Salton Sea

I watched my Pops milk his whiskey and wondered where his thoughts were. His rough fingertips gripping the bulbous glass were a sign he was still woodworking, he had to keep his hands busy or his mind would get to him. That’s what he told me anyway. I stared at the tulip shaped glass that held that he’d swig that pungent woodsy sting like a forbidden caramel. Those same old tulip glasses he’d let me drink milk out of on special nights or even just an evening movie at home when we felt fancy. He’d had one of those heavy wood box tv’s for most of my life and if there was a movie theater in my mind, that’s what every film played on.

My Dad loved California. He chased the sunrises on the desert sand like every broken dream he’d had since youth. The sand and sweat built his castle. He built his walls and kept people out and thought he’d found paradise right there on the San Andreas fault line. His life never stopped shaking and splitting, more than the earth ever did. My Momma built her castle in the mountains, but I always came back to the Salton Sea to see my Pops. He didn’t want to leave, even when the town dried up and the salty sea that once seemed like a oasis became a shithole no one bothered to love anymore. Pops did, a few did. A few still do even. Even the oceans couldn’t keep up with Salton’s salinity and the changing environment people away as it continued to dry up but also collect toxins. A poisoned paradise my father had invested his last hopes and dreams in, one he wasn’t going to give up on, and never did.

The smell of cigars sat strongly under my nostrils and I couldn’t help but smile. I didn’t have to look up to know it was him. As I sat there in the dilapidated porch of the home he had loved like it was alive, feeding it with memories and joy he had to culminate by himself. No one was going to rob him of it there. The paint began to peel and the walls began to crack just as his body began to break down too. Like his home there really was a reflection of himself and who he was, just an extension of his own being. Sickness made him neglect himself and his home and I tried to help how I could. When someone doesn’t care anymore, you know. You feel it deep in your soul that their light is going out and there’s no way you can reignite it. You simply have to let it go out and hope somehow some ember of them catches fire again. It never does, and the flame goes out and you’re left to inhale the smoke of someone who used to be.

The house that was just a road from the shore back in the heyday of this little oasis was decomposing along with my father, in his little grave a few counties over, where he won’t be left alone and forgotten again. I caught a glimpse of him again as the sun went down, whiskey glass in hand and smiled. His spirit even found it hard to leave, yet someday he would, as all grains of sand move across the dunes like snowflakes on the winter winds.

My time would come too one day. Would I find my peace in my own private oasis? Beauty seen only to me? Would I drift on the winds and settle in the sand of somewhere less lonely? Perhaps I would just end up here, amongst the sunbleached fish bones and forgotten dreams. Engulfed in the desert's parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind.