Imperial (19 page)

(Salton City’s attractions now included a broken motel with drawn-in palm fronds and shattered windows. Emblems of stereotypical cacti and flying fishes clung to the motel just as a fool clings to his dying love. They clung behind a
FOR
SALE
fence, framed by boarded-up doors and windows. The motel’s customers were heat, rubble, and cicada-songs. Meanwhile, out at the marina, a single fishing boat passed behind a rectangular pool of lavender or perhaps raspberry-colored water. Salton City offered me the sharp tang of decaying fish.)

Yeah, that was beautiful, Mr. Urbanoski said. It was a shame when they tore it down.

How was the life here twenty years ago?

Undescribable, really. Before they wiped out all the units down there, there was a place called Helen’s Guest House with cabañas and all kinds of entertainment. Salton City was beautiful then. They had a real nice eighteen-hole golf course that was wiped out on account of the water. A lot of movie stars came there. It was a real neat place.

When did everything start to change?

Around ’78 to ’83. Right out there they used to have trailers. It was undermined by the Imperial Irrigation District. They bought everybody out. People were forced to sell.

How did the IID undermine them?

They were sued three years in a row. You’d walk outside and step in a hole. Water was coming in. It keeps coming in. We’re at two hundred and twenty-seven feet below sea level right now. It keeps rising. IID got tired of being sued.

Mr. Urbanoski pointed out the window at a certain place half effaced by decrepitude and rising water. He said: The guy that owned this, he borrowed a hundred thousand dollars and was supposed to bring it up to code. He took the money and went to Tahiti with five women, had a heart attack and died. They said he died with a smile on his face.—And that building there, we lost that. I used to have a store . . .

What are all those dead fish out there?

The IID brought those tilapia in to clean out the canals, since they’re algae-eating fish. The water temperature gets below fifty-eight degrees in the winter, and then they start dying off. Once in awhile you get to see a dead corvina, too, and that’s standard.

It feels like at least a hundred and ten degrees today, I said. When did those tilapia die off?

Oh, those ones are pretty fresh. We just had an algae bloom a few days ago. That brownish look in the sea, that’s plankton.

How about the birds?

We haven’t had a die-off in a couple years.

So you’d say the Salton Sea is pretty clean?

San Bernardino County has tested the bottom for toxins. None. They got a little bit near the New River, of course . . .

Do a lot of people still fish around here?

I launch probably fifteen to twenty-five boats a week. (But what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna go down to Salton City and get some yellow police ribbon for that dock, seal it off. It’s cheaper not to get sued.) They fish for corvina. If they get a big tilapia, three-four pounds, they’ll keep that. It’s very tasty. I would eat fish three times a week if my wife would cook it for me. I been eatin’ it thirty years and I’m not dead, although my doctor said that’s debatable.

We sat looking out the window at the Salton Sea, not that we could see all three hundred and fifty-two square miles of it, and he said: I’ll tell you who ruined this: the
L.A. Times.
That bad PR:
Don’t eat the fish in the sea because they’re poison.
My buddies called me up and said: Hey, Dave, we can’t come out here no more, because those fish are poisonous.

What’s your favorite fish to eat?

Croaker. What I do is I fillet ’em and I brine ’em overnight in brown sugar, then I smoke ’em. You know how you peel an orange like
that
? That’s how the skin comes off.

Smiling, he said then: It’s so damn
tranquil
in here. I just seen a string of brown pelicans come in here an hour ago. It’s real fun to watch the white ones, the way they herd the fish . . .

