Fire
The Shimmering Horizon
Salton Sea residents — and their stories — emerge before the oppressive summer heat.
By Susan Straight | Photos by Douglas McCulloh
Early in the morning, nearly every day, Antonia Garcia stands on a bluff overlooking the Salton Sea to think about her mother, to consider her own life, to smoke a Camel cigarette, and gaze upon the water.
“I find peace here,” she says, gesturing toward the lake, silvery haze wreathing the Santa Rosa Range, the surface of the water smudged turquoise on this first hot day of spring.
When I asked her about summer, she laughed and said, “Oh, I don’t come here in July or August! Then I just run from my front door to the car! Air conditioning!”
Antonia is 44, and four generations of her family live within sight of the Salton Sea. She’s standing in a parking lot from which I can see the earliest human habitation around the inland lake, which dominates the desert here. Across from us are the Cahuilla Fish Traps, ancient circles of stone built into the lower slopes of the Santa Rosa mountains back when this body of water filled the entire Coachella Valley 400 years ago. Fish were harvested by the first peoples to live here, people whose lives depended on the landscape around the water.
Now, much attention is paid to the sea and the valley, millions of dollars and tourists visit here for Coachella music festivals and art installations and video shoots, but the residents of North Shore and other places around the sea shrug and laugh. This is home.
The North Shore Community Center is filled with mothers and children. Previously, it was the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, a building shaped like a boat, where people came from as far away as Los Angeles and San Bernardino to dance on the weekends during the 1950s. My in-laws danced here to live bands playing the cha-cha. Within sight of where Antonia and I talk, a billboard sign holds those layers as well. “North Shore Motel. Rooms By The Sea. Pets Welcome.”
These are the faded block letters visible underneath the present day dream: “Lots, from $6950! $500 Down! Programas de Finaciamento Flexible!”
Headless palm trunks parade from the sign to about 10 manufactured homes, an apartment complex, a home day care with kids in a shaded yard, and the community center. Antonia tells me she and her family live nearby, “just up on the other side of that hill,” she points south. “Come by. We have a kioska for dancing; you can’t miss it.”
Approaching the shoreline, I walk through tamarisk trees alive with creamy pink blossoms dangling like fat pipe cleaners, fluttering with spring’s epic migration of painted lady butterflies. The lake is shrinking, so what used to be a marina is now a marooned wall of boulders. A small black car with driver door open is parked facing the water, and Jim Morrison’s voice rolls out. Omar, 24, peers out, holding a can of beer, asking if the music bothers me, and I laugh and say how much I love it.
Omar comes early to the sea as well, to consider life. He plays only classic rock, he tells me. He’s a welder who worked 12 hours the previous day, at the Empire Polo Grounds, where he erects scaffolding and does other heavy labor for polo matches and music festivals that bring strangers to the desert. Overtime yesterday, and he’s tired, so today he is resting by staring out at the water, drinking beer, listening to music, and imagining what else is out in the world.
Born in North Shore, he went to Desert Mirage High School in Indio, and drives there to the polo grounds. We talked about Desert Trip, the vintage rock music he loves, and how he wants to visit Salvation Mountain, not far from here, though he never has yet. I wave goodbye as he sits on his trunk, lifting a can in salute.
Further south, with the sea shimmering silver now in the heat just at the end of the rows of palm trees, Leonel Paredes is 20 feet off the warm sandy earth, high up in a Medjool date palm, his boots deftly dancing on the curving green fronds, curved sharp knife in his hand. This is one of the many date gardens that have thrived around the Salton Sea area since 1903, when the Deglet Noor and Medjool and Barhash palms were first brought to Mecca and Oasis from Algeria by American botanists to the Coachella Valley, an area perfect for their cultivation.
Paredes is 23, also born in North Shore and educated at Desert Mirage, and he’s been working these palms for the last two months, trained by an older palmero. Palmeros have a multitude of tasks for each tree, for each season of growing. In early March, the long sprays of date blossoms have been pollinated by hand, a palmero climbing up the ladders propped against the trunks to spray pollen onto the female blossoms.
