The Raven and I went out on a long daytrip yesterday, into the Owens Valley then east, towards Death Valley. We passed by the Famous U2 Joshua Tree — the site was infested with pilgrims as we went by — and dropped down into Panamint Springs past the always mind-bending Rainbow Canyon.
After a while spent at the Panamint Springs Resort, which has no springs and applies the word “resort” to itself as a bit of hyperbole, we headed south into the Panamint Valley. The sun dropped down behind the Argus Range. I took some photos and we headed farther south, which is how we got to Trona.
I’d been to Trona once before. It struck me then as one of the bleakest towns I’d ever seen. In the decade since, it’s bleakified even more.
I am speaking here as someone who has lived in both Buffalo and Nipton. Not only does it take a bit more than a boarded up building and a blowing plastic grocery bag to get me to call something “bleak,” I actually appreciate bleakness as an aesthetic. But Trona is one of those places that outbleaks even me. Come into town and a heavy mantle of despair settles in on you. The rotten eggs smell of the chemical plant doesn’t help. It’s the kind of place that after an hour there, you actually find yourself saying sentences you never thought you’d say before, like “I can’t wait until we’re in Ridgecrest.”
I hasten to add that this judgment has nothing to do with the people living there. It’s a company town. Most people who live there live there because they’re paid to. This is not a reflection on their character or qualities.
A few towns I’ve spent time in do rival Trona in overall emotionally debilitating bleakness. Gila Bend, AZ, for instance. Or Ajo, a little ways south of Gila Bend. It’s not surprising Ajo’s gone bleak: it was a company town for the Phelps Dodge open-pit copper mine, which has been closed for years. There’s a recurring chance, each time the economy picks up, that ecotourism will boost Ajo’s fortunes: it could conceivably work as a gateway community for Organ Pipe National Monument and the Cabeza Prieta wildlife refuge. US border policy, which funnels both migrants and smugglers into the back of beyond in Arizona, has stunted tourism in both those places. The last time I visited Ajo, in 2006, it seemed like there were fewer than ten businesses still operating. One of them was a Basho’s supermarket obviously kept afloat by customers from the Tohono O’odham reservation. There was a gas station that sold sandwiches and coffee, and a Mexican restaurant. A few motels. I think that’s it.
Not that a thriving business climate always saves a town from being bleak, as Golden Valley and Bullhead City, each in Mohave County AZ, prove abundantly.
I remember Hawthorne, Nevada as another such bleak town, or at least one heading in that direction. Sharon and I were there for a morning about a decade ago, heading back to the Bay Area from Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. We were looking for a place to get breakfast, and we found one, and the food didn’t kill us. Looking it up just now I find that there are about a dozen places to eat listed there: maybe we just caught the town in a bad cycle. It’s anchored by an army base, and I don’t think we had two wars happening at the time. Maybe global instability has helped Hawthorne’s economy some. But I remember a bleakness there that was only partly assuaged by our leaving town and chasing pronghorns along dirt roads in the upper elevations of the Wassuk Range.
Tule Lake, CA, is another, and Dateland AZ, and Searchlight NV: good people there all for good reasons of their own, and each one of them has seemed unremittingly bleak to me on one visit or another. It may be more me than the towns. The bleak towns seem to concentrate in the Arid West, for me. there are dead towns back east, but the profusion of Ailanthus and kudzu and honeysuckle always soothe my mind.
What towns have struck you that way?
There aren’t many truly bleak towns I can think of in the east. Asbury Park, NJ, would be a candidate. That used to be a popular resort town until its popularity waned. In recent years its historic buildings have stood empty and deteriorating. I’m not sure if it has recovered at all since the last time I visited. York, PA, would be another candidate. That town sits in the middle of a bucolic landscape but much of the town is run down with few signs of economic life or much else going. The trouble with considering eastern towns as bleak is that even the weakest towns have at least some economic life from tourism, people passing through, or suburban commuters.
Just browsing around the Flickr photos you link to of Trona is a depressing exercise. I don’t think I’ve ever been anyplace that bleak.
The most recent place I’ve passed through that brought the word “bleak” to mind was Newbridge, Co. Kildare, in Ireland. It was bypassed by the new M7 “dual carriageway” (freeway) a few years ago, and the town was evidently in a state of economic decay—boarded up shops, aging paint, and a general atmosphere of drabness. But it’s paradise compared to Trona, it seems.
