Imperial (20 page)

Good idea.

Let’s talk about selenium some more, I said, because I’d read that should the ever-thirsty municipalities of California succeed in diverting the inflows of the Salton Sea,
²⁸
then, in one journalist’s magnificent words,
a vast salt and selenium bed of dust of over 400 square miles would be driven throughout Southern California with any wind; tourism in Palm Springs, Palm Desert and the entire counties of Riverside, Imperial and Coachella would disappear . . . Certainly agriculture would disappear under the dust, and health problems would escalate to insurmountable proportions.
(As you know, the lab man had said to me, the concentrations of anything you find in there are going to increase as the water decreases.)

Again, said Cagle, we don’t know how bad the selenium problem really is. But Imperial County already has one of highest asthma rates in the country on account of all the small particles in the air, which are present in concentrations double the federal ceiling. To me, that’s the real problem. If this water transfer goes through and you lower the Salton Sea by fifteen feet, you have the potential for some Mono Lake-style clouds.

But the notion of a toxic selenium cloud is overblown, so to speak?

That would be my guess.

(No air-quality models have been conducted, Sabine Huynen had said. It’s very open as to what would happen. We only know that the scale is much larger than in the Owens Valley. People in the Imperial Valley don’t realize how much declining water levels would affect them. Particulate matter would blow right onto their fields.)

All right, Mr. Cagle. Anything else I should know?

People have known about these problems for forty years. The farmers have had so much power that nothing’s been done. Good chance nothing will get done.

What do you think we should do?

Dike off the two ends and let the rest become hypersaline. We’d still be saving an area eighteen times larger than Mission Bay. Our main concern at Audubon is keeping the bird habitat . . .

THE GOLDEN AGE

The article on California in the eleventh edition of the
Britannica
(published in 1911) states that
irrigation in the tropical area along the Colorado river, which is so arid that it naturally bears only desert vegetation, has made it a true humid-tropical region like Southern Florida, growing true tropical fruits.
Wasn’t that the golden age? Actually, the golden age hasn’t ended even now. I look around me at the Salton Sea’s green margins of fields and palm orchards, and spy a lone palm tree far away at the convergence of tan furrows, then lavender mountains glazed with confectioners’ sugar; this is the landscape, where all is beauty, the aloof desert mountains enriched despite themselves by the spectacle of the fields. Fertilization, irrigation, runoff, wastewater—the final admixtures of all these quantities flow into the Salton Sea. I couldn’t condemn the state of the Salton Sea without rejecting the ring of emerald around it, which I refuse to do. About the continuing degradation of that sump, Jose Angel very reasonably said: It’s a natural process because
the sea is a closed basin!
Pollutants cannot be flushed out. You could be discharging Colorado River water directly into the Salton Sea, or for that matter distilled water into the Salton Sea, and you would end up with a salinity problem, because the ground is full of salt! The regulations do not provide for a solution to this. You have to engineer a project. You have to build some sort of an outlet. Now when it comes to nutrients, I think there is a role for regulation to play. We can’t blame Mexico for everything but they certainly play a role in the nutrients. They add to the problem but we have our hands full in the Imperial Valley, too. And what can we do? Because fertilizers have a legitimate agricultural use.

