In the summer 2012, I helped a close friend (who was also named Sam) move from Pasadena, California to Atlanta, Georgia. Instead of taking a normal route along Interstate 10, Sam, drawn in by the search for a rare German pastry called baumkuchen, insisted on taking a circuitous route that ultimately sprawled across the Great Basin and the Midwest and down the Appalachians and Atlantic Coast. My recollections from the time, lightly edited, are hereby offered for your entertainment.
Day One
There is no barrier in Europe that can compare to America’s western interior. A thousand miles across, it only intensifies the colonial atmosphere that pervades western life. To the first pioneers, “America” was a separate country, very far away.
The western interior was also the last place in North America to be explored by Europeans. Generations of surveyors, engineers and gentleman adventurers dreamed of a great river, the Buenaventura, which flowed west from the Rocky Mountains, possibly via Lake Utah, through a yet-undiscovered great plain into San Francisco Bay.
It didn’t exist. What lie in its place was too horrible for them to imagine.
Jebediah Smith was the first white man to cross what is now Nevada, and he found it so lacking that his associate David Burr didn’t bother to put it on the map. Instead there is an inscription:
“Some isolated mountains rise from this plain of sand, to the regions of perpetual snow, the small streams that flow from these, are soon absorbed in the sand. It contains a few miserable Indians and but little game.”
It was into this land that Sam and I found ourselves navigating uneasily in his 2011 Prius. We were following a route taken on fishing trips by my father and grandpa, up U.S. Highway 395 along the wrong side of the Sierra Nevada. But first we had to go to California City.
The Great Recession devastated the American west more than anywhere else. Towns of unimaginable sprawl rose up in the desert and the scrub, to be filled with people looking for construction jobs. When the houses were finished, people moved in looking for work building more houses. Before long the west was full of massive, brand new cities with no character. No industry. No transportation. No water. And now, no people.
It is in such a spirit that California City was founded, though it never got as out of control as those places. It began in the late 1950s as the dream of sociologist Nat Mendelsohn, who bought huge quantities of worthless desert to build a city that he hoped would rival Los Angeles, a model community laid out in the awkward, twisty style that has taken over suburban planning since Levittown. You can still see hundreds of streets stretching out for miles. They all have names, and they all have signs, but nobody has ever lived on them, and nobody never will.
How could we not go to a place like that? Sam and I drove off Highway 14 and onto the main street, past the subdivisions that weren’t, into the center of town, which has a golf course and, unbelievably, a lake.
As we drove, I looked in his glove compartment for some water. Instead I found a little wool monkey, knit in bright stripey colors. I stared for a long while before silently closing the compartment.
“It’s my aunt’s,” said Sam. “She takes that to national parks and takes its picture. She wanted me to take it to Mount Rushmore.” When we arrived at California City Hall, he considered leaving it on top of the welcome sign, but reconsidered. The town left much to be desired. Across from City Hall was a Rite-Aid and a taco truck. It was only 10:30, but we’d been up before dawn and availed ourselves of both. The tacos tasted like ass, but we got some much-needed caffeine and chapstick, and headed back on the road.
Mistakenly, we returned to the 14 the same way we’d arrived. Ideally it would have been faster to go due north and meet the highway there, but as we drove we saw a crazed woman in a baby blue nightgown, traveling toward us on the wrong side of the road in a mobility scooter. We watched as she passed us and decided that what we had just witnessed totally justified the extra ten minutes’ drive.
We continued north through Red Rock Canyon. We passed other lost settlements; Cartago, Keeler, Manzanar. The desert turned into a grassy steppe. I didn’t remember this; what I had expected to be red desert was green. It was almost…disappointing.
My father had made a habit of taking me fishing at the height of the summer storms. Being from Pasadena, where there are no summer storms, I wasn’t prepared for the experience, though the fish tend to swim closer to the surface, so my catch was always excellent. The last time this ever happened, I was ten years old and my dad’s car broke down, which landed us in Mammoth where there was a mechanic. I was fine with this. More than fine. I have always hated camping, despite my father’s often angry insistence that I love it.
