Our image might make you smile while you are enjoying its rich pigments. Perhaps you snicker at the garish misfortunes of others. The irony of the juxtaposition strikes you soon enough, creates a feeling of unease gradually devolving into remorse — a way of life has been lost; anarchy now prevails.

A bed lies askew in our crowded foreground; among piles of debris it reminds us a breathing person once lived and slept in this town, while in the background an artist has saturated a building with neon hieroglyphics. The art is primitive; a world has crashed yet its colors suggest a celebration.

Beach Estates seems destined for oblivion with neither poet nor storyteller to mark its passing. Phantasms, the disembodied, dwell here now; however among the ruins alive human beings also reside. Current residents appear to be squatting, inhabiting shelters built upon dilapidated mobile homes. Amateur carpenters have raised second-stories, improvised porches, built balconies with sunshades using scrap lumber. Sometimes the trailer-tubes join end-to-end, sometimes at right-angles, so the whole resembles a downscale hacienda more than anything else. Scavenged bricks and stones roughly outline their driveways.

Did culture cause the disaster or did it arrive from the natural world? It seems the universe and its chemical laws, earth’s climate and human decisions all joined up to destroy the Salton Sea and its formerly thriving resorts, leaving many neighborhoods looking like this: