An Idyll on the Shores of a Toxic Lake
There are two ways to experience the town of Bombay Beach, Calif., as a visitor: gawk at the spectacle or fall into the vortex. Thousands of tourists cruise through each year, often without getting out of their cars to see decaying art installations left over from an annual mid-March gathering of artists, photographers and documentarians known jokingly as the Bombay Beach Biennale. When I went to the town for the first time in 2021, I was looking for salvation in this weird desert town on the Salton Sea south of Palm Springs and Joshua Tree National Park. I dropped in, felt vibes and left with stories. I stared at the eccentric large-scale art, posted photos on Instagram of ruin porn and a hot pink sign on the beach that said, “If you’re stuck, call Kim.” I posed in front of a mountain of painted televisions, swung on a swing over the edge of the lake’s retreating shoreline and explored the half-buried, rusted-out cars that make up an abandoned ersatz drive-in movie theater. On that trip, it felt as if I were inside a “Mad Max” simulation, but I was only scratching the surface of the town.
I returned in December to try to understand why Bombay Beach remains so compelling, especially as extreme weather — heat, hurricanes and drought — and pollution wreak ever more intense havoc on it. Summer temperatures can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, tremors from the San Andreas Fault strike regularly, bomb testing from nearby military facilities can be heard and felt, and the air is so toxic from pesticide use, exhaust fumes, factory emissions and dust rising from the retreating Salton Sea that one study showed asthma rates among children in the region are three times the national average. By the end of the decade, the Salton Sea, California’s largest inland body of water, at about 325 square miles, may lose three-quarters of its volume; in the past 20 years, the sea’s surface area has shrunk about 38 square miles.
But people who live in Bombay Beach stay because the town offers a tight-knit community in the midst of catastrophe. Though its residents contend with environmental adversity on a daily basis, they’re also demonstrating how to navigate the uncertain future we all face — neglect, the fight for scarce resources, destruction of home, the feeling of having no place to go. They are an example of how people can survive wild climate frontiers together.
The 250 or so town residents live in the low desert on the east shore of the Salton Sea, which formed in 1905 when the then-flush Colorado River spilled into a depression, creating a freshwater lake that became increasingly saline. There used to be fish — mullet and carp, then tilapia. In the 1950s and ’60s, the area was marketed as a tourist destination and was advertised as Palm Springs by the Sea. More tourists visited Bombay Beach than Yosemite. There were yacht clubs, boat races and water skiing. It became a celebrity magnet: Frank Sinatra hung out there; so did the Beach Boys and Sonny and Cher.
Eventually, as agricultural runoff kept accumulating in a body of water with no drainage, it became toxic and created a lake with salinity that is now 50 percent greater than that of the ocean. In the 1980s, dead fish washed up on the sand, car ruins rusted in the sun, tires rotted on the shore. Tourism vanished. But some in the community hung on. One way to define Bombay Beach is through environmental disaster, but another way is as an example of how to live through disaster and how to live in general.