The Salton Sea is dark but reflects the yellow moon, and the air smells like dead fish and red tide. Brett pays 20 bucks to camp by some RVs, a highway, and a set of train tracks, our tent pitched on gravel. 

The visitor's center is not open in the middle of the night.

I wake up at 6 am, and watch the sun come up too quickly over the sea. Brett gets up a little later and we pack up the tent and drive to Home Depot to buy paint for Leonard Knight. We stop at a deserted taqueria for breakfast burritos, and at a date farm that sells date shakes. The shakes are delicious, and they let you eat them in a tiny paradise.

Back at the Salton Sea, we visit a defunct yacht club (chipped paint modernism, quickly becoming a roadside theme) and drive through Bombay Beach. In Bombay Beach everybody has fences around their trailers, but there is no plant life, which makes the yards seem unnecessarily demarcated from the desert.