Itemized Losses Along the Inland Shore

GREYHOUND LINES — BOARDING PASS LOS ANGELES (DOWNTOWN) → MECCA, CA DEPARTURE: 6:15 AM — SEAT 34A DATE: MARCH 11 FARE: $27.00

The bus was not full. The bus at 6:15 a.m. from the downtown Los Angeles terminal to anywhere in the Coachella Valley is never full. Eleven passengers. A woman with two suitcases held together with a bungee cord. A man in a security guard uniform who slept from the moment we pulled out of the station and whose phone alarm went off in Beaumont without waking him. Three teenagers traveling together who did not speak to each other and appeared to be communicating through a group chat on their phones despite sitting in adjacent seats.

I sat on the left side because the morning sun would come from the right and I did not want to spend four hours with the shade down. This is the kind of decision I make now. Which side of the bus. Whether to face the light.

Through San Gorgonio Pass the wind farms appeared — hundreds of turbines turning at different speeds, some not turning at all, their blades locked at odd angles like broken clock hands. They had been white once. The ones nearest the highway were gray with road dust and the ones farther out had taken on a bone color. I watched them for twenty miles. Nobody else on the bus looked at them. The security guard’s alarm went off again near Palm Springs and this time he stirred, slapped his phone, and resettled into the same position. He would sleep past his stop if he had one. I considered saying something. I did not say something.

PILOT TRAVEL CENTER — FUEL & CONVENIENCE CABAZON, CA DATE: MARCH 11 — 8:47 AM 1 BOTTLED WATER (1L) $2.89 1 TRAIL MIX (LG) $5.49 SUBTOTAL $8.38 TAX $0.73 TOTAL $9.11 PAYMENT: VISA ****4417

Rest stop. Fifteen minutes. The bus idled in a lot shared with a truck wash operation and a shuttered Denny’s whose sign still advertised a Grand Slam breakfast in a font the chain stopped using in 2009. The Pilot station was the only thing open. Inside it smelled like floor cleaner and microwaved taquitos and recycled air.

I bought water and trail mix. I did not need trail mix. I do not like trail mix. But the Pilot station was enormous — eight thousand square feet of merchandise arranged on shelving units that radiated outward from the register like the spokes of a wheel — and I felt that leaving with only a bottle of water would be somehow inadequate to the architecture of the place. A transaction should correspond to its setting.

Outside, the truck wash was running without a truck. Water spraying in sequence from nozzles arranged in an arch, sheets of it falling through empty air onto concrete, the mechanical arms advancing along their tracks, washing nothing. Someone had paid for a cycle or the machine had malfunctioned or the ghost of a truck was receiving its bath on schedule. The driver honked. I got back on.

SANDY’S CAFE — GUEST CHECK BOMBAY BEACH, CA DATE: MARCH 11 TABLE 2

2 EGGS OVER EASY $4.50 HASH BROWNS $2.25 COFFEE (BOTTOMLESS) $2.00 SUBTOTAL $8.75 TAX $0.76 TOTAL $9.51 PAYMENT: CASH

Four tables. A counter with six stools, four of which had tape over the vinyl where the seats had split. A window that faced south toward where the waterline used to be. The shore had receded — I could see it from my table, the quarter mile of exposed lakebed running from the last row of buildings to the current edge of the water, all of it white with mineral crust, bright enough in the late morning sun to make me squint.

The waitress brought coffee without asking. She had worked here thirty years, she said, when I asked how long the place had been open. I noticed she didn’t say she stayed. She said she’d been here. The distinction matters. Staying is a decision you make once. Being here is a condition that renews itself each morning, and each morning you can choose not to acknowledge that a choice is being made.

The eggs were overcooked. The hash browns were excellent — crisp at the edges, soft underneath, with the golden color that comes from a griddle seasoned by decades of continuous use. Some surfaces improve with age. Some just erode. The difference is in whether anyone keeps applying heat.

On the wall behind the counter, a framed photograph showed Bombay Beach in what the handwritten caption identified as 1968. Marina. Yacht club with pennants. A row of date palms lining a boulevard that terminated at a dock. In the photograph, the water was ten feet from the boulevard. From my table I could see the same boulevard. The date palms were dead. The dock’s pylons still stood in the lakebed a quarter mile from the water, skeletal, salt-caked, casting shadows on nothing.

