Bombay Beach

All that remains of the divide between the dilapidated houses on fifth street and the skeletons of buildings that once constituted the beach front is a salt sea wall.

Scattered among mobile homes that look like they have been imported from war zones or disaster areas are houses, some eerily well maintained, with residents only hint of existence is the occasional Christmas light, or newer model car parked outside of their property.

  If Bombay Beach, and the Salton Sea signaled the promise of the middle class and their desire for a American Riviera in the west, then what remains of this place is what is left of the promise, a quiet desolate wasteland, framed by a breathtakingly expansive sky, but now abandoned and slowly eroding into the salt from the sea.

With a few exceptions, the houses that remain against the sea wall are equal parts graffiti and squalor.  Of these abandoned structures, nearly all of then have been lived in long after they were capable of supporting living. 

The floors are littered with debris, and the stench of feces in some serves as counterpoint to the rotting smell of dead fish from the ocean.  But on those occasions when light weaves it way through the broken glass and paints this refuse of abandonment,  something quiet extraordinary happens.


 Like so many promises, Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea are the remnants of things longed for and then long abandoned.