I was hoping to take Sam to a Japanese restaurant I remembered with a panoramic view of all the thunderstorms, but it wasn’t open for lunch, so instead we went to a creperie in the old town center, which now consisted of big condominium blocks for the skiers. The crepes again tasted like ass, but as with the the tacos we ate them anyway because this time we knew there would be no food until dinner in Reno. Sam claimed to know of a good Ethiopian restaurant there, and I had promised to keep an open mind.
We stopped over at Mono Lake. He became excited over the number of birds. He had quite a fondness for birds, a fascination adopted from an old girlfriend who known to cause traffic accidents anytime she saw a bird in the sky. He was also excited by a little island in the lake, an artificial volcano built for an old movie, now used for scientific research. But I had no interest in these things when in my mind the real attraction was just a few miles away.
We took a turn off to an ancient, perfectly straight highway known as the Pole Line Road. From there we turned onto a seemingly minor street that turned to dirt. The Prius, weighed down by all of Sam’s possessions, struggled up the gorge at 20 miles an hour while rain fell. I played some music from the film There Will Be Blood. We were coming to Bodie.
Bodie was a gold mining town, but it was established decades after California’s gold rush. When huge gold veins were discovered, the miners were paid unprecedented sums, and before long a proper town had come about with a racetrack, a Chinatown, a sizable red light district, and perhaps most importantly a bank. In 1880, it was the eighth-largest city in California.
The official documentary on Bodie, which my mother purchased on VHS from the Mono Lake visitors’ center sometime in the late ’90s, writes off nearly everything that happened after 1881 or so, which is ridiculous. While the town’s population did decline, it was only because new mining technology had rendered obsolete the most dangerous sort of deep-tunnel mining. Bodie also found a second life during prohibition as a distribution center for illicit liquor. But after a massive fire in the 1930s, there was to be no recovery. The last mine was closed during World War II, and though as late as the 1950s there was hope of restarting the operation and reviving the town, it wasn’t to be.
In 1962, Bodie became a state park. Today it is notable for two things: being incredibly well-preserved, and for the manner by which it is kept so pristine. Unlike, say, Calico, it’s incredibly respectful. There’s no commercial artifice of any kind. Rather than restore Bodie to its peak, it is kept as it was when it was acquired in 1962, what Sam called “a very specific level of disrepair.” If a building today is damaged, it will be repaired, but if it was found that way, it will not. That sounds silly, but the effect is undeniable. While there, we saw them repairing storm-damaged windows.
The car was pelted mercilessly by hail as we pulled up to the main gate. Sam paid the guard and we waited hopefully for the hail to stop before getting out. The storm lasted all of five minutes. Sam looked at boilers and opium pipes while I led him toward my personal favorite building: the school. I love the school most because it was the last building to close (1942), and as such any child looking in will find a tableau eerily similar to their own classrooms. There’s a lesson on the blackboard, scattered craft projects, a map of Europe with the Third Reich, a posterboard with a patently nonsensical Dick and Jane excerpt, and an incredibly creepy little jack-o-lantern bag for Halloween candy. When I was little, my dad and I would run into lots of older people in cafes who had grown up in Bodie. This was their stuff. That’s why I loved the school.
I took Sam across town to the cemetery, where we discovered much to our surprise that people are still being buried there. The most recent graves are those of the Bell family, who cared for the town after it was abandoned. Last of all was Robert T. Bell, who was buried with his family in 2003. His tombstone read:
“Hello, God, I’ve just arrived here from Bodie. I am the last of the old-time miners.”
Before leaving Pasadena, I had Sam watch a short documentary on Bodie from 1953. I found the film Lynchian; he disagreed. The host of the film visits the cemetery, pointing out there aren’t many old people buried there, but lots and lots of children. While life in Bodie was not nearly as violent as one is led to believe, but it was tough, and cold– on this particular mid-July day it was around 50º Fahrenheit, while in California City it had been in the 90s– and especially so in the early years.