SALTON SEA STATE RECREATION AREA — DAY USE MECCA BEACH ENTRANCE DATE: MARCH 11 VEHICLE: N/A (PEDESTRIAN) FEE: $7.00 RECEIPT #: 08841

No vehicles in the lot. The entrance booth was staffed by a woman reading a novel whose cover I couldn’t see from the pedestrian window. She took my seven dollars and tore a receipt from a pad — handwritten, not printed. The pad was from the California Department of Parks and Recreation and had a design along the top that included a bear and a sunset and the words “Golden State” in a typeface meant to evoke optimism.

The recreation area had been a recreation area in the way that a hospital is a place of healing: the name described the intention, not the outcome. Concrete picnic tables with rusted bolts. A restroom building locked with a chain. Three fire pits filled with sand and cigarette butts and a single child’s sandal, sun-bleached to no color at all.

The beach was not a beach. It was a strip of crushed barnacle and tilapia bone — the lake’s entire fish population had died in stages over the past two decades, and their skeletons had been ground by water and wind into a calcium pavement that crunched underfoot like gravel. The smell was not what I expected. Not rot. Something mineral, alkaline, like the inside of a kiln that had been fired and left open to weather.

I walked to the waterline and stood there for eleven minutes. I know this because I checked the time when I arrived and again when I left. Eleven minutes of looking at water that was not ocean, not river, not lake in any recognizable sense — a body of water that existed because an irrigation canal broke in 1905 and the Colorado River poured into the Salton Sink for two years before engineers could stop it. An accident of infrastructure that became a resort destination that became an ecological collapse that became this: a woman standing alone at the edge of something that is neither growing nor shrinking but transforming into a version of itself that no longer corresponds to any name anyone has given it.

DESERT SHORES MARKET — RECEIPT DESERT SHORES, CA DATE: MARCH 12 — 10:22 AM 1 GALLON WATER $1.79 1 SUNSCREEN SPF 50 $8.99 1 POSTCARD (SALTON SEA) $0.75 SUBTOTAL $11.53 TAX $1.00 TOTAL $12.53 PAYMENT: VISA ****4417

The market had once been a marina supply shop. You could tell because the shelving was arranged for a different inventory — wide racks meant for rope coils and coolers, now holding bags of chips and canned beans and a surprising number of air freshener products. A faded sign behind the register read BAIT & TACKLE in letters that had been partly covered by a newer sign reading LOTTERY TICKETS SOLD HERE. Behind the bait sign, if you looked carefully, you could make out the ghost of an even older sign — hand-painted, the letters visible only as slight variations in the wall’s texture — that appeared to read BOAT RENTALS. Three layers of purpose on one wall. The boats were gone, then the bait was gone, and what remained was lottery tickets, which is to say: hope detached from any specific object.

I bought a postcard. It showed the Salton Sea as it appeared in approximately 1962: wide, blue, framed by palm trees and a marina with white boats. On the back, the caption read “Greetings from the Salton Riviera — California’s Newest Playground!” I did not send the postcard. I did not write on the postcard. I put it in the envelope with the other receipts.

The woman at the register asked if I was a journalist. I said no. She said they got journalists sometimes, always with cameras, always wanting to photograph the same abandoned buildings, always calling it a ghost town. “We’re not a ghost town,” she said. “Ghosts leave. We’re right here.” She was right. Seventy-one people live in Desert Shores. They buy groceries and pay utility bills and watch television at night in houses whose property values have declined by ninety percent since the 1970s and none of this constitutes being a ghost. A ghost town is empty. A town that has lost ninety percent of its value and ninety percent of its population but still has a woman selling sunscreen and lottery tickets at ten in the morning is something else — a town that has been revised downward, edited, reduced to its essential sentence while the subordinate clauses blow away across the lakebed.

CIRCLE K — RECEIPT NILAND, CA DATE: MARCH 12 — 2:18 PM FUEL — REGULAR UNLEADED 4.872 GAL @ $5.29 $25.77 1 BOTTLED WATER (1L) $2.89 TOTAL $28.66 PAYMENT: VISA ****4417

I was not driving. I had no car. I bought the fuel for a man named Russ who had driven me from Desert Shores to Niland because the bus that connects the two towns runs three days a week and this was not one of them. Russ was seventy or eighty and drove a Ford pickup that predated the current century and he did not want money but he accepted fuel, which I think he understood as a different kind of transaction — an exchange of substance rather than symbol.

