On the Back Roads (4 page)

Offering exciting promise, the Salton Sea was a glamorous place in the 1950s and 1960s. Only 150 miles from Los Angeles, this 300,000-acre saltwater lake in a mountain-rimmed desert, was also a real-estate promoter's dream. The promoters moved here in 1958, creating a place called Salton City and began selling lots at $200 down. Responding to TV and radio ads, speculators flocked to the barren desert to scoop up the raw land. A million-dollar freshwater distribution system was built for a population of 40,000. Power lines and 265 miles of streets were laid out on the sand. Some were paved. Every intersection had a sign—as they do today—bearing the names of the empty streets.

Spread over 19,600 acres of flat desert, the seaside paradise was ready for a city that never came. In the late 1960s, the whole thing collapsed, as speculative land promotions often do. The promoters packed their tents and disappeared.

Today the Salton Sea is an ecological disaster. Irrigation runoff dumps 4 million tons of salt, plus fertilizer and insecticide residue, into the sea every year. At Salton City, a foul smell often hangs over its hard, salt-encrusted shores, washed by water that is the color of cloudy tea and 29 percent saltier than the Pacific Ocean. The rising water of the sea has claimed its beaches and marinas, their crumbling structures half submerged and covered black with barnacles. Hot desert air blows through the empty windows at the abandoned, bankrupt Salton Bay Yacht Club.

Obviously, the Salton Sea has had its share of bad press. CBS's
60 Minutes
reported the New River has been dumping raw sewage into the sea for forty years and called it the nation's dirtiest. Local residents had hoped the
60 Minutes
piece would wake up the political bureaucracy to the ecological tragedy happening here. It did just that. But it also ran off the fisher men.

Next to Johnson's Landing is the RV park where Curt Goodpasture lives. He has fished the Salton Sea for over thirty-five years. “Better than half my life,” he says. “Fish aren't as big as they were. But all this talk about the fish being
gone, it ain't so. It's serious fishermen that's gone. These guys who come out now just like to drink beer in a boat.”

People here grieve for their desert sea, but science and politics may yet save it. While they wait, life here is otherwise serene, unrushed, uncrowded, simple, and healthy. The sun's entry and exit behind the mountains is gorgeous. And so is the Salton Sea, best viewed from a little distance.

Salton City's population has remained stable at 1,050 for the last few years. Yet the bird population has grown considerably. Why? Maybe the bug population has grown, too. Then again, the birds may know something we have yet to understand.

T
he open road, like having time to kill, will prod a man's curiosity into running wild, once boredom has turned it loose. I was headed east on Interstate 10 with a rumbling pack of Peterbilts and Kenworths. Exhaust lids flapped with each gear change. Tied together by machinery pushing its limits, we made the long pull out of the Coachella Valley. We peaked at 1,705 feet, Chiriaco Summit. Reaching the straight and level, the pack unravels and scatters, never to remake itself.

All was peaceful, as boredom always is, until a sudden reverberating rumble brought me straight up in my seat. A train! Filling the side mirror, it appeared to be passing in the other lane. After four diesel engines dragged their thunder down the track, a trail of container cars banged along beside me. Our speeds were a close match.

Freight trains blend into the natural setting of the West like cattle. There are so many of them. But this train was not one with the landscape. It was too close and intimate. Like the pack of trucks, we were instant comrades, bound by a common goal in the desert: to get to the other side.

The caboose is the personality of any freight train. I was looking forward to seeing it. Maybe I would swap waves with the guys inside. I even slowed down to speed it up.

As a kid, visiting my Grandmother Sheakley in New Hampton, Iowa, a train whist le sparked a ritual. My cousins and I would race for the tracks to wave at the passing freight. A caboose was always the ceremonial ending, crowned with the guy in its cupola who always waved back. Ah, sweet memories!

This train ended with no caboose. I was a witness to an incomplete event, like a ball game with no ninth inning. Two more trains passed during the hour. The same flat ending.

