Sad Beauty of Abandonment: Bodie and Mono Lake
Day 4.2
Bodie Historic Place
By the time the rented grey Ford Focus turned onto CA 170/Bodie Road in Mono County, California, the family’s plastic salad cartons, hotdog trays and fruit and drink cups were empty, and it was good thing. Bodie Road was as pot-holed, rugged, dirty and unpleasant as the history of Bodie, the town. Over the few miles of road that led to the historic place, every joint, bone, organ, body and item in the car was jolted and jiggled as the vehicle climbed the dusty, washboard road.
Bodie is a ghost town. The mining settlement grew up around William S. Bodey’s discovery of gold there in 1859, was deserted in the 1970s, then turned into a State Park. It’s like a town one might see in a Western movie, where the word “lawless”, its synonym, and consequences make up most of the inhabitants’ descriptions.
“We’ll need more water bottles,” AJ said when the little car came to a welcomed stop in the paved parking lot overlooking the town. “And I’m only putting one in my bag!” They all heard her, she thought.
Near the parking lot amid rusted pieces of cumbersome mine equipment, was a monument with an informative plaque, and new bathrooms.
The family filtered into the town, wandered down the deserted, but very much peopled streets, stopping to peep in windows and doors. Many of the buildings–houses, stores, a post office, a museum–still stand strong, with steps set under the windows so visitors can visually feed on the dregs of once-lived-in homes. Some doorways were open, with wire barring admittance, giving a better view of the broken and sun scorched households.
Through the dusty glass windows and doorways, AJ, One, Two and B saw old furniture, tables, chairs, beds; wallpaper peeling off the ceilings, walls and shelves. The buildings were littered with ornaments and pieces of lives judged not valuable enough to encumber the fleeing inhabitants.
A big, multi-shed stamping milll sits on the hillside overlooking the whole town, like a murderer gloating over the body of a victim.
As AJ walked along the dry and dusty streets of the town, she began to better understand the Foley tracts of Westerns; every step was a fine, dry gravelly crunch, loud and ominous in her ears, exactly how it sounded in the movies. The air was sweet with fragrant artemesia. She squinted in the relentless sun.
“Where’s Dad?” One asked from the shade of a nearby building. B had wandered out of sight, lured ever deeper into the skeletal town by the aging artifacts and dead scenery.
“Around somewhere,” AJ said, then lead the boys off to look for him, interrupted by the draw of some interesting building, or stopping to appease Two’s complaints and lack of interest.
They caught up with B in an empty lot. He was taking pictures of the yellow flowers.
AJ found a rock along a dry, sage-brush lined road in Bodie and sat eyeing the famed ghost town, now milling with lots of people and a fair amount of leashed dogs. As she sat, she imagined the scene had transformed into a pensively cerebral western movie. Except for the stamping mill behind her, most of the buildings are built of cedar, destined to last a while more, sunburnt and dark gold. She looked at the water bottle in her bag, a few swallows filled the bottom. They were half a mile away from the parking lot.
The desperate, dry imagery was enhanced by the fact that though she warned One and Two to take water bottles with them, neither wanted to play camel that day or had too much faith that Mom would provide the water. But she didn’t. So in the hot dry sun, they moseyed around, throats parched, the heat trying hard to bake them, while B and Tripod took pictures of rusted-out autos and beautifully decrepit houses.
AJ pulled out the brochure. It warned, “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING. Leave every rock and rusty can in place for our grandchildren to see.” They want every stick, stone and building to stand until time eternal, for what? A monument to a town built on greed and the lust for fortune and just plain bad behavior, thought AJ. A cautionary tale?
“By 1879 Bodie boasted a population of about 10,000 and was second to none for wickedness, badmen and the ‘worst climate out of doors’. One little girl, whose family was taking her to the remote and infamous town, wrote in her diary: ‘Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.’ The phrase came to be known throughout the West.”
Eventually the heat, 8000 foot elevation and repetition of abandoned houses lost its charm. After passing up the opportunity to tour the gold mill, the family headed to the parking lot. Fatigue, thirst and heat had wrenched the words from them, they were quiet as they trudged up the small incline.
Back down the agitating road, in the nearby town, they filled a booth in an out-of-fashion diner where the only fresh vegetable was iceberg lettuce. AJ ordered the salmon. “I’m not sure what this fish was before it hit my plate, but I don’t think it was salmon. It’s as white as this dried up baked potato.” Shrugs all around the table. She ate it all.