We talked for forty minutes on the drive, which should have been fifteen minutes but Russ took a detour to show me the concrete foundations of a resort hotel that had been demolished in 1989. “They had a putting green,” he said, standing on a slab the size of a basketball court. “Right about here.” He pointed at nothing. The desert had reclaimed the footprint with a uniformity that was almost aggressive — creosote bush and sand filling the gaps between concrete pads as though the hotel had never been a disruption worth remembering. There was rebar sticking up from the eastern edge of the slab, bent into shapes that no longer corresponded to any structural purpose, rusted to the color of the surrounding soil.

Russ mentioned a town in Pennsylvania that had been on fire underground since 1962. Centralia. He’d seen it on a television program. A coal mine fire that couldn’t be extinguished, that had been burning beneath houses and streets and a church for over sixty years. Population went from a thousand to five. The government condemned it under eminent domain, relocated everyone, and the fire was expected to continue for another two hundred and fifty years. “But the roads are still there,” Russ said. “You can still drive on them. Steam comes up through the cracks in the asphalt and on cold mornings the whole town smokes like it’s breathing. From a distance the place looks almost normal.”

He said this without drawing a parallel to anything around us. He was telling me about a thing he’d seen on television. I wrote it down on the back of the Circle K receipt because that is what I do. The wind came through the truck’s open windows and carried the smell of salt and creosote and Russ turned the radio on and we listened to a station out of El Centro playing norteño music and neither of us spoke for the last five miles into Niland.

PARADISE INN — INVOICE SALTON CITY, CA ROOM 7 — 1 NIGHT CHECK-IN: MARCH 12, 3:45 PM CHECK-OUT: MARCH 13, 10:30 AM ROOM RATE $43.00 TAX $5.16 TOTAL $48.16 PAYMENT: VISA ****4417

The Paradise Inn had twelve rooms arranged in an L around a parking lot. Room 7 was at the bend of the L. The window faced the parking lot and, beyond it, a fence and, beyond the fence, a street that ran toward the lake, though the lake was no longer visible from this distance. It may have been visible in 1970. A real estate listing from that era — I found it later, in a library database I still had access to through credentials I had not yet returned — described the property as “lake-view lodging, walking distance to shore.” The walk to the shore is now four miles.

The room contained: one queen bed with a floral bedspread that had been laundered past any pattern. A television bolted to the dresser. A Bible in the nightstand drawer. A laminated card on the bathroom counter listing checkout procedures in English and Spanish. Two towels. The towels were beach towels — wide, striped, the kind you spread on sand. This was a motel three hundred miles from any coast, on the shore of a lake that was not swimmable, and the towels were for a beach. Nobody had mentioned this. The towels were simply there, in the bathroom, enormous and cheerful and wrong, relics of a use case that had evaporated along with the lake.

The receipt from Sandy’s Cafe, which I had placed in the envelope two days earlier, was already fading. The ink was lighter than it had been. I held it under the bathroom light and could still read the itemization — eggs, hash browns, coffee — but the total at the bottom was becoming difficult to make out. This is the chemistry of thermal paper. The image is formed by a leuco dye reacting with a color developer when heat is applied — the thermal print head in the register heats specific points on the coated paper, and the coating darkens at those points. But the reaction is reversible. Light degrades it. Heat degrades it. The oils from your fingers degrade it. Humidity. Time. Most thermal receipts become illegible within five to seven years. Some faster, depending on storage. I know this because I spent four years cataloguing documents for a university archive, and the single greatest threat to the collection was not fire or water or theft but the slow chemical retreat of ink from paper that was never designed to be permanent. The archivists called it “inherent vice” — a term from insurance law meaning a defect in the nature of the thing itself. Not damage from outside. Damage from within.

I am building an archive of documents that are in the process of erasing themselves. I have known this since the first receipt.

INTERNATIONAL BANANA MUSEUM — ADMISSION MECCA, CA DATE: MARCH 13 — 11:00 AM GENERAL ADMISSION $5.00 PAYMENT: CASH

It exists. There is a museum devoted to bananas in the unincorporated community of Mecca, California, population 8,577, adjacent to the northeastern shore of the Salton Sea. The collection includes over 25,000 banana-related items: costumes, telephones, salt shakers, clocks, a banana-shaped chair, lamps, magnets from forty countries, a framed letter from a Chiquita executive declining to sponsor the museum, hung in a position of honor near the entrance.

