Back in 2017 I brought my wife to California for the first time. She’d traveled outside of Japan before and even had visited Missouri for a wedding, but she’d never been to my home state and it’d been a spell since I’d been acquainted with its sights so we planned to see some of what makes California great. Politics and other disagreeable subjects aside, the state has so much varied natural beauty and manmade attractions that deserves to be seen. It would also help my wife understand my sense of scale a little better.
If we combine the area of Nagasaki prefecture with the neighboring Fukuoka and Saga prefectures, which have a combined population of 7 million, we will still be smaller than California’s Death Valley National Monument, population 0. It’s the biggest, but also just one of the state’s nine national parks and we intended to visit Yosemite and Sequoia, which are also the size of prefectures. It’s hard to get the scale of the United States across to people who are not familiar with the country.
She had also never been to a desert in her life, something which I felt was surely lacking so we decided to check both boxes off our list and visit Calico Ghost Town in the Mojave Desert.
We’d met up with my grandparents the night before and stayed with them in Orange County. The morning started with an American diner breakfast, something else on the scale of America you rarely find elsewhere. As much as I love hot cakes I couldn’t finish the stacks and the sides. The poor girl just nibbled on the edge of her meal and was engorged. When we left the diner and my grandparent’s Thunderbird pulled back on to the broad boulevard I pointed to the distant mountains and told her we were going beyond them.
At the moment we were within a congested city packed wall-to-wall with habitation and people. An hour later we were in the Mojave Desert (“High Desert”) on a road surrounded by nothing but mountains and sand and no signs of human habitation beyond the road itself. And it just went on and on. Looking as far as we could in a direction there was nothing to see and it kept going this way. She was finally beginning to understand the scale of America.
My grandfather had lived in this desert during the 1970s, though the way he tells it, it may as well been the 1870s with iron horses. He lived in Daggett, a town in the dry lake bed under the Calico hills, where the ghost town itself is located. He had a small ranch, owned a horse and a lever-action rifle for personal defense. He supported the local sheriff and was on the rescue squad when people went missing in the desert. He told her his cowboy stories of High Desert living, eliciting a surprised “eeeeh…” here and there.
Calico began as a mining town in 1881 when silver was discovered in the area. The population peaked at 3,000 and though the silver was gone by 1896 the borate mineral deposits didn’t play out until 1907. Most left after that and only a handful of diehards refused to quit. Walter Knott purchased the town and relocated part of it to his berry farm in the 1950s, the rest he restored (sort of) and eventually gave to San Bernardino County for reasons that may or may not have involved taxes.
Overlooking Calico are giant white letters spelling out its name on the hill it derives that name from, apparently one of Knott’s ‘improvements.’ The Calico hills are mottled collection of colors, which according to my grandfather are even more varied after a rain.
The mountains, hills and valleys, the shapes it contorts into and the full range of colors are why I love the Mojave Desert. Every shade of earth from the rustiest reds and purples to the most delicate tans is represented and combines with muted shades of green foliage to create this beautiful landscape.
Since Walter Knott took the better half Calico is about half a ghost town and a sad one at that. Real old west buildings, a real mine and accoutrements… and Knott clown-painted it up like a fake amusement park attraction with cheap gimmicks trying to look like the real thing. Trying too hard to cater to kids robs it of authenticity, but I guess being authentic doesn’t keep the gas lamps on.
Mostly gift shops now, its main street has original 1880s buildings and mining equipment on display. A few of the businesses and a home are furnished and kept as they were when in use which are one of the high points of a place like this. Displays of antiques also show off the tools of old west life. The single neatest artifact is the red horse-drawn fire engine inside the fire hall; I would love to see that taken out for a demonstration of old-fashion fire fighting.
There are enough buildings that they could expand on that and treat the town like an open-air museum; maybe even take the building ruins around back more seriously as well. When I see a silly hand-scrawled sign over a bench reading “Pat’s Hideout” then see a man-sized pot marked Chinese Bath Tub with prices for its use, it makes me stop and wonder if the bath is authentic or another cutesy gimmick. It could be real, old Japanese baths are essentially giant kettles you cook yourself in; kind of, it’s an over-simplification. This could be a great living history village and it’s trying its hardest not to be. (In my pictures I actively avoided shooting stuff I felt looked really fake or gaudy, in retrospect I should have tried to shoot those too.)
Its biggest original attraction is the Maggie Mine just off the main street. It’s the last of Calico’s 500 mines and is partially opened to the public. Not much to stay about it other than it’s a man-made collection of tunnels; but that it was a real mine and you can see where the cart tracks were on the ground (removed for safety reasons. Stupid safety.) makes it easy to imagine what it was like having to work down here in its darkened, cramped confines. It exits to a hill overlooking the town which gives a grand vista view of the High Desert which justifies the trip to Calico alone.
Some of the better historic sites are on the outskirts of town and are best enjoyed from a seat on the Calico & Odessa Railroad, a miniature recreation of a steam locomotive that runs a short loop out of town and back.
Not everyone in Calico lived in a normal house of wood or adobe, though ruins of both are found here, but some took to mounting entrances on caves and calling it a day. I’d not seen this kind of home before but it made sense. Our engineer told stories and explained what we saw as we passed them, then some other played out mines and the rusting mining equipment decorating the landscape. At its furthest from town we were treated to another grand view of the countryside that would be at home in a John Ford movie. (If this was Colorado anyway.)
Calico’s not the best ghost town, but two hours from Los Angeles its location is perfect and it’s a fun way to spend the day. I even learned a thing or two along the way. Still, after having visited places like Meiji Mura and Kaitaku no Mura in Japan, where buildings of Calico’s vintage were brought together and preserved as living museums inside and out to share about what life was like at that time, when I look at Calico I see so much squandered potential that could still be salvaged if anyone cared to try.
After finishing at Calico we drove down the Barstow Freeway and stopped at Peggy Sue’s, the epitome of the 1950s highway attraction dinner. Diner-saurs roam the backyard and inside is a gloriously over-the-top tribute to 1950s pop culture. The thin milkshakes are damn fine as are the hamburgers, all of which are named for various California celebrities such as the pineapple-topped Huell Howser. (Howser hosted “California Gold” and pineapples are gold I guess.)
In the end Emi-chan was a bit overwhelmed by everything from the expansive desert to the desserts and over the next few days of our trip we only kept getting ourselves into more with the giant Sequoias the height of apartment complexes and the sheer majesty of Yosemite. Maybe she’d finally started to understand where I was coming from. Maybe.
ADDRESSES
Calico
36600 Ghost Town Road, Yermo, CA 92398
http://cms.sbcounty.gov/parks/Parks/CalicoGhostTown.aspx
Peggy Sue’s 50’s Diner
35654 Yermo Rd, Yermo, CA 92398, USA
http://www.peggysuesdiner.com/