SAMPLING

Squatting over the stinking green water a few steps from the spot where Jose and I had launched our inflatable dinghy, I lowered the sterile sample bottles one by one in my latex-gloved hands. The air temperature that June afternoon was a warmish hundred and thirteen degrees. Up in the parking lot, my friend William sat in the rental car with the air-conditioning on while I did my business, standing partly on a fresh human turd to avoid falling into the water. The chemical odor seemed more dizzying than usual. What was it? Hopefully I’d find out, for, truth to tell, I’d cast my analytical nets rather wide. I was angling for your basic herbicide-pesticide sweep, including the chlorinateds (EPA method 8151), a CAM-17 for heavy metals at two hundred and twenty-five dollars, a full method 8260, needless to say, with MTBE and oxygenates, a TPH (that’s total petroleum hydrocarbons to you, bud), a surfactant, and a diesel test while I was at it. Originally I’d craved a fecal coliform count so badly that I could taste it (and, come to think of it, right now I
could
), but Tom Kirk had said that the levels of fecal coliform, high at the border, dropped off steadily along the New River and then actually rose at the mouth of the Salton Sea, thanks to the worst polluters of all—birds. So to hell with it. Besides, then I would have had to keep the samples on ice, and it was boring to buy ice.

It really, really, really stank.

I’d told Mr. Kirk how happy I’d be if the water quality of the New River could be improved, at which he laughed sadly and said: Be careful what you wish for. Once the water’s cleaned up, where do you think it will go, Bill? That will become very valuable water. The Mexicans won’t drain it into the Salton Sea anymore. They’ll use it for cooling power plants. Then the Salton Sea will get more saline than ever as the water level drops . . .

Should I have collected my sample where the river meets the sea? In that case, I would have been able to measure the total pollutant load—for, remember, seventy percent of those New River wastes do not originate in Mexico. But I was curious how lethal the Mexican outflow truly was. The United States Congressional General Accounting Office
finds that sewage from Mexico poses a health risk to public health.
What poet could have put it better? Anyhow, I wouldn’t test for sewage itself. I’d test only for chemical poisons.

My hands felt wet. Lifting the last sample bottle out of the water and capping it, I discovered that the New River had more or less dissolved my gloves. My hands started stinging a few hours later. They stung for about a week.

(Actually, said the lab man, that probably wasn’t the New River. That stuff at the bottom of the sampling bottles is nitric acid.)

William and I drove up to North Shore, where I took my other sample. North Shore seemed like a good place because it was far enough away from the New River to reflect the base level of filthiness, so to speak, and it was also good on account of all those fishbones and salt-stiffened feathers crunching beneath my feet. The sea was quite shallow here (the map shows a depth of two feet, and then the black silhouettes of a SUNKEN CITY), so I couldn’t avoid getting sediment into the bottles, including bits of rotting fish and numerous cheerfully darting water-bugs which I felt guilty about inadvertently sentencing to doom (three days later, the laboratory reported that they were still alive), but I’d instruct the lab to shake up the bottle and homogenize it . . .

Every step I took made a splintering noise, like shards of glass. It was bone and barnacles, mainly, and scales, too. North Shore was a fairly grisly place.

Ray had found a swollen human corpse in the Salton Sea a few years back.—That’s nothing new, he told me. They find ’em every week. That’s just accidents. They’re just tryin’ to get across illegally.

And what about the finny remnants I saw all around me at North Shore? Tom Kirk explained: We don’t take fish deaths as seriously as bird deaths from an ecological point of view.—(There was only one dead bird on the beach this time, a fluffy little baby.) And Jose Angel at the Regional Water Control Board had insisted: As long as there are fish in the Salton Sea, there will be fish kills. The prime cause is low oxygen. We have a warm body of salty water with major algal blooms, which when they decompose suck the air out of the water.

On the pier, a man was fishing, perhaps not impressed by the selenium health advisory (not more than four ounces of Salton Sea fish-meat per two weeks).

I took my two samples up to Sacramento and got them analyzed for a thousand dollars apiece. Sample one was the New River. Sample two was the Salton Sea.
²⁶

On the chlorinated acid herbicides, your 2-4 dichlorophenylacetic acid took a hit on sample one, said the lab man. On sample two, everything was non-detect. Let’s see, now, your diesel in the very first sample took a very small hit; the second sample was non-detect. For metals your first sample showed beryllium and zinc,
²⁷
and your second had barium and selenium. Both samples were well below the MCLs on all that.

What’s an MCL?

Maximum contaminant level allowed by the Department of Health Services.

Silly me, I said.