This is not Iowa. It's fifty years later. Doesn't a transcontinental train still need a caboose?

The answer was not out here on the interstate. But I knew where to look. The Riverside County road map would be a good place to start. County maps show railroad tracks. Any town with a railroad going through it would do just fine. Someone there would have the answer. Such extensive map research, however, must be done over a counter with a cold drink in a cool place. Ahead was the exit for Desert Center.

It doesn't get much better. This is life at its intellectually finest: to be able to scratch curiosity when and where it itches.

I
coasted down the off-ramp and turned onto a road that lead under the interstate. This was Desert Center, basically little more than a hard-sand parking lot.

The road goes on to Kaiser's Eagle Mountain Mine, which shut down years ago. People in Los Angeles want to dump their trash in the hole that Kaiser left, an idea I later found, that is intensely unpopular out here.

A line of eucalyptus trees provides most of nature's shade here. Two motorists with overheated cars currently have the shade well occupied. Wearing minimal clothes, they don't move or talk. They just stand there, wilted surrounded by water jugs. There body language gave a temperature reading in human terms, easily read. It's hot, but it's not even summer yet.

Steady business at the Stanco gas station testifies to the success of Desert Center's leading industry. A short distance away is Stanco's predecessor, a deserted garage with a remarkably well-preserved look of the 1930s. I parked in front and quickly noticed how buildings age gracefully in this dry air.

Adjoining the old gaiage is the Desert Center Café. hind the café lay what was once a swimming pool. I walked
around it. On the ground behind a fence lay a collection of aged mining equipment. It had its own patina from years of use and exposure in the desert.

I pushed open the door of the café. How nice it was to be cool! I ordered a glass of ice tea and flopped three maps, my caboose-search source material, down on the counter. Two stools over, a young woman was counting and packaging a heaping pile of pennies.

Desert Center appears on the map of California as a town. In this desolate desert, it probably
is
a town, consisting as it does of an air-conditioned, twenty-four-hour café, a filling station, a small food store, a post office, four pay phones, and some shade.

I opened the Riverside County road map and my glasses and began looking for railroad tracks.

“Café ran out of pennies,” the lady next to me volunteered. I suspect she felt compelled to explain what she was doing, although the scene was pretty self-explanatory. She went on to say that the closest bank was an hour away.

“Guess water isn't the only scarce item in the desert,” I said.

Figuring now that she had publicly established her reason for being, she would concentrate on counting pennies.

“Oh, we never run out of water!” she snapped, as if I had insulted her hometown.

But it didn't end there. The pennies belong to her son. He is saving for a camera. The Greyhound bus stops in front of the café twice a day. She works the graveyard shift here. Her husband is a mason and commutes to Palm Springs every day. She was telling me all this and counting pennies at the same time. How, I don't know.

I located the railroad tracks, but I had to rustle open a second map to find out were they went.

“Everybody here works.” She looked up at the waitress who was standing over me with the ice-tea pitcher and setting down a plate of monstrous lemon wedges. “Don't you think, Judy?”

“There is nothing else to do,” Judy answered, refilling my glass.

I asked Judy about the old mining equipment by the pool.

“That belongs to the owner of the café,” Judy replied. “You should talk to him. He is working at the gas station today.”

I hesiiated. “You mean he owns this place and works at the gas station?”

“He owns the gas station, too.”

The lady with the pennies sealed a roll by thumping it on the counter. “His father really owns it, or the Ragsdale family, anyway.”

“They own it all,” Judy added.

“All?”

“Ya, what there is.” Judy continued as she started for the kitchen. “What ya see is it.”

The lady bagged her son's pennies and carried them across the room to the cash register. Judy accompanied with her.

I studied the map and identified the railroad town. It's in the next county, 116 miles from here up Highway 95.

