The Last Resort

Ash Sanders reports from Bombay Beach, a former resort community beside California's shrinking Salton Sea. The essay follows longtime residents, artists and self-described absurdist philosophers who live amid environmental decline and economic abandonment. One resident's annual run around the sea becomes a physical measure of retreat: as the shoreline contracts, the route grows shorter and more exposed lakebed appears.

The story is also about what people build in a place others have written off. Art, improvised institutions and unusual forms of community create freedom and belonging without erasing the toxic landscape or the town's history. Sanders holds both realities together, examining the energy of reinvention as well as the tensions and limits of an outsider-led revival.