There’s something compelling about desolation, about lost places filled with traces of forgotten histories both personal and collective.  That’s why I’ve always had a penchant for little towns around the Salton Sea, the vast, dying body of water I describe in my first novel, Drift:

It was a mistake, the product of a vulgar utopia gone awry.  At the turn of the century, they dreamed of transforming the desert into a garden by bleeding nature of more than she readily offered.  When they sought to divert the waters of the Colorado, they flooded downhill and formed the Salton Sea. In the wake of this disaster, they dreamed of turning the floodwaters into their own depraved version of Eden, a haven for real estate boosters, businessmen, and all the hungry failures who had lost out on the golden dream in Los Angeles and San Diego.  But everything went wrong, and all the detritus of the dying dream flooded into the sea—all the pesticides, toxics, organic compounds, and salt, salt, salt mixed together to form an ocean of poison that is killing even the harder corvina, who survived, like those who transplanted them, by eating all the smaller fish. Now the fish lie rotting by the shore, easy prey for the birds that scoop them up hungrily and die in large numbers.

And when you drive through places like Salton City or Bombay Beach it feels like the end of the world.  As the main character of Drift muses, “This is where you go when you stop wanting . . . Occupy the wreckage of a dead dream.  If the world pushes you too hard, just stop pushing back.”
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