An eastern US town that should be bleak, but is far from it: Athol, Mass.
Information on Ajo is totally inaccurate. There is no Basha’s grocery store in Ajo and hasn’t been for the thirty years I’ve been here. Judging by ads in the local paper, there are many more than ten businesses. I know there are two dollar stores, a Circle K, several gas stations, about five or six restaurants, a Radio Shack, a NAPA, Olsen’s IGA grocery store, two or three beauty salons, a barber shop, at least four real estate offices, a True Value hardware store, an art gallery, a pharmacy, a community health center, a funeral home, three insurance agencies, two flower shops… have we hit ten yet? Your description sounds more like Sells, home to that Basha’s grocery store and 70 miles east of Ajo.
The community isn’t rich nor does it appear so. But we do have a jewel of a central Plaza, the historic & restored Curley school, and a growing community of artists.
Very glad to hear my impression of Ajo in 2006 is inaccurate, Kathryn. I like the town very much, and was disheartened to see it seeming more desolate than you describe.
And you’re right. The store I was thinking of was the IGA. Thanks for the correx!
the Panamint Springs Resort, which has no springs and applies the word “resort” to itself as a bit of hyperbole
Maybe it has several of this kind of spring, and occasionally moves them around.
Asbury Park, NJ, would be a candidate
John, it inspired a King Crimson masterpiece, so it should get a free pass.
I agree heartily with you about Trona, a place once billed as having the “worst pizza in the world,” rivaling even the pizza in Blythe. One should also take gold assays from any assay lab in Trona with a huge grain of salt.
Hawthorne has been through some cycles - seemed better to me in the 1980’s, but even then had a quality of bleakness because of its location amidst munitions mounds and away from the lake, and because of the generic off-brown paint used at base housing. Sometime after the 80’s, the navy closed part of its operation, and a major gold mine near Gabbs closed. The casino took over a larger part of the major intersection area, squeezing out my favorite gas station, and the quality of restaurants went downhill. Bleaker than it was, for sure. I recommend the bypass, which misses most of the town.
I kind of like Tule Lake, but you can’t buy horseradish jelly there anymore, and so stopping by seems futile.
Tecopa is the town I always think of as bleak. Hell, I don’t even know if it was alive in the first place. Also, I have a bleak downtown in mind. The last time i was in Superior, AZ (10 years ago) the town was alive but it’s old Main St. downtown was all but abandoned. Storefront signs in the windows straight out of the 60’s-70’s. Really strange.
While I don’t have a single town in mind, one of the long drives I’ve had to undertake in 2003 due to work-related relocation (and I generally love long drives) was the most depressing long drive ever.
I was driving from Columbia, MO to Houston, TX and the landscape, while not bleak in the sense of abandoned, looked so destroyed that bleak would be a good way to describe it. If memory serves me right, it was somewhere around Wichita, KS that I began seeing oil pumps on I-35 and soon I would regularly see oil pumps and ginormous black heaps of residue or whateverthefuck on both sides of the interstate.
It was the same depressing view mile after mile after fucking mile and I can’t even remember if I saw a tree or a blade of grass until I left Oklahoma and entered Texas. Also, it was January, and the snow that had turned black by mixing with the sooty shit in the air must’ve added to the effect.
I remember pulling into the first rest stop I could find once the landscape appeared normal again and I felt so depressed and queasy I just wanted to throw up until I passed out.
I know what you mean about Tule Lake. If a deer gets trapped trying to leap over a barbed wire fence, the animal is left to thrash and starve, then slowly decay right there on the fence. Then again, the pile of dead coyotes at the entrance to Dunlap Farms in Colusa County went beyond bleak.
“I’d been to Trona once before. It struck me then as one of the bleakest towns I’d ever seen. In the decade since, it’s bleakified even more.”
(It looks like I should have left my comment about Trona on this post.) Trona was actually worse about four years ago when I was there previously. Its actually on its way up, believe it or not.
When you mentioned Berlin-Icthyosaur, I thought at first though you were talking about Gabbs when you mentioned Hawthorne. Gabbs is similarly bleak, though not on the level of Trona. The only business in the whole town is a dark bar, with some microwaved food available.
There’s a really interesting-looking working mine near town, but try taking some landscape shots of it, and the company security guys will drive out and shoo you off in no uncertain terms. Not a big loss, considering I got some nice infrared shots in Berlin-Icthyosaur and on the road back to Gabbs.
Centralia, Pennsylvania.