Chapter 54 | Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins, Part IV
Wonderland Ranch & Mojave Shoe Station
Joshua Tree, CA
Note: This is part II of a mini-series that I’m releasing on the blog about my recent road trip across the country. I managed to visit a plethora of abandoned spaces and decided to focus on writing about four of them. For context, please start with Parts I, II, and III here, here, and here.
I leave Glenrio with a heartache I clutch in my hands — then let go of it as twilight falls around the car, blazing across New Mexico, headed for California. I have no idea what’s to come.
But here’s the thing about leaving a place too soon: your body remembers the heartache, and your imagination fills in the rest. Glenrio dissolves in the rearview mirror, but the longing stays and becomes a compass. Before long, the land changes. The horizon stretches. The sky pulls wider.
I make it to the Mojave Desert.
Two more ruins to go — though, I don’t know that yet.
Somewhere in Joshua Tree National Park, near the protected gravesite of the Wall Street Mill, you’ll find what’s left of the Wonderland Ranch Ruins — a concrete foundation, a lone chimney, a hearth, and two sunburned pink walls with rough window frames that look more like memories than actual structures. Mother Nature is halfway through reclaiming the whole thing, and honestly, who can blame her?
If I were the Mojave Desert, I’d take it all back too.
I walk across the old homestead slowly, carefully, as if I’m playing a game of Capture the Flag or Sardines. I wonder if the space is tired and wants to be left alone. I understand that feeling, and I know that ghosts do too. Solitude can be a deeply romantic and comforting feeling. Two walls, a chimney, a slab of floor. That’s all that’s left of who knows how many other people’s lives? Their dinner table conversations, arguments, laughter. Their losses. Their good nights and mornings that start on the wrong side of the bed. Hopes, disappointments.
And then, tucked off the path, something tickles me.
A marker, a carbon copy of the original which was defaced and taken away by the National Park Service in order to protect its historical and cultural significance. A ghoulish headstone.
“Here is where Worth Bagley bit the dust at the hand of W.F. Keys, May 11, 1943.”
Over what, you ask? Land. That’s right. Worth Bagley died in 1943 after a bitter, years-long land dispute with homesteader Bill Keys erupted into violence; Keys shot Bagley in what he claimed was self-defense. Keys was convicted of manslaughter and sent to San Quentin, but after years of appeals — and evidence that the feud was far more complicated than the verdict allowed — he was ultimately pardoned. This all on the land we now know as Joshua Tree National Park. That was 1943, not that long ago. Decades later, and the desert still doesn’t give a shit.
I stand and stare at this fragile little stone made of ego, smack dab in the middle of a national park that is actively erasing it grain by grain. It’s almost funny. Or maybe it’s tragic. Or maybe those two things are the same out here. I can’t help but laugh. It’s almost impressive the way we naturally obsess and fight over land that really isn’t ours. We invent legislation. We kill over it. And then, eventually, we die, and the desert doesn’t bat an eye.
Maybe this is why the Mojave feels like a giant memory box left out in the sun: everything we think is permanent…isn’t. Everything we cling to becomes porous, gets bleached, or freezes then melts into carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. Or ash. Everything we build eventually goes away again. Somehow, humans feel compelled to find strange ways to attempt and preserve their own memories by inventing the rather peculiar concept of a legacy.
Take the Mojave Shoe Station just up the road, for example.
Depending on who you ask, it’s in Rice. Or Blythe. Maybe Earp. Vidal. I even saw one person claim it was in Freda. But everyone agrees on this: it sits on CA-62, just outside of 29 Palms, in the Mojave Desert. Really, all you need to know is that it’s an abandoned service station and an accompanying outbuilding and foundation for another building that is no more.
(Oh, and that all three structures are completely swarmed by old shoes.)
At first glance, it’s hard to believe. “No way,” I think. I almost drive right past it because it was late. But I know it will haunt me if I don’t go back. I ask our little caravan to turn around. Just so I can stand in and see whatever this was for myself.
It’s an accidental monument, a community altar without a blueprint. Shoes nailed, tied, wedged, and scrunched into every inch of what used to be a service station overhang. A totem of silence and death, of celebration and mourning, of the 99% and everybody trying to climb out of it. Of childbirth and family, of hermitage and solo wandering. Of the people who come here trying to find themselves — and the people trying to find America, the part we didn’t steal. Which is to say: none of it.
Shoes of every kind.
Boots scribbled with people’s names: Paige, Phoenix, Sam, and Mama Donna. Gray track shoes with Sharpie on the sole: “My honey bunches of oats — Jen D.” A pair of Vans with a red ribbon. Cheap orange Aldo heels with a mirror glued to the bottom — the exact mirror where I catch my own reflection, exhausted and tiny.
A steering wheel from a vintage car. The stuffed head of a dog, tongue out, almost choking on its own symbolism. Family T-shirts. Band long-sleeves. Sports jerseys, club league, little league, professional league, even a minor league baseball team. An old carton of Minute Maid orange juice because nobody likes scurvy. A torn American flag flapping, a silky and stale fallen soldier, only about 25% of it left, still trying to salute the setting sun.
Suddenly, it feels like a subtle, irresponsible, environmentally corrosive tourist trap complete with a Google Maps entry. A roadside scab-turned-checkbox on your millennial desert road trip. I glance across the highway at abandoned rail cars. Dented tracks. Behind the forgotten line of commerce, a rusted silo screams TEAM FREEDOM in capslock white block letters. I have this ache in my stomach that somehow feels like hope and despair at the same time. Look what humans can make out of trash — real, tangible magic — all of it glowing under a lavender and robin’s-egg-blue and creamsicle sky, the sun melting behind the Palen Mountains.
Maybe this is how we learn to survive the apocalypse, I wonder. Not by hoarding. Not by killing each other over land deeds. But by building strange, scrappy, beautiful things together.
Even if we disagree politically. Even if we’d never speak again. Even if some of these people probably hate me — or vice versa. In this shoe graveyard, we’re all doing the same thing: leaving something behind or honoring the people who did. I don’t leave a pair of shoes — but I do offer a prayer. I don’t remember what that prayer is after I say it.
Something hopeful, I guess.
Maybe something about how we all die, and that’s that.
