style="font-size:15px;"> Outside the caverns, safe in the half-empty parking lot, come back to yourself. Unlock your car and drive slowly down the mountain road, careful on the switchbacks. Turn on the radio. Pass the first barn: GOOD BYE TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT ROCK CITY. Yes, that’s right; these barns are how you heard about the place to start with. SEE SEVEN STATES. WORLD’S 8TH WONDER, BRING YOUR CAMERA. BEAUTIFUL BEYOND BELIEF.
THE LORD’S WILL SHALL BE DONE
NOT YOURS OR MINE
—Roadside sign outside Chattanooga
The barns were new once. Bright boards wept sap. There was that one roofed with hand-rived shakes cut from the great felled oak. The old men said, You got to do it at the right time of the light of the moon lest the shingles curl. Shakes nailed down tight.
Clark Byers didn’t need stencils; understood the different iterations of barn, varying shapes in the same family. Painted SEE ROCK CITY on roofs with a wide brush. That dry wood drank paint, didn’t it. Hot work, sweat running down his spine, paint spattering his forearms, pulling his hair as it dried. Carolina grasshoppers leaping from yellow straw to light on tall pokeweed. Pokeweed juice a dye the Cherokee used. Had used.
Made his own paint from linseed oil and lampblack. “There were no such things as rollers,” he said. “Used a four-inch brush, never had to measure letters and always worked freehand. Once that paint got on, there was no getting it off.” He carried paint, rope, chalk, brushes. Dying barns deflate like lungs. Inside them it is dusty, with a different kind of darkness, and in the rafters you might see wasps swarming, or old swallows’ nests. Termites chew the planking, piling gray dust on the floor of pounded red clay. TO MISS ROCK CITY WOULD BE A PITY read the John Molyneux barn. That was from the 1930s. It’s torn down now.
Traditionally, it took forty days and forty nights to cure tobacco in the barns. In early spring, you weighted seeds with ash to sow; come midsummer, cut green leaves, working slowly down the line. Bundled stems together in hands and set a slow fire. The leaves cured to brown, supple as skin on a wrist. Smoke wriggled out through gaps in the walls. You’d see it wafting over the fields, smell it on a still night, dusty and sweet, like grass in August but darker. Most people have forgotten all this by now, or never knew. One day won’t anyone remember.
Salton Sea, California
Smears of heat rise from the car, the pavement, my sister’s head. I step out of the car and onto a dead fish, crushing its skull under my heel. The air’s so dry it shivers, the sun’s so strong that freckles pop like paint across my arms, and the stink—from tons of decaying fish—is making us all sputter and choke. The Salton Sea is the kind of place most people go out of their way to avoid. Not me. I’ve talked my family into coming here, all because of a photograph I’ve seen.
Tilapia can stand bad treatment—hotter water, higher salinity, more pollution—better than most fish, but sometimes the Salton Sea gets to be too much even for them. When that happens, they die off in huge numbers, sometimes as many as eight million a day. I walk down the beach with my family, all of us crunching tilapia underfoot. The fishes’ eyes go first, pecked out by ravenous shorebirds, but eventually all the fish transform from curled-up wholes to neat ladders of vertebrae to, finally, pearly piles of loose scales that lie scattered across the beach like bingo chips.
I lean over the water’s edge but don’t step in. The water itself is tea-dark, but its surface is as bright as tinfoil. Broken slabs of concrete and stubs of rebar jut underwater. We walk slowly past a row of abandoned house trailers, wrecked during the last of the big storms. Here’s a planed-open shower stall, a rusty oven with its door wrenched off, a shank bone from a big dog, probably a Lab. Here, washed up on the water’s edge, lies an empty pack of Skydancer cigarettes, a warrior in a headdress lifting his open palm to the pale-blue sky.
We were joking in the car, but that’s all evaporated now as we squint at the water, a little confused, a little sweaty. It’s eerie here, even at high noon, and I’m not sure why. This feels like a place located outside the bounds of normal time, like an amusement park, but we’re missing something. Calliopes and tin whistles: this beach is silent.
MIRAGE: 1958
Cue the music, coming to you live from an unseen band. Somewhere, some fellow sings, beyond the sea / Somewhere, waiting for me. The trumpets, nasally muted, swing along in the background, counterpointing the melody, propping it up. A drummer brushes the skins, and despite the terrific heat, everything is very, very cool. And you’re here to see it all: the sleek cigarette boats peeling the water open; the gulls flying past crinkled mountains; the platinum sun. The ice in your drink goes to water and you swallow it. When a breath of wind passes over your face you’re immediately grateful, as if heaven sent it particularly to you, just to see if you’d notice.
For thousands of years, Desert Cahuilla Indians lived here, watching the water come and go, and farming on these banks. But the Salton Sea’s current incarnation began as a mistake. In 1905, the Colorado River, which had been diverted to irrigate local agriculture, overcame its banks and poured full bore into the desert for two years, when engineers from the Southern Pacific Railroad finally blocked it with tons of riprap. The Alamo and New Rivers continue to drain into the Salton Sea, as does agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley. Since 1909, the Torres Martinez band of Desert Cahuilla has held the title to ten thousand acres of land that lie on the bottom of the Sea.
In the mid-1980s, Richard Misrach shot a series of large-format photographs of the Salton Sea. These images, collected in Desert Cantos, are dangerous viewing for those with a certain bent: they’ll put a spell on you. Take this one, Diving Board, Salton Sea, of an empty swimming pool with a diving board and a flooded horizon receding to the vanishing point. The floodwater surrounding the pool is a strange, limpid blue, with a depth impossible to divine. I’ve gone back to the image again and again, trying to figure out why it haunts me. Partly it’s the story that the empty pool contains; what turned a resort into a ghost town?
But more than that, it’s something in the water. This is no ordinary sea, no ordinary sunset, and despite its calm surface, the water reminds me somehow of solvent, mercury thinned with gasoline. This is water with an opinion.
MIRAGE: 1902
The sun doesn’t do all the work, but it does what you can’t. You pour barrels of water into pools you’ve dug, then go round to tend the ones you set out yesterday and the day before. The sun licks the pools dry, like the fire of the Lord on Elijah’s offering, licking up the water on the altar and the water in the trough and the water soaking the wood, then the wood itself and the pieces of the sacrifice and the stones of the altar, cracked open in the flames. Sweat crawls down your neck as you rake these things over, turning the damp spread of new salt into neat piles. Pinch the stuff between your fingers and taste of it. Precious dust, come to you free, waiting in the desert like manna. Bow down in the sand, eyes shut from gratitude or knifelike sun. Nobody here to see you or ask why.
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