Although it was nearly 4 in the afternoon, we were little more than halfway to Reno. We continued the journey silently and without pause. Reno was a glittering oasis in the forest and we arrived at sunset. Sam figured out before leaving that casinos have incredibly cheap hotel rooms, as they’d rather have you spend money gambling, so he booked us at Circus Circus, which was the cheapest.
Unfortunately the Ethiopian restaurant was closed on Mondays, so we settled for an Indian restaurant south of the river. Well, let me say it was absolutely terrific. I had chicken curry with garlic naan, and they had already put out some naan chips with authentic spicy sauce. This was a foodie tour after all, and in the event that you should find yourself in this area, I wanted to make a recommendation.
After dinner, Sam went out to gamble. He won $9 overall, but spent $13 on whiskey. I caught up on Breaking Bad.
Day Two
The sun rose over the Circus Circus parking lot. We had a long day ahead, and even if it wasn’t the longest, it would prove to be our most difficult. We ate an extravagant and fruit-heavy breakfast at a place called Peg’s Glorified Ham and Eggs, all the while while I scanned the local newspaper. It turned out that we’d just missed a campaign visit by Mitt Romney.
We slogged up Interstate 80 through identical sets of uninhabited mountains and grasslands. While searching for a gas station in Fernley, we passed a cutoff to U.S. Highway 50, billed on the sign as “the loneliest highway in America.” Only in Nevada would loneliness be a point of pride. To pass the time, I played Radiolab and This American Life until we reached Elko, where we struggled mightily to find lunch. In the interest of supporting local business, we found a Chinese restaurant. It was dreadful, everything was covered in a reddish glaze that Sam informed me is a common characteristic of Chinese food east of the Sierras. It was inedible, and I relocated to KFC. We vowed to never say the name Elko again.
In preparing for this trip, I had created a playlist of songs to complement the passing landscape. And as the drive across Nevada is famously dull, I decided to liven things up with comedy sketches, novelty songs, and random sound effects. One such was a clip of comedian Reggie Watts doing a cover of “Panama” by Van Halen. We had seen Reggie Watts perform at a comedy club a year earlier.
“Did you know he did the theme song to Louie?”
“No he didn’t,” I said.“What are you talking about? That wasn’t him?”
“That’s a real song!” I replied indignantly. “It’s from 1973!”
“That’s a real song!?”
“It was a number-one single!”
After a long silence, Sam finally pushed me to play some more music. It was at this moment that the highway turned and faced down into Lake Bonneville, the driest lake in the world. Were it not empty, it would cover an area the the size of Connecticut. As it stands, the lakebed is big and flat enough to see the curvature of the Earth. The highway through it is incredibly straight, and as we drove we sat silently in awe. It made up for the whole day.
Salt Lake City is not much bigger than Reno or Pasadena, but as the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who have some very precise principles when it comes to city planning, it has a very strict and rather strange layout. The grid should make it easy to navigate, but this is offset by the fact that the streets all have names like “200 South” or “1100 West.” How can people remember addresses here? “Oh, you’re looking for 450 south 900 West, this is 900 North 500 West.” But at least the streets were wide and there was plenty of parking.
We settled for pizza in the hipster section of the city, which was just one side of a single block on the main street. The pizza was adequate, but the hipsters seemed to come from a bygone era. The western interior is full of places like this, where culture and fashion and ideas are uniformly behind the rest of the world. Not long ago, there were people out here so poor that they were living generations behind. You could see them in far-flung places like Wyoming, decked out in Edwardian dresses, driving ’57 Chevys and using Alta Vista instead of Google. But that time has ended, and the delay has been cut down to about five years.
Incidentally, Sam was right. The theme song to Louie is actually a cover of the 1973 original by Reggie Watts.