Salton Sea madness

January 5, 2009

The Salton Sea sure has some strange goings on. My cousin and I were out at the Salton Sea exploring and shooting all kinds of weird and wonderful things on Saturday. More specifically it was late afternoon and we'd just pulled over the earth wall protecting Bombay Beach from the sea and we saw a black Scion and three people exploring the area, and a gray Scion parked near a white pickup with a few folks milling about over there. Of course you know something interesting is going to happen - this is, after all, the Salton Sea. So what happened?

Well, there were some loud voices, I know not what was said, someone jumped in the gray Scion and drove hard curving left, gravel spinning, tail slightly out, then straightening lined up perpendicular to a set of three vertical poles each about a car width apart. The poles were solid and beefy and about the size of two railway sleepers joined together and about eight feet high. In between the poles was a little bit of junk but not much to worry about. Then what? Well, the Scion slammed full speed into the right hand pole with a loud crash. The driver never applied the brakes. Now marooned on the newly horizontal pole, wheels off the ground, the Scion driver exited the vehicle and ran around to the passenger door to open it. There was no passenger in the vehicle. Unable to open the passenger door she (yes it was a woman) left in a huff headed along the dirt road that runs off the earthen dam and in my direction. Unsure of just what exactly had transpired or what I ought to do I made no eye contact and shot a few frames of The Trailer as she walked briskly past and into town never so much as glancing at me. I wondered at what I had just witnessed. Did I really just see that? Yes, I had. A surreal unfolding of events befitting a surreal place.

The people from the white pickup commented matter of factly that "she musn't want her car no more." I concurred softly to my cousin that it did appear to be that way. So we carried on shooting all the wonderful decaying things there were to shoot. We had wandered a way from the car a decent distance and noted the water level as being lower than my last visit, when I started to feel like we should have locked our car. So I headed back to lock the car so we could carry on shooting and feel safer. The car now locked, I turned my attention back to The Trailer, now much more derelict than before, when over the dam appeared a golf cart with what I presumed to be a local and the driver of the gray Scion. They went to the marooned Scion. The other black Scion and its occupants had long since departed, right after the gray Scion crash as a matter of fact. I kept shooting the Trailer. The white pickup helped haul the marooned Scion off from the perch atop the pole and the driver surveyed the damage to her vehicle. It did not appear too bad. I did not look too good either. Either way, we left chasing the setting sun to North Shore.

Wait - you can't end there - where are the photographs of the incident I hear you cry? Oh yes, here they are - a few shots of the aftermath: