Bombay Beach, Salton Sea, California

On Salton Sea, it’s a 20 minute drive from Fountain of Youth Mineral Hot Springs. I’d passed it once before only driving through without any exploration. It was memorable enough then that I wanted to return now.  A most unusual place.  It’s part ghost town and part steam punk art museum.  The beach is a place of zany funky installations that are reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s post apocalypse world. I had an LSD flashback just driving into town seeing a sign for Veterans and thinking the town really was reminiscent of the Vietnam Vets war or the testing of Nuclear bombs in the Nevada Desert.

It’s like no other place I’ve been.

I’d ridden my Vespa 300 GT super tech with Madigan in the dog box on the passenger seat. His head swivel around like the spotter in a WW 1 Bristol Fighter. I think of the Snoopy Beagle sometimes when I see him on the back of my motorcycles .  We stopped on the beach.  I let him run free and together we explored several of the more prominent installations.  Amazing.  My nuclear physicist engineering nephew writes steam punk novels and I thought of him. This would be the perfect location for a dystopian love story among the sculpture by a partial ghost town.  

There’s a bar and a market.  Here and there in the town are houses that have been kept up with locks and fences and new cars outside. Beside them are graffiti covered skeleton’s of old trailer park icons. The graffiti is often the sort I associate with crystal meth. 

There was a Seaside Baptist church, a beautiful blue and white uplifting affair that seemed to have its world cut out for it. Down the streets stood the Bombay Estates , the hand painted sign on a burnt out building that looked sordid and inviting to only an awkward teen age nerd and an older predator.  Another sign said Last Resort and again had a special irony.

In the history of the town it said this was ‘the beach’ , only a 100 miles from Palm Spring and 150 miles east of LA it once hosted the Sinatra Crowd and Later the Beach Boys Set. Then salination and silenium in the water reduced the appeal along with flooding and storms that caused the in crows to move or just pick up and leave.  I don’t know when the artists came.  After some hurricane or apocaluypse that spoke to the mortality of things and people and places.

I was staying at the over 55 Fountain of Youth Spa and RV park where some of us feel our bodies and lives are like living in a Ghost Town. That was the title of The Rolling Stones song in Covid 4 years before when we all masked for the Dr. Fauci Wuhan Lab Leak while being told the truth was a lie and the lie was the truth.  This era looked like the town with health and rot side by side. Ruins and repairs. There’s even an archeological dig in Bombay. It’s a huge inland water and the notes say you can still swim and fish in it.  A recent find of an amazing wealth of Lithium says the town will likely rejuvenate. I’m truly hoping the rich mineral waters  will do that for me or at very least slow the decline.  Only death is certain.  That and renewal.  I could be caterpillar on the way to becoming a butterfly. This town could be the next ‘in spot’ 

It’s an extraordinary place and was well worth the visit.