By Michael Halstead
Tribune Reporter
Just an hour south of Palm Springs, Calif., rests a lake larger than Lake Tahoe. Surrounded by pristine mountains, teeming with fish and bountiful with hundreds of species of birds, this lake waits for the thousands of snowbird vacationers fleeing the frigid north for some sun and fun.
The lake waits. The people never come.
Welcome to the dismal and surreal world of "Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea," a documentary from filmmakers Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer screening this weekend at the Santa Fe Film Festival.
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'PLAGUES AND PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA'
Screenings: 6:30 tonight and 4:15 p.m. Saturday at Santa Fe Playhouse, 142 E. DeVargas St., Santa Fe Rated: Not rated Running time: 86 min. Grade: A
Tickets are $9. For more information go to www.santafefilmfestival.com or call (505) 988-5225.
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This haunting and occasionally hilarious film chronicles the rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story of California's largest lake as told through the voices of those who still cling, for one reason or another, to its desolate shores.
The Salton Sea blinked itself into existence through a combination of incompetent engineering and unlucky accident. At the turn of the century, land developers cut a canal into the Colorado River, hoping to bring prosperity to farms in California's Imperial Valley, but a shoddy dam and a series of unprecedented floods filled the valley, creating the state's largest lake.
By the 1950s, developers had reinvented the lake as a destination resort with fishing, water-skiing and bird-watching. During the 1960s the Salton Sea outpaced Yosemite National Park for tourist dollars.
The lake's future seemed secure.
Mother Nature had other designs.
The Salton Sea's salinity, originally an asset for sportsmen looking to catch big sea fish in its waters, jumped 25 percent in less than a decade, choking the fish of much-needed oxygen and creating a virtual petri dish of bird-killing toxins.
If that wasn't enough, two consecutive hurricanes rocked the sea in the late 1970s. With no natural outlet, the lake's water violently shifted and pitched like a swimming pool in an earthquake, engulfing yacht clubs, docks and beachfront property.
Investors fled, and the resort dried up.
"Plagues and Pleasures" coolly documents the Salton Sea's languishing aftermath, but the human heart of this film is found in the oddball locals. The motley mix of sentimental hangers-on, urban escape artists, religious zealots, inebriated freedom fighters and quixotic real estate agents alternately describe the Salton Sea as a fetid sewer and heaven on Earth.
Yet the film's most complex character might be the lake itself. Metzler and Springer eschew the role of muckraking filmmakers, training their lens on the lake and letting it tell its calamitous and complicated tale. In one scene we behold the still sea, framed in rugged mountains and illuminated in stunning alpenglow, and in the next we see its bleak beaches, blanketed with thousands of dead and rotting fish.
"Plagues and Pleasures" vividly captures the last gasps of the Salton Sea. A sea that seemingly sprung to life for the sole purpose of dying, it rests in the California desert like a mirage, simultaneously bringing hope and despair to those spellbound by its empty promise.
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