GHOST TOWN

Just under six years ago, I spent a chunk of a September day walking around a ghost town, relatively high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. The town was called Bodie and it was once a vital cog in the gold mining industry, but when the mine stopped being profitable and the jobs dried up, the town began its slow decline until only one resident remained and, when he died, the town was bequeathed to the U.S. Department of the Interior who designated it a National Historic Landmark and began to preserve the remaining 170 or so buildings in a state of “arrested decay” although it struggles to remain open with constant funding cuts.

Lying at over 8000 feet above sea level, it must have been a brutal place to live even without the bandits and desperados who seem to have made up a large number of its inhabitants.

I can’t really remember what drew us to head on through Yosemite Park that year and drag ourselves over the spectacular Tioga Pass to Lee Vining and its impressive Whoa Nellie Deli, famous for its incredible breakfasts supplied to both burly hill-walkers and tourists of a far less hardy build. I think perhaps we’d seen a documentary partially filmed at one of the California ghost towns and thought that they might be interesting places to visit, and Bodie was the one nearest to the places that we intended to drive to.

I know that we thought that it was terribly decadent (and possibly just a little self-indulgent) of us to drive through Yosemite just as a way of getting to somewhere else, and I remember finding the scenery along the Tioga Pass so incredibly spectacular as I was driving along that it was almost far too much more distracting than was good for me.

We arrived at Lee Vining on a Saturday evening after a long drive and were rather alarmed to find out that there was precious little in the way of available motel rooms available. Luckily, the rather excellent visitor center pointed us towards the nice little town of June Lake just up the highway and we managed to find a pleasant little house to rent for the weekend, to nurture our brewing headaches as we adjusted to the thin air, because at around 8000 feet, the lack of oxygen really does take some adjusting to.

The next day we headed on up to Bodie itself and spent the day quietly strolling around one of the most eerie and yet fascinating places that I have ever had the pleasure to have visited. Some of the houses are long gone, having simply fallen down, or burned or after having been trashed by that first generation of “teenagers” back in the 1950s before it was put under government protection, but around about 170 remain, some admittedly much the worse for wear, but others looking rather like the inhabitants only moved out yesterday. Pots and pans and boxes of groceries still sit on shelves when you peer in through window panes, and armchairs and beds are still in the positions they were left in when the residents finally departed.

The tour guides were keen to warn us to drink lots of water and to warn them if we felt at all faint, but I think that the fascination of this lost world really meant that, for me, that simply wasn’t going to happen.

Old cars and other engineering paraphernalia litter the site and you are not allowed to move any of it. There is no “little shop” to buy snacks in, no café to get a drink, and littering is strictly forbidden in an area that seemed to be almost frozen in time, and yet, despite all of the decay, it’s a surprisingly hypnotic and beautiful place, and has proved to be a rather photogenic inspiration to any number of photographers over the years.

My visit was made, of course, in the days before I had any compact digital cameras to travel with, so it was left to my memory to try and absorb the moment, by just sitting down on a bench for a few minutes and trying to let it all sink in. The photos the beloved took also helped, too, of course, but I do remain rather haunted by that abandoned little wooden town that speaks volumes about an age and a lifestyle long-ago lost. How hard life must have been for them then, with their bitter winters, the constant roar of the mining machinery, the thinness of the air and the sheer brutality of pioneer living. I mean, it’s no picnic for the people living up there nowadays either; The Tioga Pass is closed for much of the winter, and even in September in California, I woke up to find ice on my car windscreen and got into trouble for going for a morning stroll without telling anyone where I was going.

There were Grizzlies about, I later discovered, and this was really not the wisest thing to have done.