(d) list. Namely, for the New River,
seventy percent of whose effluent comes from the United States, meaning that the contamination would presumably worsen as one approached the Salton Sea,
they are bacteria, silt, volatile organic constituents (VOCs), nutrients, and pesticides. The pollutants associated with agricultural runoff are salts, silt, pesticides, nutrients, and selenium.
Jose kept spraying me by accident. There was not much to do about that; certainly I couldn’t imagine a gamer or more resolute companion. He was definitely getting tired now. Replacing my camera, which was speckled brownish-black from the New River, into its plastic bag, I laid down my notebook between my sodden ankles and began to paddle again. Here the stench was not much worse than that of marsh water. Had I simply grown accustomed to it (I remembered how my friend William had grimaced in disgust one night when we stood high on the bank), or was the New River really not so bad? The stink of a Florida mangrove swamp, or a Rhode Island cranberry bog, or a Cambodian river-bank on which the fishermen have thrown down many a wicker basket’s worth of entrails, struck equivalency, in my memory at least. Although it was not much after eight in the morning, the water had already begun to approach blood temperature (the revised forecast for that day was a hundred and twelve, which turned out to be low). We rammed into another tamarisk thicket, and when the branches sprang up to catapault more river-droplets on our heads, it felt almost pleasant.

We were passing a secluded lagoon into which a fat pipe drained what appeared to be clear water. We sped around a bend, and for no reason I could fathom, the stench got much worse—sewage and carrion as in Mexicali. The greyish-black mud clung more stickily than ever to the paddle. I vaguely considered vomiting, but by then we were riding a deeper stretch which merely smelled like marsh again. The water’s green hue gradually became brown, and that white foam, which occasionally imitated one of those faux-marble plastic tabletops in some Chinese restaurant in Mexicali, diluted itself into bubbles. Everything became very pretty again with the high bamboos around us, their reflections blocky and murky on the poisoned water. Occasionally we’d glimpse low warehouses off to the side; and wondering whether they might presage Highway 98 distracted me from the bitter taste in my mouth, which would continue to keep me company for days. Another inlet, another pipe (this one gushing coffee-colored liquid), and then we saw our first live creature, a duck which was swimming quite contentedly. Black-and-white birds, possibly phoebes, shrieked at us from the trees, fearing that we might pillage their nests. The heat was getting miserable. Narrowing, the river swerved under a bridge, and I got a beautiful view of more garbage snagged under dead trees . . .

I kept wondering when we would reach the pipe about which the old
pollero
had warned us; we never did. My end of the dinghy, having punched into one bamboo thicket too many, hissed sadly under me, sinking slowly. Since the price included several airtight compartments, I wasn’t too worried, but I didn’t really like it, either. Meanwhile the river had settled deeper into its canyon, and all we could see on either side were bamboos and salt cedars high above the bone-dry striated banks. A wild, lonely, beautiful feeling took possession of me. Not only had the New River become so unfrequented over the last few decades that it felt unexplored (no matter that every bend had been mapped and we couldn’t get away from trash, poison, stench), but the isolating power of tree-walls, the knowledge that our adventure might in fact be a little dangerous if we extended it sufficiently, and the surprisingly dramatic loveliness of the scenery all made me feel as if Jose and I were nineteenth-century explorers of pre-American California. But it was so weird to experience this sensation
here,
where a half-mummified duck was hanging a foot above water in a dead tree! (What had slain it? Can we necessarily blame the New River? I recollected a certain old man on the shore of the Salton Sea who thought that nothing was really wrong there and said about the avian die-offs: How do those
scientists
know that all those birds weren’t sick before they got here?) Lumps of excrement clung to the shore. Lumps of reeking black paste clung to my paddle. The river skittered from bend to bend in its sandy, crumbling canyon, and suddenly the sewage smell got sweeter and more horrid once again, I didn’t know why. And now another splash from Jose’s paddle flew between my lips, so that I could enter more deeply into my New River researches. (How did it taste? Well, as a child I was given to partake of the sickly-salty Salk polio vaccine—an ironic association, I suppose, for one of the thirty-odd diseases which lives in the New River is polio.) Not long afterward, fate awarded Jose the same privilege when a snagged tree sprang out of the water into his face.