Surfactants, surfactants, mumbled the lab man, and in my mind’s eye I saw again the long white clouds of foam which drifted down the New River from Mexico—oh, here we go: a very small hit on sample one, and sample two was pretty close to sample one.

Are you sure about that? Sample one is supposed to be the most polluted river in North America.

Absolutely sure. Salinity: two point five grams per kilogram in sample one, forty-six grams per kilogram in sample two.

Here I gained confidence in the laboratory, because the Salton Sea Authority maintained that the sea’s salinity was an almost identical forty-six grams per kilogram; and I had not disclosed the origin of my samples.

We ran the 8260 for volatiles plus oxygenates as you wanted. Both samples were clean.

And that was that. Unfortunately, they’d run out of water, or I’d run out of money, before they could get to the pesticides.

I sat there for awhile thinking. Then I inquired how my samples compared to other water they’d tested.

Relatively clean compared to other wastewater samples, the lab man said. They’re certainly not nearly as nasty as some of our samples from Brazil, Singapore and China . . .

SELENIUM AND OTHER MYSTERIES

And so what do I actually know now about the dirtiness of the Salton Sea and the New River? (As to the constituents that you were listing, said Sabine Huynen of the University of Redlands Salton Sea Database Project, I can’t give you my own opinions. I can’t give you any information on whether these numbers are accurate. It would depend on how you sampled, what sort of personal equipment you had, and any number of factors.) It is too bad that I lacked the resources to test for other organic compounds; that the laboratory elected to test for herbicides instead of pesticides; that I couldn’t have sampled the Río Nuevo at Xochimilco Lagoon and the New River at the mouth of the Salton Sea; I wish I could have repeated Ray Garnett’s experience of testing Salton Sea sediments. But if I did learn anything, it was this: Neither the New River nor the Salton Sea was, on my sampling day, at least, as toxified as claimed—the relative absence of heavy metals appearing especially telling. Moreover, Mexico could not be the primary culprit for what little pollution of the Salton Sea my samples did detect. The New River’s beryllium and zinc had nothing to do with the Salton Sea’s barium and selenium.

I telephoned the Audubon Society man, Mr. Fred Cagle, who had always struck me as levelheaded and independent (no doubt it was these qualities which caused others to call him “jaded”).

Do these results surprise you? I asked him.

Not at all.

Well, is the New River the most polluted body of water in North America, or one of the most polluted, or what? I can’t figure it out.

It’s been getting cleaner. But it still gets that reputation. It depends on who you talk to. They’ve found cholera, TB, all that kind of crap . . .

What about the metals and organics?

I don’t know whether this is a low time or not in their pesticide application. You have to be careful. It varies tremendously. We’ve taken hundreds of samples, and they all come out different. And the stuff in the sediments may not be soluble; there are just so many variables. Of
course
you can’t figure it out! Scientists can’t figure it out.

And those nine million pounds of agricultural chemicals you mentioned, where do they go?

Some of them break down; some of them get oxidized by bacteria. But we don’t know that. Scientists get confused, too.

Would you agree that the Salton Sea is the most productive fishery in the world?

It’s the most productive fishery but it’s the most limited fishery. All the fish are artificial. We’re getting right close to the edge of the salinity window. And why spend a hundred million dollars to save a ten-million-dollar fishery? Tilapia are an amazing fish. You know, they’re a freshwater fish, and in thirty generations they’ve modified themselves to live in the Salton Sea. But has anybody told you about the parasite levels on those fish? They’re enormous. Parasites are in their lungs, everywhere. The people who eat those fish might not enjoy them as much if they knew that. But humans can’t get those parasites, at least. Still, there
is
a selenium warning, as you know.

And that I can’t figure out, since the selenium level of the water was so low.

What’s in the water doesn’t make too much difference. These fish feed on pileworms. Maybe these pileworms concentrate it. Nobody’s completely researched how it gets concentrated in the food chain. But I know enough about selenium levels to tell you
I
wouldn’t eat it.

I still have a little smoked corvina left. Maybe I won’t send it to you.