Calling the Mojave Desert Phone Booth

After dinner on Monday night we sat around talking, and the subject of the Mojave Desert Phone Booth came up.  The Phone Booth was popularized by Godfrey Daniels (otherwise known as Deuce) back at the end of the 1990's, and you can read the whole fantastic story here.  It was an ordinary Pacific Bell phone booth with a working payphone in it, and was located out in the middle of the Cima Dome area of the Mojave Desert for many decades.  Before the modern payphone there was a crank operated telephone there.  It had been an important utility for the ranchers and mine workers who had no other means of making a call in that remote corner of the desert.  It was well off the paved road, and to reach it you needed a reliable four wheel drive vehicle and the willingness to leave the pavement.  My visit to the booth was my first 4WD adventure and my first time going into the back country.  From that moment I was hooked on four wheeling, back country adventures, and the Phone Booth itself.

I told my campmates about my visit to the Booth on Christmas Day of 1999, and how pissed off and disgusted I was (and still am) with the National Park Service (may they rot in  hell) for forcing the removal of the Booth not long after.  The Booth was destroyed after its removal, even though it was a cultural icon and an important communication resource for the local people who lived and worked in the area.  But then I remembered that some time back I'd programmed the number into my phone, and I'd done that because I'd read on Deuce's website that the number was once again active.

The phone company understandably did not make that number available for use again following the demise of the Booth, and they made statements to the effect that they never would.  But an intrepid Booth fan kept careful watch, and when the number was made available after all with a block of similar numbers, he snatched it up and set up a bridge number so that people who called it would be connected into a kind of conference call.

It wasn't the same as bringing the real Booth back.  It's hard to describe the experience of unity and mystical connectedness that happened when you found yourself standing in the surreal desert night, surrounded by thousands of Joshua trees, wild burros and creatures of the night moving in the darkness, and the impossibly thick splatter of stars arching overhead while you talked to some breathless Booth fan calling from Austria, or Poland, or New Zealand, thrilled to have finally had their call answered by a real Booth visitor, or a group of friends from England sitting around on Boxing Day who dialed the number on a whim, or a prison guard calling from a nearby state correctional facility, bored and lonely up in the guard tower as he kept the long watch of the night and only wanting to hear a friendly voice to pass the time.  Or friends who called to talk to you because they knew you'd be there, and had called earlier and left a message which had been taken down carefully by an earlier Booth visitor, who had left the folded message wedged into the coin slot for you to find when you got there.  On the surface it was a silly pop culture phenomenon, but in practice it was something more, a little glimpse into the better nature of humankind, its yearning to make contact across distance and find the perfect connection between stranger and stranger.  It was surreal and altogether wonderful.

Still, to take back that number and return it to something like what it once was, a vehicle for strangers to once again talk, not as anonymous identities on the Internet, but as real voices speaking on the line. . . .that is a commendable thing.  I had often thought of calling, but somehow I was waiting for the right moment.

This was the right moment.  And so I said, "As a matter of fact . . ." and I picked up my phone and pulled up the number from my contacts.  I dialed the number, and put it on speaker phone, and suddenly we were listening to a conversation about snapping turtles.  We kept the line muted on our end for awhile and listened.  Then I unmuted and butted in, introducing myself and asking how many other Booth fans were on the line.  It turned out there were four of them, one being Lucky, who was responsible for snatching the number back from oblivion and restoring it to some semblance of its original usefulness.  There was someone from Colorado whose name I didn't catch but who railed against the freezing weather where he was, and someone named Kyle, who told us he was just over the border in Mexico, boondocked in an RV, just as we were on our side of the border.  When we said we were in Slab City, he laughed and said he knew it very well and had spent a good deal of time here.  When we said two of our number had just been to Los Algodones to visit the pharmacy, he laughed again and said they might have seen him, a freak riding his bike around town.  It seems the serendipitous power of the Booth to dissolve distance continues. . . .

They seemed impressed to hear that I'd actually been to the physical Booth, and told me I was the first caller they'd had who had ever been there. This gave me an odd turn, as at the time of my Booth visit and for many years after (and still sometimes to this day if I'm being honest), I was living in a cloud of regret at having missed great moments of counter culture history.  It was that regret which had, in part, led me on quests and adventures to find the Unspoken Thing, the Nexus of the Cool, wherever (or whatever) it might be.  I had not yet completely absorbed the idea that all I had to do was keep my eyes open to the moment in which I found myself, that the cool things and moments that were meant for me would find me as long as I paid attention and gave them half a chance.  That my adventures of today would become a story that would one day impress someone else who might regret that they had not had a chance to experience some Cool Thing that they wish they could have seen.  But of course, they have their own adventures waiting for them, just as I have mine.  And it's hard to say how we will find our way to the Nexus of the Cool that is waiting for us.  Sometimes we stumble upon it in unexpected ways. 

It was a good conversation, and I was able to tell Lucky how much I approved of what he had done in snatching up that sacred phone number.  For awhile the distance seemed dissolved, and we were all talking around one great cosmic campfire, swapping tales and finding that, though strangers, our paths ran closer together than we might have guessed.

I'll call it again, I think.  When the time is right.  When I'm lonely or trapped in the hopeless beige of suburbia, far from the star filled desert night that is wild and mysterious and just a little scary, filled with Joshua trees and invisible desert creatures and ghosts of desperadoes and cowboys, and spirits that move, whispering, along wires that connect strangers.  Or that move along tiny radio waves that travel from tower to tower, making the loneliness and isolation a little less, and suggesting that in the desert, anything is possible.

Long live the Mojave Desert Phone Booth.  It lives on in the ether, it is a state of mind, it is finally safe where it can never be destroyed, as long as two strangers pick up any phone and dial the numbers . . . .

(760) 733-9969

 

Go on.  Call it.  You know you want to.