Trifter

Away from the glitz and glamour of coastal towns like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, is the other California. Eastwards, away from the dreamy Pacific Ocean, are the desert and the small, lost towns where a few battered houses cling to the sand, where a single store, or a single bar serves the needs of ten, or twenty scattered families and the occasional wandering prospector.

Sometimes I fancy that these lonely places are the last refuge of dissatisfied pioneers, who came, restless, to the United States, and fled to California at the end of the rainbow. At the edge of the continent they piled up in the coastal cities, and from there, hard-core loners, seeking some sort of impossible dream, they wandered out into the desert.

Well, I said it was fanciful, but I’ve driven through many dusty outposts in the California heartland. There are dozens of them outside Palmdale, a dusty outpost itself thirty years ago, now locked together with Lancaster, a big city. Restless loners moved on from Palmdale to Littlerock and Pearblossom and El Mirage, tiny settlements in the California desert. Some drifted to the remnants of once-thriving towns on route 66, and some were left stranded when dreams dried up in the desert.

I used to pass a place called Yermo, on trips between L.A. and Las Vegas. One day, I decided to get off route 15 for a coffee and a bite to eat. The town was dying. At least one in three places was boarded up: the rest were on their last legs. Halfway down the main street, one man tended a beautiful garden in the middle of a dead landscape. He was the only sign of life, except for a police car, ominously prowling the deserted streets. The one fast food place I saw was boarded up.

I looked up Yermo on the Internet. The city guide listed – businesses one, a well-driller, community, one – Calico Ghost Town, education – a school district covering seven communities scattered over 3,200 square miles. That’s Yermo.

Further on, towards Las Vegas, there’s a place with the bizarre name of Zzyzx. The access road leads nowhere. I looked this one up on the Internet also, and all that remains now is a desert studies center for Cal. State University, one dormitory building.

Closer to Vegas is the 400lb gorilla of lost California communities, the town of Baker, population, last time they bothered to count – 650. It’s a street of motels and restaurants with the I15 running on one side and a fringe of scrubby trailers on the other. Baker is home of the worlds largest thermometer and the Bun Boy restaurant, and it’s about to be strangled by the San Bernardino/Riverside megalopolis, spreading relentlessly northward. When that happens, many of the 650 inhabitants will pull up stakes and wander out to remoter, more lost places.

It’s a California that not too many people are aware of, far removed from the wide highways of San Diego, the glitz of Hollywood, and the liberal sophistication of San Francisco. It starts a few minutes east of the coast, and stretches out towards the deserts of Nevada and Arizona. It’s a ragged dusty place where men and women can easily lose themselves.