The road comes off the highway at the foot of the eastern Sierra and climbs a dozen winding miles through the sage, past caved-in prospect holes and the stacked tailings of claims that never paid, with the desert opening out eastward in pale, enormous layers all the way to Nevada. It is an unpromising road, and Bodie, when it appears, appears the way such places do: all at once, on the shoulder of a hill, a weathered grid of board fronts and pitched roofs standing against the flat white light of the high country.
No smoke comes from any chimney. No one moves in the streets. Above eight thousand feet, in early autumn, the air is thin and dry, and the wind is the first thing that declares itself. It comes off the range, lifts the dust off Main Street, works at the loose glass in the windows. The light is hammered and clear. The town is entirely legible at one glance, the way a skeleton is legible.
At the visitor center in the Miners' Union Hall, visitors talk in low tones. There are museum cases of the town's household things — a miner's lamp, a wedding photograph, a shelf of patent medicines with the labels still shouting their promises. Outside, the dust stands up in curls on the street. Everyone keeps their voice down the way people do in a cathedral or a sickroom. The wind does not keep its voice down.
Beyond the fence, the pinyon and the sage run on to the edge of the visible world. There is no second town, no house light on the horizon. Bodie is the only thing of its kind for a long way in any direction, and the last stretch of road is loose dirt and washboard, with the dust hanging in the air behind the car for a long time after it passes.
The Strike
The gold here was found by a prospector named Body, who did not live to spend a dollar of it. He paid for the discovery in the winter of 1859, frozen in a blizzard above the creeks, and the camp that took his name changed a letter so the town would not be a joke at the gentleman's expense.
For fifteen years Bodie was nothing much — a few claims, a cabin, a rumor. Then, in the middle of the 1870s, the hill gave at once. The Standard mine opened, the stamp mill started, and the stamping became the town's heartbeat; every floor in town carried the pulse. Millions of dollars in gold came out of a hill that is still hollowed beneath the streets, tunnels running in every direction under the foundations.
At its peak the town had five thousand residents by the sober count and ten thousand by the count of anyone who owned a saloon. There were saloons by the score, a red-light district down the slope, a Chinatown, a daily newspaper to report what the night before had done. By the telling of it, there was a murder a day in the worst weeks of the boom. The streets were laid out straight and never curbed, and the dust of 1879 is the same dust.
The mines played out. The town thinned by degrees.
A fire in the summer of 1932 burned the east end of the business district, and the town never pretended again. A few people held on into the fifties, keeping the store, minding the cemetery. In the early sixties the state took the place over, and the policy they set was the honest one: arrest the decay, and let everything else stand as it was. Not restore. Not rebuild. Arrest.
Stabilize, Don't Rebuild
What the policy means can be looked at on Main Street. The buildings are shored where they need shoring, braced where they need bracing. Roofs are patched enough to keep the weather from finishing what the weather has been starting for a hundred and fifty years. But nobody repaints a wall to make it look young. A porch that sags is allowed its sag. The structures that have come down in heavy snow years are measured and drawn, their pieces shelved in the work yard, and the decision about them can take as long as the wind likes.
The Boone store still fronts the street with its windows of old glass, the shelves behind them keeping their freight. The Methodist church keeps its steeple and bell. The Miners' Union Hall holds the museum — stoves, washers, an organ, the mineral collection, photographs of the town when it was loud. On the hill above the last house stands the Standard mill, its tall stack white as bone, the big machinery inside still bolted to its frame and oiled enough to glint in the light that comes through the broken vents.
A car from the nineteen-thirties has become part of the ground where it was parked, its tires rotted, its fenders rusted to the color of the dirt. Through certain windows there is a bed made up, a table set, a curtain still holding its shape. It is not a stage set. It is the last gesture of a household that walked out and did not come back, the way some households do.
Almost everything inside the boundary fence is the actual article, not a likeness. That is what the policy protects, and it is why the quiet here is a different quiet from any rebuilt town's. There is a smell to the place, too: dry wood, dust, a faint mineral cold coming up from the deep ground. A rebuilt town is full of good intentions. This town is full of weather.
What the Wind Keeps
East of the fence the ground runs down into the Great Basin — sage, dry lakes, enormous sky. West, the Sierra wall holds a season of snow. The cemetery sits on the knoll where the wind has a clear run.
Pickets. Wooden headboards, the lettering worn soft as felt. Many of the graves hold young people — boomtown arithmetic. A separate section sits apart, its markers low and plain, the dead buried at the distance the town once kept.
When the heavy snow comes, the park road closes, and the keepers go down the mountain. The only way in is on skis or snowshoes, a slow crossing through the drifts. Some years the road stays buried into May, and the town passes the whole winter with snow banked against the west side of every building, the wind working the loose glass, the mice making a small warm nation in the walls of the Boone store.
Come evening, the visitors go down the hill, and the town darkens the way it has darkened for decades, with no lamp behind any window. Nothing here is finished. That is the point. The gold is gone; the mill will not run again; the bad men and the good men and the nameless are all in the cemetery. What remains is a town doing what towns do — standing where it was put, taking the weather — and the wind, which had the place before the miners came for it and will have it again, going house to house with its hands full of dust, keeping the whole thing aired.