The stylized elegance of a palm grove’s paragraph of tightly spaced green asterisks reified legitimate agricultural use, as did the ridge-striped fields south of Niland, where sheep and birds intermingled, the cottonballs on the khaki plants so white as to almost glitter. Suddenly came a brilliant green square of field on the righthand side of Highway 111, a red square of naked dirt on the left, a double row of palms in between, with their dangling clusters of reddish-yellow fruit . . . Legitimate use, to be sure, from which I benefited and from which the sea was getting more selenium-tainted and saltier and fouler with algae, creating carrion and carrion-stench, which kept sea-goers away, so that it was legitimate agricultural use which created that empty swimming pool in that motel in Salton City with cacti and flying fishes alternately painted on the two rows of broken-windowed rooms. The palm trees danced in a wind that stank of death. In its entry for Riverside County, the
California Blue Book
for 1950 offers a fine example of legitimate use:
The county is drained by the Whitewater River, which flows toward the Salton Sea.
Legitimate use made the half-scorched rubble of the Sundowner Motel, whose rusty lonely staircase comprised a vantage point to look out across the freeway to Super-burger and then the sparse pale house-cubes of Salton City. On a clear day one could see right across the Salton Sea from those stairs, but if there was a little dust or haze, the cities on the far side faded into hidden aspects of the Chocolate Mountains’ violet blur. Year by year, the Sundowner disappeared. By 2000, only the staircase was left, and in 2001 that had also been carried off by the myrmidons of desert time. Meanwhile the Alamo flowed stinking up from Holtville with its painted water tower (that river also commenced in Mexico somewhere), and the Whitewater flowed stinking, while the New River conveyed its stench of excrement and something bitter like pesticides. Imperial flowered and bore fruit; Imperial hid its excretions behind dark citrus hedges. Through that lush and luscious land whose hay bales are the color of honey and whose alfalfa fields are green skies, water flowed, ninety percent of it not from Mexico at all, carrying consequences out of sight to a sump three hundred and fifty-two square miles in area.
Pursuant to Section 303(d) of the U.S. Clean Water Act, the Regional Board approved its updated list of impaired surface waters in January 1998 (copy attached). Within the Salton Sea Watershed: the Salton Sea, the New River, the Alamo River, the Imperial Valley Agricultural Drains, and the Coachella Valley Stormwater Channel were all listed as impaired.
From a distance it looked lovely: first the handlettered sign of
May’s Oasis
, then the Salton Sea’s Mediterranean blue seen through a distant line of palms, and the smell of ocean . . .

Chapter 4

SUBDELINEATIONS: LOVESCAPES (2001)

. . . an intelligent species might, for all we know, really be isolated emotionally from all surrounding species, might view them simply as moving objects and have no access to their moods. But this “theoretical” isolated possibility is actually very obscure and may perhaps not make much sense.

—Mary Midgley, 1983

I
mperial is—

A landscape remains itself without me, I think (I think, but cannot know.
There is nothing in all that I formerly believed to be true,
says Descartes,
of which I cannot in some measure doubt.
) Imperial does not need me to be itself,
I think.
The salinity of the Salton Sea will not alter its rate of increase on account of my absence,
I suppose.

Nonetheless, just as the Salton Sea lies blue beneath a blue sky, grey under clouds, so any delineation of Imperial depends on the delineator, which means that whatever Imperial is must get expressed, no matter how scrupulously and intelligently, as a variety of shifting if hopefully overlapping entities even if we all confine ourselves to a single aspect of the place at a mutually agreed instant. My best hope (which doesn’t seem awfully good) is that when we overlay those delineations, each plotted conscientiously upon its own translucent sheet of memory-vellum,
²⁹
then a common core, however blurred in its boundaries, may appear. Why not lay a clean leaf of tracing paper upon the whole mess in order to construct an average shape? Well, we’d then be forced either to retain only the most conservative, hence tedious truisms (“Imperial is hot”), or else to extend the polygon outward, enclosing whichever debatable zones happened to conform to our own tastes. In other words, it would be going too far to claim, as in a previous delineation I nearly did, that Imperial remains unknowable, but yes, I did say that Imperial remains unknown.

In that chapter I tried to draw the best preliminary outline that I could, and now I can’t help but make another. Overlay them if you will; I cannot.

