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Paved streets with natnes Paradise Lane C( like and Oasis Boulevard zIgzag barren on a Journey to nowhere. " river was muscled back on course. In the meantime, the Sea had grown to such a size that it drowned the main line of Southern Pacific railroad tracks, as well as numerous other structures and industries that once existed in the valley. For many years the Colorado River had been proving a difficult and unpredictable adversary, and for the next several decades, the US government sought to tame the wild beast and rein in its awesome power. They did that, of course, by building dams. The early part of the 20th century is considered by many to be the era of dam-building, with Hoover Dam being the grandest behemoth of them all. Its construction helped to lift the country out of the Great Depression, and it provided electricity and water to burgeoning cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas. But the Hoover Dam also regulated the flow of the Colorado River; when it was completed in 1935, the river, once a raging lion, was officially as tame as a housecat. Downstream in the Imperial Valley, the farmers could now count on a steady flow of water, and farming continued to spread across great swaths of desert. The place that had once been referred to as the Valley of the Dead was now a miracle of agriculture. Today, the lower Colorado River, as it approaches the Gulf of Californ ia, has been reduced to a mere trickle, a distant shadow of its former self. Nine-tenths of the Colorado's volume is robbed from the river before it reaches the Mexican border. Its water is being consumed daily by the thirsty multitudes living in the nearby deserts, and used to maintain vast swaths of agriculture in a region with little rainfall. The nearby Imperial Valley has become one of the nation's most important agricultural regions, producing over a third of the winter vegetables consumed in the United States. But these changes brought with them great costs. One hundred miles south and across the Mexican border lies the Colorado River delta, a place once depended upon by millions of migratory birds, a place where cougars, jaguars and bobcats once hunted in thousands of acres of dense vegetation. Today it is gone. A parched desert stands in its place. The once great schools of shrimp in the Sea of Cortez that depended on the river's unbridled flow are also gone. The Colorado River, once one of the mightiest, wildest and most unpredictable rivers in the world, is a now a clear-flowing stream by comparison. Many of its most beautiful and wildest sections are now lying dormant under the water of its vast reservoirs. The Salton Sea, on the other hand, seemed at first to benefit from all of this change. During the 1950S and 60S, the Sea enjoyed a kind of heyday. Water skiers flocked to the desert lake to enjoy the warm wintertime water. Hollywood starlets basked in the desert sun at the Salton Sea Yacht Club, and sport fishermen bragged of huge catches of fish. Developers carved up the property around the Sea and began a mega blitz of selling, promising a resort to rival nearby Palm Springs. Plans for golf courses, gardens, parks and neat rows of upscale homes were drawn up and the land sold for high prices to unsuspecting buyers. No one gave a thought to what lay in the future for a salty inland sea with no natural outlet. No one imagined what a wasteland the sea would one day become. The Salton Sea would have dried up some 70 years ago if it weren't for the immense quantities of water being poured on nearby desert farmland. So much water, in fact, is used in the fields that drain into the sea that its level has remained somewhat constant over the years, even overcoming what evaporates every day in the arid heat. Yet during extremely wet years, when the desert receives more rain than usual, the Sea has flooded its banks, devastating both nearby fields and beachfront property. Flooding, combined with cataclysmic die-offs of both fish and bird life, have turned the Salton Sea into a modern-day ghost town. A few people still live along its shores, but most structures are empty and vandalized, monuments to lost developers' dreams and plans gone awry. Paved streets with names like Paradise Lane and Oasis Boulevard zigzag across barren desert lots on a journey to nowhere. Motels are boarded up and swimming pools are empty. Deserted yacht clubs overlook silted marinas that are inhabited only by birds. As I walk along the shore of the Sea, deftly avoiding crunching the carcasses surrounding my feet, I see a flock of white pelicans hunting in the shallow waters. [pull quote] Their splashes are the only sounds to be heard for miles around, and I am surprised to see that they are catching quite a few fish. I also see terns, avocets, great egrets, blue herons, and numerous other species of wild bird. I bend down at the water's edge, peer into the green murk and see a medium-sized fish swimming lazily through the algae-thickened scum, slow and seemingly drugged. Overhead, a large flock of snow geese passes across desert lot s, 38

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