The long stretch of beach gives underfoot like loamy soil, breaking through in spots, baked by the sun with the crunch of long-dead creatures. It stretches wide before reaching the edge of the inland sea, once a resort playground and now exhausted and abandoned, laced with a post-party confetti of pink and white mussel carcasses, delicate like cherry blossom petals, sprinkled with tiny, glistening fragments of fish spines.

The murky water laps tentatively at the shore with an oily touch. The air has the sharp smell of the sea, marine life that has been beached, abandoned, rotting, forgotten. The landscape loops on repeat for miles and miles with no fishermen, no families, no gathering of seagulls along its toxic shoreline. Simply gray sand-soil, cracking into polygonal plates, gathering up a feast of tiny bleached and delicate shells, like flakes of salt in the unrelenting southern California sun.