At hot and smelly midmorning the river split into three channels, all of them impassable due to tires and garbage, and here again the water became the same rich lime as the neon border around the Mexicali sign for MUEBLES ECONOMICOS which as dusk arose gradually succeeded in staining its metal siding entirely green. Above us, Jose’s father waited at the Highway 98 bridge. The Border Patrol had already paid him a visit. They prohibited him from coming to help us; and I remembered Officer Murray’s colleague saying: Now, that irrigator’s car over there just happens to be in a convenient place. We’ll have to check him out . . .—Well, thank God I was white.—We hauled the sagging dinghy up the slope and through a fenced-in place where the earth was so pale that a brown jackrabbit, whose hue might in other jurisdictions match the color of dirt, seemed lushly alive. I didn’t think we could count on enough buoyancy to make it all the way to Interstate 8, so I called it quits. Even after a shower, my hands kept burning, and the next day Jose and I still couldn’t get the taste out of our mouths. We used up all his breath-mints lickety-split; then I went to Mexicali for tequilas and spicy tacos. The taste dug itself deeper. A week later, my arms were inflamed up to the elbow and my abdomen was red and burning. Well, who knows; maybe it was sunburn.

ANOTHER RIVER CRUISE

Ray Garnett, proprietor of Ray’s Salton Sea Guide Service, was a duck hunter, but he preferred to take his birds in Nebraska. He knew quite a few men who hunted the wetlands around the Salton Sea, and he used to do that himself, but about their prizes he remarked: I don’t like ’em, ’cause they taste like the water smells.

How about the fish, Ray?

I’ve been eatin’ ’em since 1955, and I’m still here, so there’s nothin’ wrong with ’em.

As a matter of fact, he thought that the Salton Sea must have improved, because he used to get stinging rashes on his fingers when he cleaned too many fish, and that didn’t happen anymore.

Ray went out on the sea pretty often. He’d been a fishing guide for decades. Now that he was retired, he still did it to break even. He called the Salton Sea
the most productive fishery in the world.

About the New River, Ray possessed very little information. He’d never been on it in all his seventy-eight years, and neither had anybody else whom he knew.—Seems to me like a few years back I was down here duck hunting and then I heard a boat comin’, he said. That was why he was willing to hazard this eight-hundred-dollar aluminum water-skimmer with its twelve-hundred-dollar outboard motor on the New River. He was even a little excited. He kept saying: This sure is different.

Ray preferred corvina to tilapia, and in fact he’d brought some home-smoked corvina in the cooler. It wasn’t bad at all. Probably I was imagining the aftertaste. Thirty-four pounds was the record, he said. Fourteen to fifteen pounds was more average. He could gut one fish per minute.

In the sixties and seventies lots of people came down here, he told me. Then that bad publicity scared people away, but they’re startin’ to come back.

Today, as it turned out, Ray’s boat was going to cover the river’s final ten-odd miles. Poor Jose only got a hundred dollars. I had to give Ray five hundred before he’d consent to try the New River.

Stocky, red, hairy-handed, roundfaced, he did everything slowly and right, his old eyes seeing and sometimes not telling. We put the boat in near Lack Road by Westmorland, and the river curved us around the contours of a cantaloupe field, with whitish spheres in the bright greenness, then the brown of a fallow field, a dirt road, and at last the cocoa-brown of the very water which whirled us away from that sight.

The New River’s stench was far milder here, the color less alarming; and I remembered how when I’d asked Tom Kirk of the Salton Sea Authority to what extent the Salton Sea’s sickness derived from the New River, he promptly answered as his fact sheets did: None. People point their fingers at Mexico and at farmers. Neither of these are contributing factors to bird deaths or fish deaths in the Salton Sea.

Maybe he was right, God knows. Maybe something else was causing them.

You think there are any fish in this river, Ray?

Flathead catfish. I wouldn’t eat ’em. One time we did core samples of the mud in these wetlands. It has just about everything in it.

Swallows flew down. The river was pleasant really, wide and coffee-colored, with olive-bleached tamarisk trees on either of its salt-banded banks—all in all, quite lovely, as Hemingway would have said. We can poison nature and go on poisoning it; yet something precious always remains. I thought about all the Indian tribes whom we’d forced off their hunting grounds—grazing ranges these days, or more likely industrial parks—and in exchange we’d awarded them “reservations” where we assumed the land to be most worthless. Coal and oil sometimes turned up there, or uranium . . . Our earth had gifts left to give, so we kept right on taking and taking. I wondered what Imperial must have been like in the old days—the very old days. Someday I should learn the history of this place. Lowering our heads, we passed beneath a fresh-painted girder bridge which framed a big pipe, probably for water, Ray believed. Rounding the bend, we met with a sudden faint whiff of sewage. But the river didn’t stink a tenth as much as it had at the border, let alone in Mexico. Passing a long straight feeder canal with hardly any trash in it, we presently found ourselves running between tall green grass and flittering birds. Villager Peak in the Santa Rosa Mountains was a lovely blue ahead of us. Now the bamboo thickened on either side, rising much taller than our heads. When Ray duck-hunted, he refrained from shooting if his prey were to fall into a thicket like that, because it would be virtually irretrievable.

Have another piece of that corvina, he said.