Ghost Regatta on the Salton Sea
Do not go down to the seabed today, don’t bring a friend, don’t go alone.
The hot winds are coming in over the playa, the parched residue of a sea come and gone. There’s a turbid mass in the desert expanse, ash-thick and deathly. It’s swelling and seething and creeping this way.
It’s searing salt, it’s roiling particulate. It’s a grimey wave of DDT, arsenic, cadmium, selenium--an unholy union of agricultural runoff, aerated trash and geothermal brine. It’s far-off hooting and hollering, all sloshed chanteys and tinny horn-dog rock. Yes, today’s the day the Salton Sea Regatta runs its perfect circle course.
Blotting out the pink sky, the regatta is faint and then it’s less so, the hazy motes condense and roar into parched maritime revel. Atop cracked desert expanse, the umber drifts take many shapes: crusty catamarans and gritty hydroplanes, sandy sloops and dinghies, runabouts and scows and skiffs, weekenders with raggedy sails and signal flags of airy loam. Here they come, racing windward, with dessicated scum, plastic debris, crushed bird skulls and fish vertebrae in their hellish undertow.
It’s a sea that has been born before and died and been reborn. Flooded and evaporated only to flood again, a 500 year circuit with all its blameless booming and busting. Today though, it’s all bust.
You might get lucky and the winds will die; a storm might come and clear out the sky. But not today. Today, the sands are on the move. A dust-devil might reach down and suck up a vessel at will. Flags a-whipping, booms a-swinging, the hazy race might dissipate, only to recombine with an opaque vengeance. Spraying sand around that circle course, they’re coming in leeward fast and fierce.
Some race to win, others ride for pleasure. All are innumerable sheets to the wind, a pageant of rip-roaring drunken undead. You’ve got your crumbling, trophy-mad captains in their ruined combination caps. They bark their orders at pale riders in presumably ornamental life preservers. You’ve got the phantom polo shirt and ratty ascot set, the bedraggled Bretons and boatnecks, all tied off at missing limbs. They’re giving the eye-socket to the undead ladies with the whipping quiffs, kerchiefs tamping down flyaway permanents. They hold fast to their wayfarers and cat-eye glasses, shading their sandy sockets to who-knows-what end.
It’s all carnal and hollow. When things get hot, this lot mashes against one other, dry humping in once-white shorts. They blare their transistor radios in the murk. They beckon to you, bikini-clad ballasts leaning overboard, their limbs drafting on glinting motes.
Oh, it’s a spectacle to be sure but don’t you be tempted. Don’t sneak a peek. Stay indoors, soak a rag and tie it round your face, seal the windows, clutch your babes. Stay far from the regatta lest you choke on its spume, the lake bed sediment working through your lungs and into your bloodstream to stay.
But wait--
With a cry and a cheer, the cavalry’s here! Dust-borne jet skis emerge in savage pursuit! The decomposing riders hop waves of grit to the sweet crescendos of electric guitar riffs.
Grainy powerboats tow footless barefoot skiers and eighteen rotting trick skiers in pyramid formation, these bathing-capped beauties disintegrating as they’re tugged in the gritty backwash.
Taking up the rear, there’s a corroded amphibious car towing six pantless men on an inflatable banana. They sing and screw, gleefully reducing each other to crumbly bits on impact, kicking up poison plumes as they gain on the others.
With a rant and a roar, this rabble flotilla accelerates around the course until it’s hopping distance from the rest of the throng, just a boat-length behind. With cackling delight, they careen and collide into the race leaders, plowing rubble skyward in sandy smithereens. The waterskiing pyramid goes tumbling tits-up, ass over speedboat into death-rolling dinghies, broaching and dissolving into the dried-up drink. Wriggling chunks of ghost sailors and disembodied, still-laughing jet-ski-babe heads explode into scattering hulls and rigging, making a fine whirling flotsam.
Way, hay up it rises, a vile dry squall on its way skyward. The ghost-farers have blown up and away but be warned! They’ll ride again and again on other days. You won’t see it coming. None of us will. It’s no one’s fault, there’s nothing to be done.
They call it a regatta but really, how can it be, when there is no finish line, no starting cannon, no beginning, no end, just a merry hoard yoked to time, leaving naught but dust in its wake.
Sarah Blank hales from Los Angeles, CA where she does visual effects and writes humorous site-specific pulp. She is currently rounding out a collection of stories entitled "California Bloodbath" and hatching big plans for multimedia accompaniment.