Until a week ago this place had been hers and mine,
our place,
she said, and so it had been for years. In those days Imperial was as beautiful as a double rainbow over the desert, rain falling and evaporating as it fell when we came down Highway 78 into Ocotillo, with chollas on the reddish-grey knobby hills, pencil-smudged clouds of rain; and the noise of the windshield wipers was very mirthful; then came that stunning double rainbow with mountains shining through it like an overexposed color photograph. Imperial was a band of literally heavenly colors then, the most beautiful being the greenish-yellow arch in the middle of each rainbow like a celestial distillation of all the emerald fields, but then the rainbows faded into a fresh clean dust smell. The last time I ever spoke to her, she wept: And I don’t even have a picture of us . . .—so here is the picture: Looking east, we came down into Imperial’s magic afternoon light; soon we’d find the chalky glow of the Salton Sea. Grey ocotillos on the slopes were joyous to us, since lovers love the pathetic fallacy; and now we obtained our first faraway view of the Chocolate Mountains, and yes, the needle-narrow glint of the Salton Sea; somewhere in the deep purple mountains—I’m sure I’ve delineated the place—with white and grey cloud above, white sand below, came the sign IMPERIAL COUNTY LINE. It was our place. So many years later I read that sentence and almost smile; my ignorance of Imperial has filled a long book, so how could it have ever been my place? Who were she and I but travellers? No place was our place, and Imperial never belonged to me. Well, if it had been ours in any sense, now I must try to make it mine alone, and if she ever returned there, it must be hers alone. (And from many years later I almost smile again.) I had asked whether she wanted to accompany me just the same, but she’d replied that it would be too sad,
because it was our place,
and I thought her correct not only for that reason but because after that day anything would have been too sad. My life was mine alone now, not hers anymore, so I must try to carry the burden of my own dead or almost-dead Imperial, unless I simply chose never to go back there. It was not ours and could not be, not ever. But I didn’t believe that yet. Well, well, so I was returning to Imperial just the same; but the Date Tree Motor Hotel in Indio, with its elegantly withered palms and the swimming pool she adored, the palm orchards of Mecca and Thermal, the sign below Leonard’s mountain which said LOVE, those map-spots were so richly hers that I could not yet approach them without tears. Wait a bit, I tried to tell myself; Imperial’s sun will fade her ghost. (But she was not dead.)

Imperial is not what I thought it was. It cannot exalt me anymore. But I’ve admitted already that Imperial does not need me to be itself. Imperial is whatever it is. Imperial is—

ONE MORE TIME

Had I implored, she might have done it. And because I hadn’t, I longed for it, as at a funeral one wishes for just one more word and then one more word again from the dead; any addict thinks that the next fix will solve all his problems, and at that moment he is right. So I thought back on the last time when we actually
had
made love, an evening half-hour that felt tired and strained; now I understood that her body had already begun to grow away from mine; the decision was ripening in her in place of that child we could never have had, maybe she felt a little repulsed; well, for a long time she’d been asking me to brush my teeth before she allowed me to kiss her cunt; and then she’d stopped letting me do it at all. The morning after the last time we made love, it wasn’t obvious to me, nor perhaps to her, that anything was different, because although we used to make love every morning we woke up together, over the last year she’d been getting more “delicate” as she put it, and so, that morning after our last time, when she made no move to touch me, nor any touching glance, I thought nothing of it. I believed that an enduring “is” had been calmly established between us long ago, so that if we did not make love at every opportunity, the rest of our lives remained; forgoing it therefore felt luxurious; we weren’t starving. That was what I thought then. I was a fool, so Imperial could still be delineated by a twin rainbow.

