Bom-Bae
Bombay Beach is my bae!
After more than two years documenting and exploring this funky ghost town, it has become increasingly difficult to explain exactly what it is that I do there.
“Jose! Are you free this weekend?”
“No, I won’t be sorry, I’m driving 3.5 hrs out into the hot desert to see what’s going on”
Sometimes I go and just have a few beers, make small talk with the locals, other times I end up getting too involved with the locals and get invited to raid the nearby bombing range (a federal crime that I did not commit, btw). I have ended up in alien sex parties and have been served drive-by margaritas in the dead of the night by a 4×4 vehicle. I have been invited to bug themed restaurants, told that I was born in the wrong millennium, blown up pumpkins, celebrated the dead locals’ birthdays. I have fought the biggest horseflies I’ve seen in my life and even saw a celebrity once.
Every single time, no matter what random day of the week I show up, it’s a different experience. Every single time, it’s an adventure, and every time I walk out with a story to tell. However, this is of course my fantasized “my life is a movie” version of Bombay Beach.
Bombay Beach is a ghost town near the Imperial Valley in California. It is home to the Salton Sea, a famously Dead Sea, as in nothing can possibly live there due to the salinity of the water. What used to be a celebrity resort in the 1950’s, hosting celebrities as big as The Beach Boys, became a rotting playground for outcasts and hippies. The dead fish got washed ashore, and the decay of everything in and outside the water gave Bombay its infamous smell. What was, at one point, sand is now mostly made up of fish bones and other decaying matter.
It was deemed irredeemable and a waste of resources to even try to preserve it. Nothing would ever live again in the Salton Sea, and the once bustling town lost its direction and purpose. As time went by, less than 100 permanent residents stayed, but surprisingly, they’re not really locals; no one really holds much significance to what Bombay Beach used to be, what it used to represent. Almost everyone stumbled upon it and decided to stay.
There is a culture brewing in Bombay Beach, and it has been for the last decade or two. A culture of mostly hippies and nomads looking to express themselves, on their very own, they have turned the decaying town into a huge art playground. Building stuff on top of the houses, their backyards, or sometimes fully repurposing them. There are many sculptures and think pieces resting on the shit sand down at the beach, and even some art far into the sea.
In the whole town, there is only one restaurant/bar, and this is where the thinkers get together to discuss ideas or figure out where they’re spending the night. While not many of them reside in Bombay, people from the nearby towns come here to meet. Niland, Palm Springs, Slab City, all the way up from Joshua Tree, something draws all of them to Bombay. And the bar is always a good time, always someone interesting to chat with, and by sunset, you start hearing rumors of where the party for that night will be (there is a party every night).
“You'd better join us at the party by the beach tonight, we’re setting off some fireworks”
And I walk from one corner of the town to the other in under 15 minutes, make it to the beach, and begin to ponder if I’m sleeping in my car tonight.
I, of course, document the whole thing with my camera and tell people about what I do. There is a lot of comfort for me in walking around aimlessly in the hot desert ghost town with nothing but a camera in hand, checking what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, talking to the locals, and hearing their stories. I have done it for many years in many different places, but Bombay sticks out to me because of their community, the welcoming comfort that they provide. Their lives not all that different from mine. They make me wonder if one day I’ll drop everything and live in the desert. Which I won’t because that’s crazy.