For our first date, Ryan took me on a lakeside picnic. He picked me up in his boxy Toyota with a basket full of things he’d made himself—veggie wraps, salads in Tupperware, strawberry shortcake—and we drove down to the water, windows rolled down, music bright and warm. Something smelled wrong from about a mile away, but it wasn’t clear what we were dealing with until we got there.
A carp die-off. Their bodies floating in waves and tangling all along the shore like silver balloons. He hid his face in his hands for a silent moment, ears peeking out pink. Our town doesn’t have many places to go, besides the lake. There’s also the diner, but I couldn’t bear the thought of Ryan’s veggie wraps melting in the too-warm car while we ordered burgers. Homemade hummus sweating olive oil and lemon, carrots and cucumbers and arugula pushing through soggy tortilla. The thought made me wilt, so I decided our picnic was perfect in its own way.
We took a long walk on the forest path above the water, passing the bottle of wine back and forth until we were ready to eat in the car, windows squeezed shut. I joked that for our second date, he could take me to the river behind the closed-down paper mill. We saw a movie instead, my head on his right shoulder, our fingers butter-tipped and twisted together under tilted light, but my other suggestion stuck and became a joke between us.
We started building a list of The Ugliest Places in America, and it’s been a work in progress ever since. We send each other screenshots whenever we come across new ideas, giggle over dramatic online descriptions. And every year we celebrate the anniversary of our first date by setting off in the old Toyota to see one of the places on our list. We haven’t thrown a second picnic, since it’s hard to eat over the loud smell of decay, but we love walking around our odd destinations, love being the only intentional visitors.
So far we’ve only seen two of the maybe two hundred places on the list, but they’ve been good ones. First a spot along the Hood Canal, just a few hours away. Low oxygen levels. Miles of oysters rotting in the sun. Ryan built a bonfire and we pretended to throw a post-apocalyptic clambake. Then the old Black Butte mercury mine in Oregon last year, with its torn earth and its litany of “Check Your Well Water for Arsenic!” signs. We crawled under do-not-enter tape and poked around a crumbling tin health hazard, a museum in the making. You should see our scrapbook. It’s really something.
This year, we’re visiting the Salton Sea, the biggest lake in California, tucked about fifty miles southeast of Palm Springs. We drive toward it, my bare feet stretched on the dash, AC turned way up, and take in the rotten egg smell we’ve read about online. It’s 104 degrees out there, fire and brimstone.
This place was a resort town in its heyday. People came from all around to sail and fish and water ski right in the middle of the desert. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby rubbed sunscreen on their noses, went swimming off the dock. These days, it’s much less impressive. Diseased wildlife, algal blooms, clouds of toxic dust scattering in the wind.
The bones of the resorts remain, sun-bleached and forgotten. We walk through them, take photos of ourselves checking into a hotel without a roof, sunbathing on the deck of a landlocked shipwreck, cooling off in the shade of a tree-shaped sculpture.
While Ryan’s off in search of a bathroom, I watch a kid dribble a soccer ball around and around the ruins. He must live nearby, must be one of the population of 324 mentioned on the Salton Sea Beach sign. He shoots and scores against a blue graffiti cat, then notices me looking and stares back. Holds my gaze until I need to look at my feet. And all at once, I feel really bad about coming here, about our big list and our scrapbook of disasters.
The kid turns away, rubs his nose and scores another goal. I have no idea how to tell Ryan that I’ve suddenly changed my mind, that I want to abandon our tradition, change tack and head to Joshua Tree for the rest of the weekend. I picture us hiking among the yucca palms and cholla cacti. When he gets back, I still haven’t come up with the right phrasing, so I just blurt it all out, unfiltered. And he laughs for maybe five whole minutes, gasping and moist-eyed. “I thought we’d have to do this forever.”