Saturday, April 02, 2011
Bodie and Soul
The little red soob had weathered a night of high altitudes and freezing temps, and so had we in our shock-corded tent - proud survivors of overnight car camping at the eastern end of the Tioga Pass near Mono Lake. The day lay open before us, dewy and glittering with promise. We could have done anything. What we did was, we went to a ghost town. That trip really seems to have stuck with me. Might as well share. My blog, innit?
From where we awoke, the turnoff was 15 miles away. Then there was a good long stretch of rough track, 10 miles rarely traveled and an adventure in itself, which we braved under the tender mercies of our tiny 4x4. Finally, the pavement stopped three miles short of our destination, but mere washboard and ruts could not dissuade us. We had reached Bodie. It was still early. It was cold. It was perfect.
Back in the day there was a fair quantity of gold in the Sierras, and a fair number of hardy souls willing to endure privation to get a piece of that action. Some smaller boomtowns like Copperopolis and Placerville still survive today, but Bodie, once the biggest boomer of the lot, is now a ghost town - plenty of houses, some stores, a church, a miserable school - but no one lives there. Tin cans hunch, bleached and dusty, on the warped shelves of an abandoned grocery; a chenille still drapes a bed that was worn out when left behind to moulder in the 1930s. Big old coupes rust on their axles amid tumbleweeds. Huge beams prop up walls at crazy angles and roofs crack and shrivel under the onslaught of freezing winters and scorching summers.
The town was built up at about 8400 feet, well into the bare cirques and escarpments of the sere eastern Sierras. The Donners died in more hospitable lands, though not so very far away as the raven flies. In its heyday nearly 10,000 souls called Bodie home, though it’s hard to imagine that many meant it with any fondness. A gold strike had brought the first prospectors but they played it out within a few decades; later, a huge ore processor anchored the town, a machine the size of a castle that boiled gold out of granite tailings by dint of violence and cyanide. So long as gold kept showing up in the tailings, Bodie wasn’t going anywhere.
Then the gold stopped showing up. The processor sat idle, shut down in the ‘40s, began to fall apart. There was nothing else there, no other reason for the town to exist, so bit by bit, it ceased to. Once the post office closed in 1942, there really wasn’t much left to salvage for the 90 or so souls still living there. People left their homes and never came back; people died there without kin or friend to take their place. The buildings where they’d lived their lives just persisted, audaciously, until the elements might finally push them over to bury it all again in sand and sagebrush.
Bodie is now maintained as a State park, which in this case means “State of Arrested Decay.” They won’t let any of the 200 or so remaining buildings collapse completely, but otherwise little is done to stem time’s inexorable ravages. Places persevere with the bare tenacity of inertia. Few visitors brave the miles of dirt track leading to it; no amenities await them there but a pit toilet and some photocopied maps for self-guided tours. All around it is emptiness - the kind unique to harsh wild places.
We spent a few hours wandering its streets and peering in its warped windows in 1992 - a trip that remains unchanged in my memory, like a recurring dream, like a souvenir rock kept in a drawer. In my mind, I keep going back there. Bodie didn’t feel like a slice of preserved history - this was no museum, no replica, no rendition or reconstruction or recapitulation. Bodie is time itself, dense and earthy at its crust, filled with ineffable delicacy, dusted with sunlight and wind and alkali. A visit to Bodie is not for all travelers, but for those who travel not to places but through eras and worlds that supersede the concept of “place.” It is a surprisingly rich experience - considering that even the ghosts there ran out of gold a century ago.
Additionally we climbed a volcano, but I’ll get into that story later. But, not coincidentally at all, it seems I’ve missed an important appointment: Purim was a few weeks ago. I hope you got some hamentashen and otherwise celebrated appropriately. I should have re-pointed you to this story, which I seem to do every year so why should I stop now. Enjoy, stay well, and keep those cards and letters coming.