Mono Lake
Mono Lake is filled with weird, weird, water. It is a lake with rampant kidney stones, piles of them, called tufa, mineral carbonate precipitates left in mounds and towers when the water receded from bubbling springs.
The tufa are the result of the water abandoning its place, drawing back from its shores because a few decades ago, when Los Angeles needed more water, they diverted the streams that fed Mono Lake to the city’s water supply. The tufa would never have formed if the lake was left alone. A few decades, legal fights and environmental consciences later, they are trying to put things right again. In the early 1990s, Mono Lake won back its tributaries, but with the drought it will be a long time until it reclaims its former borders.
“I’m going to put my feet in. The visitors center said you can swim in it,”AJ said as they walked down the path to the shore line. “Will you come with me?” she asked the boys.
A mix of noncommittal grunts and sighs and possibly a “maybe” was the answer.
As B and One, who carried the camera bag and Tripod, searched for the best place to catch the sun sinking into the lake, AJ and Two explored the area.
Excited and curious, AJ walked up to the water’s edge. A dark cloud wafted at her foot falls. They were flies. Millions of little black flies swarmed the shores, their larvae wriggled and squirmed in shallow, oozing algae puddles, with a brine shrimp here and there. Two hopped from rock to dry spot to rock, asking questions and making comments.
“Ewww. Just, ewww, she said as she watched the flies and larvae swarm over the algae and salt-encrusted rocks. “I guess I’m not going in.”
“Why are the rocks white? What are those things? Why is the ground green in places? Why is the water dark and moving like that?” he asked as he watched her, carefully stepping rock by rock further from the shore.
“Well, do you remember in Yosemite, at Soda Springs where there were white rings around the rocks …” the process of explaining scientific phenomena was a learning experience in itself. She had to think of the process and put it into words an 8 year old would understand. “ … when water that has a lot of minerals and salt in it evaporates, or becomes particles, like steam–but you can’t see it, it’s slower–the water goes off and leaves the minerals, and the minerals appear white … kinda like salt. This is salt, actually …”
She bent down and dipped her hand in the water. It was slippery to the touch, like watered down dishwashing liquid.
Along with birds, flies and Big City water hogs, Mono Lake attracts photographers. It’s probably the colors: unique beige, chalky white, salmon pink edges to the grey-blue whale sky that frames a pale blue, grayish rippling lake. On her way through the maze of towering tufa to find B and One, she had to artfully avoid the ire and and camera lens of half a dozen photographers. She and Two found pieces of tufa to sit on as they watched the sun go down. It was calm but not peaceful with the chatter of the clicksters and their entourages.
After a quarter mile walk to the bathroom with Two, AJ came back to the lake, dim with dusk, to find tiny, flighty, thin-winged, flirty bird-like animals careening over the lake surface, too spastic and agile to be birds. “Bats! They’re bats, Two, look at them!” she said as she approached the water, cringing when the curious little mammals came too close. Two hung back. They dived and dipped along the water, enjoying a meal of alkali flies, turning in sharp jerks, fluttering this way and that.
It was a long, dark drive through the woods back to their cabin at Yosemite. On the boulder-lined cliff-edged road, they crept past nonchalant deer, slowed for courageous chipmunks and coyotes. Mice skittered on the road in front of the car like bread crumbs blown across a table top.
Between the natural destinations and man-made sites that day, AJ couldn’t decide which she liked best. The natural sites–the bald rock mountains of Olmstead Point, the clear watery beauty of Tenaya Lake, the wonderfully strange Soda Springs–were captivating because they just were, no one made them, the stories of their creations were hidden in the ancient churnings of an infant world. The mystery of their stories leant, in part, to the strong aura of wonder in their appeal.
The man-made destinations of that day–bad, bad, Bodie the deserted gold mining town, and the weird concentrated water, fauna and tufa of neglected Mono Lake–had very human, apparent stories to their inceptions. Both were based on greed, one which man was trying to preserve, the other which man was trying to undo, to restore to nature. There was something hauntingly sad about the man-made sites as monuments to abandonment. The things left behind after abandonment draws visitors, as a train wreck captivates onlookers. Something bad or injurious had happened at these places and that thread of sadness, of desertion and scars, tipped the scales for AJ. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw”*, but humanity may not be much better, only more subtle and elegant in its savagery.
*Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H., 1850, Canto 56
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