Getting up to leave, I decided my interest in the old mining equipment did not extend beyond the limits of the air-conditioning. The same could be said for the Ragsdale empire. By the door, however, a rack of caps caught my eye. The fronts read Halley's Comet, Desert Center, 1986. Did Ragsdale have a piece of the comet stashed somewhere? Guess I have to ask the owner.

Sweat trickled down my neck after the two-minute hike to the gas station. Sidney Ragsdale was pulling a crooked Coke can out of a dispenser. He was a husky, weathered man of about forty.

I asked about Halley's Comet and the mining equipment.

My manner? My questions? Something had brought up his guard. Perhaps I didn't fit the pro file of the “average” stranger. Any man who spends his life serving the traveling public must develop a suspicion of people, at least a skepticism. Every kind of folk wanders in off the interstate. He has
probably seen them all and has built up a mental data bank on the human animal to fit his survival needs.

“The Halley's Comet hats were my dad's idea,” Sidney explains. “We had people by the busload come here to see it in 1986. Because the air is so clear out here and there are no city lights, it's a good place to watch for it. It only comes by every seventy-six years, like once in lifetime.” Still, something bothered him. “Are you from the county, one of those guys who wants to dump out here?”

“No, I don't need to dump.” I wasn't sure what he was getting at, unless he was talking about the wastewater tanks in the motor home.

“Where's your car?”

“I'm traveling in a motor home. It's over by the café.”

An eighteen-wheeler hid half of it. Whatever he saw was my ticket of credibility. Out here in the desert, perhaps a vehicle told Sidney as much about its owner as he needed to know.

“Give me a minute. I want to take you on a special tour.” Sidney locked up the drink dispenser. We piled into his pickup, went back to the café, and into the back office.

The only thing new in there was a calculator. Once something was hung or stuck on the wall, apparently it never came down. A 1934 calendar pictured Desert Center on Highway 60. The caption read, “Our Main Street is 100 miles long.”

Sidney grabbed some keys. We walked next door to the old garage. I noticed the pumps in front last pumped gas for thirty-four cents a gallon.

The garage was the size of a ballroom and crammed with memorabilia. It struck me as the ultimate fantasy storage shed of a desert rat. Treasures from yesterday lay in the shadows, gathering dust, dripping oil into delicate puddles on the concrete. An old-fashioned fire engine. An antique car with spoked wheels. What looked like a guillotine was really a cheese press, the oldest thing there. The newest was a mock-up of a train engine and tender used in the movie
Tough Guys.

“The Disney people wanted to buy the mock-up for their theme park in Florida. Dad saves things, never sells them,” Sidney smiled.

Three dusty motorcycles leaned on stands. One was a U.S. Army Harley-Davidson that General George Patton left here in 1942. A leather rifle holster that looked like it belonged on Wyatt Earp's saddle hung on the side. Patton's army trained in the desert here for the African campaign of World War II.

Unwritten history fills that old garage. I'll bet years from now, others will find things just as I have. Nothing will be disturbed, except maybe to make room for more memories.

A
couple of hours later, I was in Needles, Cali forma. The off-ramp dropped me in the center of town.

In front of me spread an imposing two-story building. It covers nearly a city block. Shaded by tall palm trees, it had a soothing, cool look. Its windows and doors were covered with weathered plywood marked with a spattering of graffiti. Despite this contemporary look nailed to it, the old concrete building had retained its ageless dignity.

Behind it, heat shimmered above rows of iron tracks that steel wheels had polished to silver.

The only person in sight rode a lawn mower around the parklike setting in front of the building. He worked around old shade trees and stately palms, a cannon framed by an iron fence, wooden benches, and iron light poles topped with white spheres. It was a picture out of the 1930s.

The sun was turning my aluminum roof into a radiating hot plate. I found a big tree and parked where the sun couldn't get at it. I got out, crossed the street, and walked through the scent of just-cut grass to read the brass plaque on the cannon. It was a memorial to those who died in “the World War.” Obviously, when they engraved this, there had been only one.
If the cannon fired, it would knock the sign off the Sears Authorized Catalog Sales Merchant building.