And so what if we had made love one more time after she’d told me that it was over? First of all, I take back what I said at the beginning: Even if I’d implored, it never would have happened, and I wouldn’t have, because the instant she told me, sobbing so hard that I grew terrified for her, I remembered how not long ago, on our very last trip to Imperial, in fact, she’d rushed into a teary rage of apprehension over nothing, and asserted that it was
over;
she could tell that I didn’t get it but I would have to because it was
over, really over,
and I apologized and apologized as with her I had gained so much practice in doing, until she forgave me and we lay wearily in each other’s arms. I now understood, and instantaneously, that on that night, she’d been begging me to let her go, but I’d been too blind and too selfish. Even now, when she sat bowed on the edge of the bed explaining that she just couldn’t do this anymore, I retained the strongest conviction that if I were only to grovel, comfort and promise in the correct proportions I could lure her back for a little longer, but at the same time I recognized at last that I was truly harmful to her, so that any extension of our covenant would merely have poisoned her more deeply. Nonetheless, speaking purely selfishly (since I was as I’ve said selfish from the start), I very tentatively asked whether we could make love one more time, since I longed more than ever to be inside her right then, in part because she never ceased to manifest herself so divinely to me (and from years later I smile outright at this juncture, for “divinely” conveys none of the
unique
meaning which it once did for me) that I lusted after her beyond thirst no matter how many times we were together; and I now wanted her in part (impurest of all) as a desperate attempt to seduce her back to me by means of pleasure and pity; I knew her body very, very well by then, much better than I ever would Imperial; I knew precisely how to bring her to climax (now I forget); so how would
that
have been? Perhaps the Salton Sea’s stinking radiance comprises a metaphor. Maybe it really could have been a pure goodbye, had I been good enough, but since I was not, it would have been a mixture of the love which cannot die, the love which dies, and was now looking over the edge of its oncoming dying, of terror, rage, grief, and pleading, of thinking that if I could only perform the act better than I ever had before, she’d be happily hypnotized out of the strength she’d so bravely discovered to leave me, just as when I rubbed her spine with just the right pressure, which is to say not too feathery, for she hated light touches, and not roughly, but firmly and steadily, as if I’d always be there with her. That is how it might have been for me; as for her, when I asked her (just once, in what I intended to be a gentle, hypothetical way) how it would be if we did that, she replied that she’d probably feel tortured by a terrible pressure to feel everything and make everything count forever, by which she communicated to my still astonished and unbelieving heart that the last time really
had
been the last time and she was trying not to change her mind, which meant that my having asked was all the more humiliating. She didn’t want to touch me anymore. I had come to her today not knowing, and until she’d told me, we had still been together. First I knew nothing except that she was crying, so I kept asking who had been mean to her or what had gone wrong; and even after she told me that she just couldn’t do this anymore, I continued to feel only that tenderest longing to comfort her which always came over me whenever she was suffering, and I held her tight, stroking her long hair; I said that of course I understood now and would do what she wished. But most of me, including the loving part, the comforting part, couldn’t yet apprehend that what she wished was that I vanish from her life like water in Imperial sinking down into the sand. Very soon now the pain which turns like a worm in one’s chest, the sharp, physically stabbing pain, the suffocating pain which awakens one gasping from a dream of winning her back or of losing her, the debilitating pain which takes up residence in the stomach, and the various kindred pains would enter into me. Right now they were swimming in the room like germs in New River water, but I couldn’t yet perceive them. I was planning and fussing about how she was going to move all the heavy boxes out of her studio, because she had a bad back, and she said so gently, not weeping at all: Don’t worry.
That’s not your responsibility anymore.—
That was when the first pain, an eel-like one with very sharp teeth, began to eat my chest. The memory of her words would come back and back every day, and sometimes I nearly screamed. (Reading this over now, I feel a pain as sharp-spired as a smoke tree.) But even now, all I knew was that whenever she wept I always tried to be strong for her and help her, and I had done this again just now, freely and gladly, because I loved her and she loved me, although now we . . . Now we remained on the couch where we had so often lain together, and we were lying or sitting (I forget which) near each other, but not touching although we had been touching half an hour before when we came there and I had been holding her in my arms when she had told me, her face as white as the sands just east of Palm Springs. I felt weak and asked if we could lie down, and she said that she guessed that we could, as long as we didn’t get too intimate, because that would make her confused. So I decided that it was better not to find out what too intimate was, better not to do anything. With shrill brightness she now began to treat me as though I were a friend. She proposed that we go for a drive or play a board game because she wanted us to always be friends; and because she had been so heartbroken when she was saying what she had to, I for her sake assured her that we always could, that in her words,
nothing will change except the stress and the sex,
and among the items which I can list to my credit concerning our relationship I am proud to mention that not only did I not implore or insist that we make love one last time, not only did I not beg her to take me back, but I even for an hour or two went through the motions of being just friends with this woman whom I longed to kiss on the mouth and name my sweetheart as I could have done just yesterday; until the slow, sharp fact that she was actually leaving me had twisted deep enough into the bright new wound to reach a certain depth, then a deeper depth, and then suddenly it approached unbearability, at which point I leaped up half-sobbing that she had better take me home now, although it was hours early, and she rose without protest, which she never would have done before. (She used to beg me for an extra five or ten minutes.) On the road she gave me a letter opener with a little business card window within which she’d inserted one of Leonard’s Salvation Mountain postcards, cut to fit. Although she said she’d meant to give it to me before, it burned my hand, for it was a consolation prize. It was the first gift, and as I made sure, the last, which she had given me after she had left me. It was accursed. Sitting beside her (ordinarily we would have been holding hands), I decided to drop the thing into the Salton Sea as soon as I’d returned to Imperial, although in fact I failed to, proving too confused, weak and unsure of myself to reach the shore. It took several years to dispose of it. She remained silent and composed beside me. Then I got out of the car. This was the first time we failed to kiss goodbye, the first time that I went up the sidewalk without looking back at her and waving. Rushing inside my house, I stood and hid for a long time, dreading that she might still be there gazing at me. Finally I peeped out the window. She was gone. I began to choke with anguish.