Camping on the edge of Yosemite National Park. Sounds idyllic, I agree. And for the most part, when I pitched up in the (relative) Californian wilderness a few years ago, it was.
However, what they don’t tell you about camping, regardless of location, is the hours of inconceivable boredom and nothingness that occur the second the sun sets. Admittedly, this could very much be due to our own terrible forward planning, but lack of light and/or entertainment source made way for endless blocks of staring at the tent roof during the four-day camp, scared to even breathe too deeply as the slightest rustle in nearby bushes was immediately deemed to be a Brown Bear.
After one such night, I decided there simply must be more to wilderness camping than eating half-cooked veggie burgers, playing I-Spy and trying to protect food supplies from an increasingly curious deer. It was this decision that led us a few miles from our campsite down a dusty dirt track, into a haunting, eerie, but nonetheless magical place called ‘Bodie’.
Bodie’s (rustically wood-panelled) website refers to it as ‘a town frozen in a state of arrested decay’, and as we clambered over a cluster of grassy knolls and stared down at the town from an elevated vantage point, we saw what they were sayin’.
To clarify, Bodie is what is commonly referred to as a ‘Ghost Town’, and claims to be one of the best preserved in the whole of the USA. The town was born in 1861, the glittering peak of the American Gold Rush, and at first was inhabited by just twenty miners. In less than twenty years however, its population had expanded to over 10,000. Among this 10,000 were miners (obviously), wives, children, shop-owners and workers, tradespeople, clergy, teachers, prisoners and, apparently, a somewhat disproportionate amount of prostitutes.
As we wandered through Bodie in the late afternoon sun, we saw evidence of all of the above in the incredibly conserved buildings. From schoolhouses littered with inkwells and paper, eerily reverent churches, hymn books still open at frozen verses, to a fully-stocked (although horrendously past use-by) general store and dank prison cells, regular shivers were running their way down my spine.
Amongst Bodie’s hotchpotch of wooden buildings, obstinately standing the test of time, were a number of what the information guide delicately referred to as ‘houses of ill-repute’. Back in Bodie’s heyday, there were apparently about 65 of these salons of hedonism, despite my absolute bemusement as to where they would have fitted. If you think 65 salons sounds pretty out of proportion to the 10,000 inhabitants, you’re bang on. Bodie’s swirling combination of gambling, alcohol, prostitution and gold had heavily detrimental effects on the town and a death rate to match. Allegedly, every morning Bodie folks would ask each other, ‘have a man for breakfast?’ meaning ‘did anyone die last night?’ Not quite as upbeat as the ‘which bear-locker did you put the Cheerios in??’ which had punctuated our mornings thus far…
What I personally found the oddest and most beguiling about Bodie however, was how it ceased to be. In the manner that had become commonplace among gold-mining towns, after just 80 years of booming trade, Bodie was completely abandoned. According to the guide, this was due to ‘sub-arctic weather conditions’ (which seemed incredibly hard to believe as we strolled around in shorts and flip-flops), as well as the standard ‘gold running out’. Don’t get me wrong, if your entire basis for living in a certain location becomes obsolete, by all means pack up the kids and hit the road. But peering through the windows and creaking across the floorboards of these otherworldly rooms revealed tableau after tableau of abandoned possessions, notes left half-written, meals semi-eaten and bedclothes rucked. Why would an entire town leave so suddenly and in unison, if a bit of a nip in the air and lack of trade were the only pressing issues?
I guess that’s the kind of mystery that keeps the tourists rolling in, and Bodie’s name spoken day after day after day…