Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low-Down California (review)

Book Reviews203 despair that drove him to seek the job, and of the subsequent circumstances that caused him to change his mind. MorriU's book is a kind of map in itself, one that marks the pathways of human feeling—his psyche one line on the map, his footsteps another, his passage through time still another. Ultimately, he discovers that he, Uke other travelers, has already been shaped by the places and people who left their mark on him. In "EncounteringTime," MorriU records the words of a painter he met in Nepal: "you can take a picture of [a] village, but your photo isn't of the viUagers' viUage. The picture Ues somewhere between what the viUage is for them and what it is for you. Maybe that's why the image is a spiritual space." MorriU returns to that spiritual space, a place that A Stranger's Neighborhood maps with a direct, occasionaUy painful, insight. Reviewed byJessica Mersky Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low-Down California by William deBuys and Joan Myers University of New Mexico Press, 1999 307 pages, cloth, $35.00 In Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low-Down California (1999), writerWiUiam deBuys and photographer Joan Myers are, in Robert Coles's memorable phrase, "doing documentary work" in the tradition of such exemplary verbal and visual texts as American Exodus by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor (1939) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee andWalker Evans (1941). Combining thorough research with on-site observation and sharp, vivid images, they produce a haunting and compelling portrait ofplace. The low-down California they document is the corner abutting Mexico on the south and Arizona on the east, especiaUy the area around the Saltón Sea, an impervious rock basin with depths reaching 278 feet below sea level. As deBuys writes, "Gravity decrees that in low places consequences coUect, and here is the lowest of the low: Saltón Sea, growing saltier by the day and stewing with the waste of the upstream world" (8). The Colorado River at one time created a broad, fertile floodplain with its spring floods, and its lush delta provided extensive wildlife habitat. The land beyond the delta, however, was harsh, unforgiving desert, and the Saltón Trough, a long depression between mountain ranges, was a land oflittle rain and little water, an arduous, daunting, and occasionaUy fatal southern route to California goldfields. EventuaUy, in order to "improve" the "wastelands" of 204Fourth Genre the West, entrepreneurs and engineers constructed dams and dug canals and diverted water to harness the voluminous flow of the Colorado. One result was the rich and profitable agriculture of the ImperialVaUey, "halfa miUion acres ofcropland" growing "head and leaflettuce, carrots and artichokes, asparagus, beans, beets, and broccoli. There are bok choy and celery, cilantro and cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, and okra. There are cabbages and kale, coUards and cauliflower" (5, 7). The Ust goes on for half a page, and concludes with "roughly a mfllion sheep and feedlot cattle, plus dairy cows, swine, farmed catfish, and . . . commerciaUy tended bees" (7). Another result was the Saltón Sea, the end product ofwhat deBuys caUs "the most spectacularly bungled development scheme of the century, perhaps of aU time." Floodwaters overran inept diversion schemes and, guided by irrigation channels, emptied the Colorado River into the Saltón Sink, forming entirely by accident the world's largest man-made lake, a body of water with no outlet. Inevitably, entrepreneurs saw a way to exploit this disaster by designing and marketing a posh planned community with marinas and country clubs and comfortable living. The scheme ultimately went bust, but deBuys sees the deserted town plat as the terminal destination of "a river of spirit and dreams," the American faith that determination and high finance can transform any terrain into a promised land of opportunity and profit, of cities of gold beyond the imagination of conquistadors. In the end, the Saltón Sea became a receptacle for raw sewage flowing north from Mexico and agricultural run-offfrom the ImperialValley, its size reduced by evaporation, its salinity ever increasing. Having robbed the Colorado delta of the river's resources the Saltón Sea has become a way station...