For this Medjool tree, Paredes now moved around the crown, counting each pale golden spray to make sure only 40 strands remain. This is thinning, ensuring the dates have room to grow plump. Extra strands are trimmed off with his knife, decorating the ground below like stiff strings of tiny pearls.
Paredes played music in his small white truck, faint songs that reached around the hundreds of palms. He slid a long white paper bag over the spray to protect the dates from too much sun, to keep them safe until harvest. Paredes and the hundreds of other palmeros working around the Salton Sea climb countless steps up rungs and palm bark and along bending green fronds to make sure the world has Deglet Noor and Medjool for Ramadan, when the tradition is to break fast with sweet brown fruit.
The date gardens and field crops stretch on this irrigated land all the way to the edge of the Salton Sea, whose water could never sustain them now. The All-American Canal runs fast and deep past Mecca and Niland and Calipatria, all the way to the border with Mexico. Tilapia ponds, sod farms, row crops, and date gardens — all tended by Latino men and women who speak Spanish, who greet me and tell me about their lives, their children, their dreams, within the wavering mirror of the reflection of the sea.
On this northern shore, rows of newly sprouted pepper plants stretch for miles, regiments of jaunty bright green in black plastic and deep furrows, a lovely echo and contrast to the regal tall palms with their silvery feathered fronds in hallways of shade.
The heat has risen now in the valley. I drive up the hill Antonia Garcia had shown me, and there are a few hundred ranchos, corrals of wood and pipe and cactus where goats and horses peer up, where swingsets and treehouses and rock gardens decorate the desert. This community was built in the 1950s. Some of the original mobile homes, Broadmoor brand, metal and pastel and distinctive, are still here, and some have been replaced by newer models. I found Antonia and her fiance, Alfredo Campos, 48, inside the huge white wooden dance pavilion that dominates their acre of land. That structure overlooks the sea, the entire valley, and represents the love of a family like the Garcias. Antonia and Alfredo, animated and reflective, tell me their stories.
Her mother, Hermelinda, was born in San Luis Via Colorado, just over the border, in Mexico, and met Arturo Garcia, born in Michoacán, while they were in Tijuana. Hermelinda married him when she was 15, and they had six children, moving from Tijuana to Fresno to Los Angeles and finally, buying this rancho in 1991. One son was killed just after graduating from Coachella Valley High. All the other siblings live nearby. Hector, Antonia’s brother, works for wealthy people in resort cities like Desert Mirage and La Quinta; a man wanted this pavilion removed from his property, and Hector dismantled it piece by piece, brought it to his parents, and reconstructed it here. He poured a cement floor, and now the round-roofed shade is filled with grill and chairs and flat screen and family, the sea on the horizon.
Hermelinda died three years ago, and the family grieves hard even today. Antonia, divorced after four children with her husband, met Alfredo two years ago. Facebook — her daughter set it up and approved Alfredo, and their first date was at Fantasy Springs Casino’s bowling alley, in Indio.
Campos was born in Tijuana, but he has lived in Indio for most of his life. They move through the gazebo as if they have never not known each other, touching and smiling. Antonia shows me the tiny trailer where her father, Arturo, has taken himself, in his grief. He’s a welder, even now, at 73, and on his worktable is a handmade tool, like a canoe paddle, but with a deadly sharpened silver blade. It is for the palmeros, to slice off the thorny curves of frond along the trunks before they attach their ladders.
I touch the table, where Antonia has laid out Polaroid photos of her parents and siblings and her children and grandchildren. Four generations of family here on this desert hill, her father’s squash growing in a carefully watered tractor tire, his chair where at dawn he says his prayers, Antonia tells me, and speaks to Hermelinda while the sun rises over the sea.
Susan Straight’s new memoir, “In the Country of Women,” will be published in August by Catapult Books. She is a native of Riverside, and a distinguished professor of creative writing at UCR.
Douglas McCulloh is senior curator of exhibitions for the California Museum of Photography. His book, “In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California, 1950 to the Present,” based on the exhibition of the same name, is available from Inlandia Institute.
