People are amazing- Bombay Beach

I've been meaning to write this for a while, and while my daughter is watching Dora, now seems as good a time as any.

On Mentalfloss.com I found this article.
According to Ransom Riggs:

Bombay Beach may be the most famously depressing place in California; the poster child for the post-apocalypse. On the edge of the dying Salton Sea, an enormous body of water half the size of Rhode Island and so salty and polluted that by 2030 no fish will be able to survive in it, there is a town. There are several towns, actually, along the Salton’s 70+ miles of rancid coastline, but the most in tact, the most iconically awful, is Bombay Beach.

It’s a 10-by-10-block square of squat houses and mobile homes that was somebody’s idea of paradise back when the town was incorporated in 1929. A beachy getaway 150 miles from the Pacific, it was supposed to be Palm Springs with water — but decades of hyper-saline farm runoff and other problems turned the sea into a nightmare; plagued by fish and bird die-offs and outbreaks of botulism that leave its banks littered with corpses and its beaches smelling like hell, all but the hardiest tourists and investors had fled the scene by the late 60s. Even worse, the Salton began to overflow its banks, flooding the bottom part of town repeatedly. The remains of dozens of trailers and houses that couldn’t be saved still sit rotting, half-buried in salty mud, along what used to be the town’s most prized few blocks of real estate.

So here are some pictures from this place.

Dry

Same place flooded

So you would think in a place as crappy as this, people would have abandoned it, but nope, the house that has "The Hills Have Eyes" spray painted on it has people living in it.

That's not sand, that's fish bones. The constant stench of rotting fish must be overwhelming. This is the worst place on the planet, and yet, people live there, they haven't left. It's the their home. Human's need to have a place they connect to runs deep and through all cultures. It might be left over from our primate days.

This picture I think is the most interesting, no matter how isolating the location, no matter how horrible the conditions, we seek each other out. We find comfort in being a group. Sure, some of us might be shy, but when you live in the middle of the desert, it's nice to know, you're not completely alone.

There are about 300 people who live there in 2000. Some people might find this depressing but I find it to be amazing and hopeful. Human's don't give, we don't leave, we stick around because we need each other.

For more about Bombay Bay, you can read the whole article here.