Wanton Salton

 Part three of Sunday's trilogy: Salton sunset.

A few campers parked in the sand; some desolate buildings sinking into the earth; at the end of a road with a sign: "County Park Closed."; Lifeless power poles littered the landscape; something as simple as a boat ramp deemed completely useless: broken earth where the water once was.

Eroica naturally went straight for the fish skeletons.

 "Withdraw into yourself and look.  And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.  So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine."

 ~ Plotinus, First Ennead VI, 9

Picking away at Plotinus' beauty, but that quote doesn't fit the location as much as my people in it.

Something about the sunset light at the Salton Sea is absolutely incomparable to anywhere else I've ever shot.  I have no Idea why, but I could make some practical guesses.  Forget the masses of abandoned structures in the area, this is basically an abandoned lake.  Man made, though by accident, a pretty sizable aquatic structure here, to sit in desolation amidst a universe of fish skeletons.  The only time I have ever seen a significant number of people around this lake, it was groups of photographers who seemed to be mulling around capturing the aftermath of some natural disaster.  The true irony here is that most of the beautiful abandoned structures and cars that everyone always told me I should shoot, but I didn't, are gone, in an attempt to clean up the area, and apparently make more plots of uninhabitable wasteland, like trying to polish cancer.  I imagine that at some point I'll be the old guy telling my grandkids that I remember when there was water there, like those our great-grandparent's age would say that they remember when this was just a pond in the ugly desert.