Sunrising the Salton Sea and Its Forever Folly

I'd been itching to return to the Salton Sea. After all, it had been more than six years since I was last there.

Is it possible I'd only visited once since actually moving to California? Time flies—especially when you've got lots of exploring to do.



For my prior visits to the areas surrounding this large, inland sea, I'd always stayed in Palm Springs or Joshua Tree or Anza-Borrego. But this time—especially considering the fact that I planned to attend a balloon race on the water at sunrise—I decided to support the community and stay local.



Of course, there are no hotels actually at the Salton Sea—you'd have to go to Brawley for that—so, since I didn't plan to set up camp, my only other choice was one of the off-grid accommodations offered on Airbnb at Slab City.



Specifically, I chose to stay in a tiny red barn by the Coachella Canal at the California Ponderosa, hosted by a friendly and creative desert rat named George.



This wasn't my first time in Slab City, the abandoned site of the Marine Corps barracks of the World War II training facility known as Camp Dunlap—I'd been once in 2010 on my way out of Salvation Mountain.



But I felt uncomfortable photographing it back then. As abandoned as it may look and seem, people live there.



They may live in trailers, off the grid, far from utilities and law enforcement, but this is their home. It felt insensitive to gawk or even linger long enough to snap a photo.



But Slab City has become a perfect destination for hosts who want to create unusual accommodations for guests from around the world and for visitors who want to get away from it all—including running water, electricity, telephone lines, and occasionally a cell phone signal.



But I spent the night in "The Slabs" listening to the wind rattle the rafters of my makeshift cabin and falling asleep to the sound of a banjo playing and a freight train moaning in the distance. And I woke up there, the sky still full of stars, George's dog sniffing my hand as I scuttled over to the "ladies room" (which is basically a toilet in a teardrop trailer), and I made my way to the Sea.



I'd been lured by the promise of a sunrise event called "The Great California Balloon Race," scheduled for 7 a.m., as well as a sunset event called "The Lowest Glow On Earth"—but, to be honest, both were just an excuse to go back to this desolate, desert area that continues to inspire me.

For months leading up to them, they seemed like such a good way to revitalize the communities around the sea and draw some visitors, get some press, make some money. But we all forgot that the main thing that characterizes the Salton Sea is folly.

Its modern iteration resulted from the flooding of the former, ancient Salton Sink—something that was supposed to be temporary. When it didn't evaporate as planned, locals made the best of it and tried to transform it into a kind of California Riviera, whose salinity gave it a buoyancy that made speedboat racing and waterskiing particularly exciting there.

And then the fish die-offs. And then the bird deaths. And then the resulting smell.

And the floods—one of which consumed half of Bombay Beach.

And then, a problem of the exact opposite nature: a receding shoreline that's leaving behind so much dry dust and particulate matter (much of which is salt and other mineral deposits, as well as disintegrating fish and bird bones) that just breathing in the air there can be hazardous to your health.

I'd been reading about the dust storms, but I hadn't experienced them myself—that is, until this weekend.

I was prepared for the smell of dead fish and rotting birds and horse manure (and the flies that follow). But I was not prepared for 50 mph winds that created white-out conditions on Highways 86S and 78 and the 8 Freeway, starting at the north shore of the sea in Riverside County and intermittently relentless until I got way past the sea, through the Imperial Dunes, and to the other side of Imperial County, practically at the Arizona border.

That was the day before the balloon race and "low glow."

So, it should've come as no surprise that the hot air balloon events of the next day would be cancelled.

But, of course, they weren't cancelled. Not officially. After all, this is the Salton Sea. And the Salton Sea is coming back, isn't it?

One day, anyway. That's what they say, anyway.

Maybe other event organizers in another area would've called the whole thing off preemptively, but these folks had to try. In the morning, one pilot got one balloon fired up—mostly, but not enough. After three hours or so of failure, all the pilots packed up their balloons and baskets and left.

So much for the balloon rides that many folks had reserved in advance.

I thought that would be the end of the so-called "SeaFest," but it wasn't. Even though most of the vendors were late in setting up. Even though only a couple of drivers showed up for the vintage car show. Even though there was no way that anyone was going to get a balloon up for any length of time, at any time before the event was scheduled to end.

I left the festival grounds around 10:30 a.m. and set off to busy myself with the adventures that had really brought me back to the Salton Sea, but, in good faith, I returned around 3:30 in the afternoon, a half hour after the pilots were supposed to have returned with their balloons.

Not a balloon in sight.

I could've waited around until 5, when they were supposed to launch again, but I had my doubts about the potential for success at the Salton Sea. I decided to bag it, knowing I might regret it if the wind miraculously died down and the "glow" happened as planned.