I stayed for forty minutes and spoke to a man named Walt who had volunteered there for six years. Walt explained the difference between Cavendish and Gros Michel banana cultivars with the intensity I have come to associate with people who have made a deliberate decision about where to place their attention. The Gros Michel was the dominant commercial banana until the 1950s, when a soil fungus called Panama disease wiped out plantations across Central America. The industry switched to the Cavendish, which was resistant. Now a new strain of the fungus — Tropical Race 4 — is killing Cavendish plantations worldwide. “The whole thing is happening again,” Walt said, adjusting a display of banana-shaped erasers, “and nobody’s paying attention because it’s bananas and people think bananas are funny.”

He did not think bananas were funny. He thought they were serious and imperiled and worth six years of unpaid labor in a building with no air conditioning in a town where summer temperatures exceed a hundred and twenty degrees. I bought a banana magnet from the gift shop for three dollars. It is not in the envelope. Some things you just keep.

BUCK’S BAR — GUEST CHECK NILAND, CA DATE: MARCH 13 SEAT: BAR

BOURBON (WELL) $5.00 BOURBON (WELL) $5.00 BOURBON (WELL) $5.00 BOURBON (WELL) $5.00 SUBTOTAL $20.00 TAX $1.75 TOTAL $21.75 PAYMENT: CASH

The bar had been something else before it was a bar — the walls had the wrong geometry for a purpose-built drinking establishment, too many right angles, a counter that ran along the side wall instead of across the back, a doorway to a second room that had been sealed with drywall that didn’t match. Bait shop, maybe. Laundromat. Something with plumbing, because there were capped pipes visible near the ceiling in two places and the floor had a drain in the center that the bar stools were arranged around as though it were a feature rather than an artifact.

Four bourbons. No food. The bartender was a woman named Dee who did not comment on the pace of my ordering, which was steady and deliberate, the way I used to go through catalog stacks — one item, process it, next item, set aside. I sat at the bar and the television was showing a basketball game with the sound off and the players moved back and forth across the court in silence like figures in a dream about purpose. Dee wiped the bar in circles that never quite overlapped. A man at the far end was reading a newspaper that was three days old — I could see the date from where I sat — turning the pages with the care of someone who intended to read every word, including the classifieds, including the legal notices, including the parts of a newspaper that exist to fill space between the parts that contain information.

Here is what I did not record on any receipt, in any annotation, in the notebook I’ve been carrying and writing in each night in motel rooms that smell like cleaning products and someone else’s cigarettes from a decade ago:

I left because you asked me to stay. That was the mechanism. You said, “I think you should stay,” and something in the construction of that sentence — the “I think,” the conditional architecture of it, as though you were offering an opinion about the weather rather than asking me not to go — something in that broke whatever was keeping me upright in the kitchen where we had been standing for forty minutes having a conversation that was not a conversation but an inventory of failures presented in the grammar of calm discussion. You said I think you should stay, and I heard the thought instead of the staying, and I packed a bag that night while you sat on the couch and did not watch me pack and did not say anything else because you had already said the thing and the thing had not worked and you were not the kind of person who said things twice. Not because you were proud. Because you understood, I think, that repetition would not change the sentence’s architecture. I think you should stay. The conditional. The thought. Not: stay. Not: don’t go. I think you should stay, and the thinking was the problem, or my hearing was the problem, or the problem was older than either and the sentence was just the permission I’d been waiting for someone to not quite give me.

You said it once during a different argument that was also not an argument: “You don’t fight, you archive.” You said that and I filed it and here I am in a bar in Niland, California, four bourbons in, writing on the back of a receipt that will be illegible in five years about a morning I chose documentation over presence, which is the only choice I have ever consistently made and the one I understand the least.

The fifth bourbon I did not order. Dee poured it without being asked. I don’t know if this was kindness or efficiency or the mercy of bartenders who have learned to recognize a silence that needs chemical assistance rather than conversation. I drank it. It does not appear on the receipt. Some transactions leave no record.

PARKING STUB — MUNICIPAL LOT SALTON CITY, CA DATE: MARCH 14 ENTRY: 9:12 AM — EXIT: 9:47 AM FEE: $2.00

No annotation.

