Imperial (181 page)

H. DUROS
TRAILER PARK

and an address, which I omit. (If you want to find it, ask the Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, whose band comprises a hundred and ninety-two members
within the ranchería,
and fifty-seven
adjacent;
their gross acreage is not quite twenty-four thousand, if we ignore the fact that much of it lies under the Salton Sea. Duroville exists proudly
within the ranchería.
)

The trailer park itself? Trailers, fences, roads with absurdly official street signs; here and there the white negative of a tree; it’s a flat zone (no two-storey trailers here!); it’s dreary and unfriendly. But aren’t most new neighborhoods?

The editorial from which this chapter’s epigraph was taken goes on to quote a
Los Angeles Times
story which claims that
dioxin-laden smoke and ash from the waste dump waft through the slum of broken-down trailers and plywood shacks. Raw sewage leaks onto the streets, while piles of rotting garbage and other refuse litter the area, which is called Duroville, after its founder, Harvey Duro.

I never noticed any raw sewage. The garbage pile was on the outskirts of Duroville, and usually it was smoldering.

According to the private investigator I hired, Harvey J. Duro, born in 1947, owned no property appearing in a database of California tax assessors’ records. Nor did any corporate or business affiliations appear under his name, although the investigator remarked:
It is probable that records regarding activity on an Indian Reservation would be kept by the tribal government, not by state or county agencies.
As for the man’s criminal history, no Imperial County records were available online, but Riverside County case number 062389 (28 August 1996) revealed that Mr. Duro had served thirty days in prison for driving under the influence of alcohol and then resisting arrest. A civil case from 1993 reported a default judgment against Mr. Duro, who failed to appear in court on what seemed to have been a child support matter. In 1991 he was the defendant in a Federal District Court in a real property rental, release and ejectment case, the plaintiff being the All Indian Housing Authority. The case was closed a year later. In 2003 another Federal District Court case of the same nature was filed against him, the plaintiff being the United States of America. This case was still pending. The civil minutes mention that one of the main issues was
whether the court . . . has the authority to order defendant, an Indian allottee, to take certain action to alleviate the human habitation and environmental conditions which prevail on the allotted land pending the eviction of the occupants of the trailers.
The court ruled against the United States’s request for a preliminary injunction, arguing that the risk of immediate harm to the occupants of Duroville was less than the hardship which would surely be inflicted upon them should the place be closed down. The case continued.

In 2003, four thousand-odd migrant workers lived in Duroville.

Noe Ponce, born in Duroville, had worn the Virgin of Guadalupe around his neck for two years now. He said: Police come in here every day arresting people for being drunk, fighting, stealing.

Carmen Lopez, aged twelve, wanted to be a cheerleader. She had lived in Duroville for six years. She said: I don’t like it here so much, because when they burn things at the dump, my head hurts.

For fun she played. She wanted a cheerleading outfit but did not know where to buy it.

Many men had come from Michoacán, I presume illegally, to work in grapes and bell peppers. They paid two hundred a month to live in those junky trailers. (
$4,500 SE VENDE
, offered one trailer.) I did not ask them whether they had ever proceeded beyond the laundry drying on the fence to visit the INSTITUTO GNOSTICO DE ANTROPOLOGIA A. C.

A redhaired man was sitting beside the restaurant trailer. He glared at me.

Aside from trailers, Duroville contained nice cars, dirt streets, stop signs, street signs, fences, some vines, gravel yards, even a lawn or two, a basketball hoop. In spite of the lawn, it reminded me of the ghetto shantytowns of Kingston, Jamaica.

Every now and then I went back there. I never made any friends. Nobody welcomed me; nobody trusted me.

One hot December afternoon I rolled up along the western side of the Salton Sea, the grape leaves on the vineyards quite reddish at this season, and passed that famous landmark the Riverside County Disposal Site. Lincoln Street offered citrus hedges in angled parallels, young palms, some of them mere seedlings; they were ranked like chesspieces in the white dirt. The clump of convenience stores at Highway 195 has grown a trifle wider. Who knew what grandeurs Duroville might have achieved?

Stop Illegal Dumping. Keep Our Reservation Beautiful.

NATIVE SPIRIT DISCOUNT SMOKES

PRIVATE PROPERTY

Then there was an inflatable Santa Claus by a fence, a huge fat shaggy palm, junked cars in the dirt.

POSTED—NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT

Imperial was flaky mud, a roadrunner on the pavement. Imperial was
FOR SALE BY OWNER.

A long silver pipe in a fallow field paralleled the highway, guiding me back into Duroville.

I saw a painted Virgin of Guadalupe on the side of a trailer, crapball fences of various sorts, pickup trucks, additional grimy Santa Claus statues, a dog lying in the street, doubtless doing its best to enforce the sign that said
KEEP OUT—PRIVATE.
A man glared at me through dark sunglasses. Christmas tree lights hung over boarded-up windows and a full garbage can.

A police car blocked the dirt street called Wiley Avenue. Two cops were interrogating a man dressed in his Sunday best on this Tuesday noon, while a crowd of girls and women watched from across the sand.

The redhaired man was sitting in the same spot as before, shooting me a bloodshot glare . . .

Chapter 200

SALTON CITY (2006)

Into this long undeveloped land, which nature has so wonderfully fitted for the highest human use, has now come a new race, bringing energy and the most approved modern methods . . .

—Elmer Wallace Holmes, 1912

F
ruit for a dollar a bag at the Brawley fruit stand, Palm Avenue, Lalo’s Taco Shop on Palm and Main, Brawley Billiards, the Salvation Army, the shut-down Planter’s Hotel with scaffolding on it, then Westmorland’s tan dormant fields, these are one’s early-twenty-first-century landmarks en route to Salton City. Four white geothermal plumes arise in the direction of the Salton Sea. Had I stopped at the Westmorland Dollar Store or Johnny’s Liquor, this chapter might have been about Westmorland instead; but the biggest news I ever gathered from my decade of passing through the latter metropolis was that once upon a time, a truckload of lemons spilled on the highway, and children ran out to gather them up by the arm-load; meanwhile, the traffic squished the fruits, and Westmorland smelled so beautifully like lemon. Now Westmorland is behind; the car curves toward the low grey-blue knife-ridges of mountains, passing a field of chard, and at Bannister Road I first notice the Salton Sea as a sky-blue line of a pencil’s thickness. Trifolium Canal is but a wriggly arroyo at present; perhaps it always was; Deep Wash is deep no longer. Here comes the first palm tree. Crossing Alfalfa Ditch I pass a dust-sugared palm grove, then the dry olive-brushed wash of San Felipe Creek. Today the Border Patrol checkpoint is memorialized by an empty white vehicle, and the car speeds through, by which time the Salton Sea has rotated from a bearing two-o’-clock to three-o’-clock, becoming a dusty grey-blue; and at one-o’-clock I soon see the small white shards of Salton City.

SALTON SEA ESTATES—
$10,000 Credit
WELCOME TO West Shores of the Salton Sea

A mortgage center that was never here before offers

New Custom Homes from the $200,000s

WELCOME TO droopy cacti on Potrero Road, to new homes. The Imperial Idea may linger in this neighborhood! Just now I read about a man on Vista del Mar who boasts that he can dance with his wife on the patio or
talk to your yard bare-ass naked. And nobody can complain.
What of the other grand avenues? Might they be as free-spirited as Vista del Mar? Shore Sand remains empty; then come four new houses, the blue line of sea widening ahead like a lizard’s smile; I now catalogue Shore Prince, Shore Maze, and I had better not forget Shore View, where a desert-camouflage-painted Volkswagen Beetle graces a sandy driveway; Yacht Club Drive, a home
FOR SALE BY OWNER
(he sold out at a fancy price); Treasure appears no more or less precious than the other streets, and here’s the beach, herring gulls circling and crying over the purple water. On the flats, mummified brown little fat tilapia speckle the world farther than I can see. Why not take a promenade? My driver retches at the ammoniac stench, the fish-corpses flat and crunchy underfoot on the tan sand. As the Department of Parks and Recreation wrote in 1990,
the salty water may cause a slight stinging sensation in your eyes or in open cuts, but old-timers claim that a soak in the Salton Sea can cure almost anything.
Cured, we return to the car. My shoes leave lumps of reeking beach-mortar on the floormat. Off we go. In the blink of a realtor’s eye, we have arrived at Seaport Avenue.

The Mexican-American woman, shrugging, fifty-odd years old, fat, has been here for one year. Her five-year-old looks very cute watering sand with the hose. They hail from Coachella.

When I ask what brought her to Salton City, she gives the Imperial answer: I wanted to live in a place more tranquil.

Does the smell bother you?

Yes.

Is it getting better or worse?

Well, it’s not improving, and in the summer there are a lot of bugs.

Could it be hazardous for your daughter’s health?

It could be, she shrugs.

Are the neighbors nice?

I don’t talk to them.

What do you do for fun here?

Go to Coachella. When the smell is bad I don’t go outside.

Back at the mortgage center, the pretty young Mexican-American realtor assures us that the Salton Sea possesses a filtration system and that she does not notice the smell more than half the time. I inquire about birth defects, and she claims never to have heard about those, or indeed about any pollution problem with the Salton Sea. I wonder aloud about fun in Salton City. Well, there are a few restaurants, and soon there will be a truck stop.

I ask who has been buying her houses.

We’re getting a lot of good people here, she explains. I don’t want there to be any bad people.

Departing Salton City, we cross Electra Ditch; at Calyx Ditch the sea suddenly becomes wide, blue and pretty, with the reddish desert hills to our left. Passing Desert Shores, the white shack or shed crowned by the initials of Veterans of Foreign Wars, we find the sea ever so calm, with the brown and red Chocolate Mountains vaguely reflected halfway across it, and already we are coming into date palm groves . . .

Chapter 201

HOLTVILLE (2003)

But that is the essence of the Valley; so much that is worth noting is silent, unspoken.

—Alice Woodside, 2006

...
A
nd the golden light on the golden fields brought the land alive as evening always does in Imperial: A lush green zone of chard or radish flashed by, with sky-blue water in between every row of green; a big cloud rested over Signal Mountain; Imperial put on her best perfume (essence of feedlot); and then came the eastward turn toward Holtville.

Imperial was green and the mountains were underlined by a strip of white sand, a line of palm trees, the Planters’ Ginning Co.