It turns out that the pilots did eventually get all eight balloons up in the air—sort of. It was after the event had "officially" ended, and the state park rangers had been turning people away for hours, telling them the event was cancelled.

Just a few stragglers managed to tough it out and witness the event, which failed to be epic.

But it wasn't even an epic failure—it just fizzled.

And so many people felt deceived and ripped off (though the event was free, parking was $7)—and, by virtue of their lack of communication or miscommunication, the organizers ended up discrediting themselves.

I'm not sure they can do this event again in the future and have anyone believe that they will deliver as promised.

Now, I don't blame them for the weather conditions. All balloons are subject to the wind—as are hang gliders, paragliders, and other aeronautic vessels and contraptions.

But it's not fair to dump a bunch of false hope onto spectators–especially not at the Salton Sea, where promises are almost always empty and hopes are almost always dashed.

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Photo Essay: The Oktoberfest Running of the Weenies

Since 1978, people of German-American ancestry have dominated a rather unlikely place in Southern California: Huntington Beach, a.k.a. “Surf City.”



And that's thanks to a German immigrant named Josef Bischof, who came to the U.S. from Germany in 1952...



...and brought the Bavarian style to both the South Bay and Orange County...



...having founded both Alpine Village in Torrance and Old World Village in Huntington Beach.



At Old World, Oktoberfest is such a big deal that it starts in September.



Its main attraction is the adorable tradition of Dachshund wiener dog races, which take place every Sunday during the celebration.



While the Dachshund is a dog ("hund") that was originally bred in Germany to hunt badgers ("dachs") and, later, foxes and hares...



... a squeaky toy is usually enough to get these little frankfurters across the finish line.



And, judging by the crowd, the snout-to-snout competition is as exciting for the spectators as it is for the participants.



The key to winning seems to be a strong bond between dog owner and pooch.



Humans whisper words of encouragement to their pups...



...though some of them are so raring to go...



...they've got to be held back.



But when the moment of truth comes...



...and those gates open...



...there's no guarantee that both—or even either—of the doxies will actually go anywhere.



Sometimes they just linger at the starting point, seemingly preferring to hang out with their owners rather than run to their callers.

But that's all part of the show. It's almost better when a little hot dog makes it only halfway and then gets distracted by something and wanders off.

Although the Dachshund is a German dog, wiener racing didn't start in Germany—but rather, Australia, where one of the largest ethnic groups is comprised of Australians of German heritage.

And it's not an "old world" tradition, either. In fact, it didn't start until the 1970s, and it's really only been rising in popularity—at least here in the States—since the 1990s.

That must be why I've got no cultural reference for it, despite having grown up in a German-American family.

As for Old World and its decidedly antique appeal, with its cobblestone streets and red-tiled roofs, Joe’s family runs it, while he lives on the property.

That is, for now. It's not hard to imagine a storybook place like this meeting its demise like a character in a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.

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These Memories That Reek

Meditations on Chroma

My father is color blind. His mother was, too.

My Grammy had an extreme case of it: Everything looked pretty much black and white to her.

She always wore bright red lipstick. In the mirror, and in black and white photographs, she thought it looked pink.

Dad, however, has the kind of color blindness that allows him to see some colors accurately but mix other colors up. Brown and green, for example, look the same to him.

Whenever we'd give him a tie for his birthday, Christmas, or Father's Day—a gift I believe he truly appreciated, as a banker who wore a suit to work every day—he'd acknowledge the pattern (stripes, fleur de lis, whatever) but then ask about the color.

"It's... blue... right?"

"No, Daddy, it's red!" And we'd all laugh.

He didn't seem to mind having access to only a limited spectrum of colors. He knew there were other colors out there that he just couldn't see—he just didn't care all that much.

Maybe that's because he'd never seen those hues in the first place.

I, on the other hand, have perfect color vision. My color sensitivity is so impeccable that I can detect minuscule variations in shades that most people can't see. At least, that's what color tests on the internet tell me.

Even as a child, when my visual acuity was near legal blindness, I could always see colors really well. I recognized my parents in the grocery store by the color of their clothes.

I still look for people in a crowd by the color of their hair.

Like my Grammy, I, too, gravitate towards bright red (and hot pink)—but it's because I can see it and I just love the way it looks.

But you can only stare at one color for so long before it starts to fade, desaturate, or morph into some other spot on the spectrum.

After all, even in a monochromatic setting, other colors can filter in. A red chamber next to a blue chamber can, at least at some point, look purple.

And there's no parity between primary colors like red and blue and a secondary color like green.

Of course, in reality, nothing is ever one color. Even in my grandmother's black and white world, there were many shades of gray—to which she attributed the colors of the rainbow, though she didn't know first-hand the experience of purple or turquoise or even gold or silver.

That's why light and space Carlos Cruz-Diez considered his installation Chromasaturation from 1965—currently on display as part of Pacific Standard Time at the Palm Springs Art Museum—an "artificial habitat."

I know that the three chambers were lit with only blue, red, and green lights. But I also know that I saw oranges and pinks and purples and pale lime greens and even yellows.

Where did those colors come from? From inside my own eyeballs?

If that were the case, then how did my camera pick up on these spectral tones as well?

















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Elegy For Those Who Won't Stay Quiet

Sometimes, there's a great price to be paid for speaking up. It's no wonder people don't do it.

circa 2014—By Amakuha (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Whether it's outing a sexual harasser, abuser, or assaulter, or it's protesting governmental policies, whoever raises their voice in opposition has to withstand beratement, suspicion, interrogation, violence, and/or—as was the case in the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014—death.



In the Euromaidan protests of the time, one of which was centered on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Майдан Незалежності) in Kiev, a volunteer task force had appropriated the Trade Unions Building (Будинок спілок Федерації професійних спілок України) as its headquarters and command center—mostly, to feed and otherwise support the students who were engaged in civil disobedience in the middle of a typically cold, wet winter.



And then somebody set it on fire while it was full of people. Nearly 40 of them died in the conflagration.



The corrupt Ukrainian government and the police blamed the protesters—whether it was the peaceful ones calling for an alliance with the EU to the West, or the pro-Russian ones looking to drag the country back towards the East.



And sure, a molotov cocktail or two had been thrown in the environs of the square that surrounds the Independence Monument. But the protesters say that those had been planted by the police to escalate the conflict.



As our local Kiev guide and revolutionary, Slava, tells it, it was the government that burned the building down and took those lives. And, unfortunately, the massacre didn't end there.



By and large, the protesters knew they were targets for violence. After all, police unleashed water cannons on them, despite the sub-freezing temperatures. But, instead of arming themselves, the rebels created makeshift shields out of car doors, trash can lids, scrap metal, and anything else they could find—which would've been enough to stop a spitball or a rubber bullet, but not real ammunition.



And the ammunition that was turned on them was, in fact, very real. Though the protestors had barricaded themselves inside the square with whatever they could find (imagine those from the Paris Uprising of 1892, as described in Les Misérables), it offered little protection when the police finally opened fire on and tossed grenades into the crowd.



The weren't just warning shots, though. Officers didn't fire blanks or aim their guns up into the air to scare the insurgents into submission. They carried AK-47s, and they intended to use them.



The positioned snipers upon rooftops and took aim directly at those they wanted to silence, shooting them in the heads and necks—that is, shooting to kill, despite the president having agreed to cease fire.



But it was only a temporary fix, really—because although some of those who occupied Maidan were forced into an eternal silence (including the "Heavenly Hundred" who sacrificed their lives for the cause), the massacre caused an even bigger uproar.



In fact, it's what led to the ousting of then-president Viktor Yanukovych, who was charged with mass murder for directing the police in their unspeakable actions against those who, at the very worst, were hoisting wooden sticks in their rebellion.

circa 2014—By Amakuha (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

And the so-called "police"? Some of those Security Service of Ukraine (Служба Безпеки України, or СБУ) troops who ultimately reported to the president may have actually been trained by Russian special forces.

At the very least, in 2015 it was revealed that the Ukrainian army soldiers—who eventually got involved as well, making the counter-protest effort a military mission—got ammunition and anti-riot and combat weapons from Russia.

Russia—and, specifically, Putin—has denied involvement in the massacre of these "radical" victims (later called "heroes" by the new Ukrainian government). But isn't it curious that after Yanukovych was ousted, the "Motherland" seized the opportunity to take control of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea?

That move was condemned by many nations internationally and resulted in a number of sanctions against Moscow and Russia—which brings us to why Russia may have wanted to get involved in U.S. elections.

It would be difficult to blame anyone who stayed home instead of camping out at Maidan. It's actually easier to blindly obey than it is to mindfully disobey. When under attack—or trapped by the fear of being under attack—sometimes it seems like the only thing you can do is play dead.

But that's what they want you to do—to just play along.

That's what those police officers did, despite the fact that the rebels peacefully begged them not to—appealing to their humanity by telling them that they didn't have to commit such atrocities because the government would be overthrown soon, and there would be no punishment for their disobedience.