CIRCLE K — RECEIPT SALTON CITY, CA DATE: MARCH 14 — 10:05 AM 1 BOTTLED WATER (1L) $2.89 1 ASPIRIN (24CT) $6.49 TOTAL $9.38 PAYMENT: VISA ****4417

The aspirin was for the headache that was for the bourbon that was for the thing I wrote about in the bar and have not reread and will not reread. The receipt from Buck’s is in the envelope with the others. I put it in without looking at the back.

The woman at the Circle K register had a tattoo on her inner wrist that read REMAIN in small capital letters and I wanted to ask her about it but didn’t. You don’t ask a stranger in a convenience store at ten in the morning why she had a word put on her body that means the opposite of what you have spent six days doing.

GREYHOUND LINES — BOARDING PASS MECCA, CA → INDIO, CA (TRANSFER) → LOS ANGELES (DOWNTOWN) DEPARTURE: 1:30 PM — SEAT 22B DATE: MARCH 14 FARE: $24.00

I waited at the Mecca Greyhound stop for an hour and ten minutes. The stop is not a station. It is a bench under an aluminum shade structure in the parking lot of a grocery store. The shade structure had been bent, at some point, by wind or impact, so that it leaned fifteen degrees to the east and cast its shadow not on the bench but on the asphalt six feet away. I sat on the bench in the sun.

A woman sat next to me for the last twenty minutes of my wait. She had a canvas bag and a phone and she was talking to someone in a voice too quiet for me to hear the words but I could follow the rhythm, which was the rhythm of reassurance — the same phrases repeated with small variations, the way you talk to someone who is afraid or far away or both. She hung up. She looked at the road. She did not get on the bus when it came. I don’t know who she was waiting for or whether she was waiting at all or whether the bench was just a place to sit that happened to also be a bus stop. She was still there when we pulled out, her canvas bag on her lap, her phone dark, the shade six feet to her left.

TRANSIT — TRANSFER RECEIPT INDIO TRANSIT CENTER MARCH 14 — 3:42 PM CONNECTING SERVICE: MECCA → LOS ANGELES LAYOVER: 47 MINUTES RECEIPT: COMPLIMENTARY (NO CHARGE)

The transit center in Indio was air-conditioned and had rows of plastic seats bolted to the floor and a vending machine that sold both snacks and phone chargers, which struck me as an honest assessment of what travelers actually need. I sat near the window and watched the parking lot. A man in the adjacent seat was eating sunflower seeds and dropping the shells into an empty coffee cup with a precision I found mesmerizing — each shell placed, not dropped, into the cup, as though he were constructing something rather than discarding something.

I took out the envelope. Fifteen items. The Sandy’s Cafe receipt, the oldest, was now nearly illegible. The eggs and hash browns had faded to a whisper of gray on white paper. The total was gone. The date was gone. The coffee — bottomless, two dollars — was a smudge.

The bus to Los Angeles was boarding.

GREYHOUND LINES — BAGGAGE CLAIM STUB LOS ANGELES (DOWNTOWN) DATE: MARCH 14 — 7:15 PM ITEMS: 1 BAG (CHECKED) NO CHARGE

I did not check a bag. The stub was handed to me in error by the driver, who was distributing claim tickets to the six passengers who had checked luggage and included me in the count. I took it. I put it in the envelope.

ITEM: HANDWRITTEN NOTE FOUND: PARADISE INN, ROOM 7, SALTON CITY, CA LOCATION: INSIDE NIGHTSTAND DRAWER, FOLDED INTO THE BIBLE (BOOK OF RUTH, PAGES 8-9) DATE FOUND: MARCH 12

The note was written on a piece of paper torn from a yellow legal pad. The handwriting was small and slanted left in a way that suggested a left-handed writer using a pen that was running low. The top third of the page had been folded wet or pressed against something damp, and those lines had bled into each other — words visible as shapes but not as language, the ink having migrated from its intended positions into a watercolor of illegibility. What remained:

— waited through the weekend but you already know that. I moved your things to the blue bin in the garage so they’d be out of the rain. The dogs are with Paulina and she says she can keep them through the end of the month but after that you need to figure something out. I’m not going to call anymore. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say that I haven’t said. If you need the car it’s at Tom’s on Fifth, he said he can hold it through April but not longer. I’m sorry about the window. That was me, the night after you left. I know.

— R.

I kept this.