I know for a fact that I have heard that the desert contains important and difficult-to-apprehend ecosystems located mostly along, and just beneath, the surface of its soil. This, I think, is where I got— and have kept— the idea of “hidden languages,” and why I have grown (or how I articulate) my love for the desert. When we think of biomes or ecosystems, we think of robust three-dimensional spaces populated with players or agents that are more or less easy to apprehend in their activity. It is the uneasy-to-apprehend nature of the ecosystem of a desert “floor” that fascinates me, not only because I feel that the value of experience so often resides in these sorts of places, but because (relatedly) these places are also the loci of important elements in narratives of unintended consequences.
This week I am finally going to go visit the Salton Sea, a great woundish gathering place of hidden languages. Accidentally flooded following an ill-advised attempt to irrigate the Imperial Valley in the early 20th Century, later becoming a short-lived tourist destination on top of thousands of acres of Indigenous reservation land, doubly-stolen and washed away, now a favorite fetish of contemporary apocalyptic ethics and cuckold neoliberal guilt affect as seen on instagram and youtube and veritably laced through with the brute inability of the colonial and imperialist project to address reality as it is/ was before it ravaged the future, the pressure I feel to go and see it before I move away from this place and the Colorado dries up (hopefully in the order) is palpable.
I’ve built an itinerary of things I’d like to see on our day-long tour, and it includes a lot of “hidden” places that it takes some digging just to discover they exist, let alone geographically locate: the mouth of one of the rivers created in 1905 by the catastrophe; a small “beachside” community on the eastern shore that has been lobbying Sacramento to help them restore their community, themselves located smack dab in the middle of the checkerboarded Indigenous lands that the shore itself bisects; a wetlands project by one of the local tribes that began after a fourteen-million dollar payout from the government for the devastation wrought by the state and its partners; etc. Not tourist destinations, but easily fittable into the category created by the question I’m met with when I tell people we’re visiting the Salton Sea: “why?”
Yes we’ll visit “Slab City” and “Salvation Mountain” and the yacht club that Frank Sinatra and everyone hung out at before things went south and probably that pink swing hung from ruined concrete pylons you see on instagram now and again; and yes we have a box of kn95’s and n95’s and even an n1000; but mostly I want to go there and listen.
I want to walk out as far as I can toward the receding waters and kneel down and see what that salt crust looks like, doing its job remaking the land that was stolen and is now being inadvertently returned. I even want to smell what they say is a sour eggs smell; see if I can watch it waft over to Los Angeles; maybe catch a glimpse of the Coachella aqueduct as it sparkles, its water— stolen from stolen— and whisks it to the San Bernardino Valley to join the egg smell. The Colorado is actually so far from there, and the place where it was re-routed back— both “up” and “down” — to the valley is actually across the international border in Mexico. I wonder if the feeling, the amalgam of all the ways we can apprehend these things mashed with whatever thoughts I’m able to have about it all, of the water running out— and the food no longer growing and the economy encircling these things collapsing— is going to sound like a trickling, or nothing at all: a stagnation, losing itself imperceptibly to the atmosphere, leaving only the salt crust behind. That ecosystem that is, itself, a surface that we somehow can’t see.
And I want to write about it. Which is why I write here, “for free,” to keep that going when I have time and energy after my “real job,” which I will be missing— along with the needed pay that adjoins it— whilst sniffing out hidden languages in the desert. That being said, if you enjoy reading this I would like to read more and would someday like to see it in an official capacity somewhere, I’d really appreciate it if you could drop a tip in my Venmo, @JoshuaAdamAnderson / the qr code below. Paycheck to paycheck subjectivity makes vacation itself a risk, with its own unintended, though usually inevitable, consequences. So: wish me luck! I’ll send words along regardless. XOXO
PS oh and also maybe follow my instagram stories for the photo essay element of things XOXO (x2)