Regardless, the troops were just following orders. Maybe they knew it was wrong but were too afraid to speak up. Maybe they thought they'd lose their jobs.

Maybe they thought their own lives were more precious than the lives they took.

Thankfully, the Maidan revolutionaries disagreed—and shed their blood selflessly, giving their fellow countrymen the precious gift of freedom beyond the barricades.



BREAKING: A number of makeshift memorials had been mounted over the past nearly four years since the horrific events of Euromaidan in 2014, but there was one more or less "official" commemoration of the heroes—placed directly below the so-called "flower clock" along Heavenly Hundred Heroes Avenue (a.k.a. Heroyiv Nebesnoyi Sotni Alley, Алея Героїв Небесної Сотні). As of earlier this month, October 2017, it has been destroyed and local law enforcement is pursuing leads on a suspect.

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Photo Essay: Victorian-Style Mourning, Beyond the Black Veil

From the outside, it may appear as though Mr. James Bettner, a lawyer and civil engineer from Yonkers, and his wife Catharine led a quintessential idyllic existence.

They were well-off, as was much of Riverside when they settled there in the late 1870s. By the year 1895, had the country's highest per capita income, thanks to the burgeoning orange industry.

But Mr. Bettner had come out West—as many folks had—for his health. He'd been diagnosed with a kidney ailment called Bright’s Disease, and he only survived to the age of 45, leaving Catharine a widow and single mother of two sons.



When Catharine's younger son died of tuberculosis in 1891 at the age of just 22, she'd had enough with the home on Indiana Avenue she'd shared with her deceased husband—so she deeded it to her remaining son and commissioned a new home to be built.



Since the Bettner family had profited handsomely from James co-founding the California Fruit Growers Exchange, Catharine managed to find her new home in a Victorian-style mansion on Magnolia Avenue, the City of Riverside's version of "Millionaire's Row."



To build the Queen Anne manse, Catharine tapped architect John Walls, who would earn notoriety later for his work with the Farmers and Merchants Bank (1905), the Vision Theatre (1931, then known as the Leimert Theatre), and several other movie palaces.



Now preserved and open to the public as a house museum called the Heritage House, it's a stunning showcase of what life was like for those who lived on the right side of the tracks at the turn of the last century.



But even with her fresh start, Catharine couldn't shake the shadow of death—and so it seemed appropriate to visit the Heritage House while it was draped in traditional mourning dress for Halloween.



It's the perfect time of year for the house to display all the classic elements of Victorian death, in all its somber glory.



Of course, the Victorians had a certain period-specific fascination with death, from producing death portraits...



...to conducting seances to try to communicate with the dead...



...to surrounding themselves with dead things that appeared to still be living, as the art of taxidermy rose in popularity during the Victorian period.



But as comfortable as the Victorians were with death in everyday life, they also respected the period of mourning enormously...



...turning down every sound...



...and dimming every light...



...so as not to disturb those who were grieving the loss of a loved one.



Of course, particularly if you were a woman in the Victorian era, time stopped both literally and figuratively.



While it was traditional to stop a wound clock at the time of death (to commemorate the passing but also to stop the incessant chiming), having even less to do than the regular nothing that women had to occupy themselves with meant that actual time slowed to a seemingly imperceptible crawl.



Of course, the Victorian ladies had their hair jewelry and abalone shell art (some of which was incredibly painstaking to create)...



...but it's not hard to imagine them just staring up at the (14-foot) ceiling sometimes, waiting all day for night to come.



It's no wonder that Catharine had so many different lighting fixtures hanging above her—all of which are still original to the current condition of the house.



Of course, if someone were actually living at the Heritage House right now and were actually in mourning, all of the photos and portraits that hang would be turned around to face the wall.



And back in Catharine's time, that would've been taken care of by a Chinese servant, who had their own quarters and own staircase built into the house.



And when Mrs. Bettner would be ready to receive guests—as she loved to entertain and show off her fine art collection and various "Oriental" artifacts—she'd simply go town to Chinatown to staff up.



In terms of interior design, there was nothing simple about Victoriana—but every attempt was made to simplify daily life after the passing of a loved one.

Maybe it was to quiet the background noise, allowing messages from beyond to break through. Maybe it was to spot an apparition lurking in the shadows cast by a chandelier.

Mrs. Bettner lived in this house until her own death in 1928—and, because it was owned by only one other family afterwards (the McDavids), you can still feel her spirit alight in every room.

Or maybe that's a glimpse of her that you catch in one of the mirrors, which have been covered with only a gauzy, black mesh you can actually see through instead of the solid black crêpe that became a Victorian tradition in the 1860s.

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