Desert Center, CA

When I head out on a road trip, the beginning of my journey is always unsettling. As the first miles roll by, my mind bounces between my “normal” life – bills, obligations, relationships – and my artistic one. Further on up the road it will be easier to be fully engaged. But at the outset there’s a transition to navigate. Until I do, I find it more difficult to be present in the moment.

And so it was last March as I headed east out of Los Angeles, climbing into the San Jacinto Mountains on my way to Arizona after a short family vacation in the Southland. My eyes scanned the landscape as I settled into the long drive, my mind wandering back and forth between the present and the past. At times like these I am alert to opportunities to stretch my legs and fuel my creative energy. But the drive before me was long, and though fields of wildflowers beckoned there was little time to stop and wander. The mountains soon gave way to the high desert: a barren brown landscape under a dull gray sky.

Then, a few hours into my journey, a flash of interest caught the corner of my eye. A ramshackle building or two on the left, just off the interstate. Maybe a chance to stop for a bit and stretch. A mile or so up the road an exit appeared. “Desert Center” read the sign. Why not? I pulled off to take a look.

There wasn’t much left of the former highway waystation. A graffiti clad gas station, an empty cafe, a market with a collapsed roof. A few abandoned shacks scattered about, littered with the belongings of their final occupants. Only the post office appeared to still be in use. As I wandered through the desolate landscape I couldn’t help but think about the people that used to live and work here, and the travelers who stopped by on their way to somewhere else. What brought them to this town, and what were their lives like? Why was this town built, and how did it die?

There were few clues in the remaining detritus – an old hiking boot caked with dust, a frayed box spring leaning against a wall, a portable vacuum cleaner standing guard against a battered door. After I returned home a little internet sleuthing provided a few answers. The town first appeared in the 1920s, when “Desert Steve” Ragsdale built a service station and café along a remote stretch of a new state highway. Over the next 25 years the town grew to provide housing and services to workers building the California aqueduct, then to serve General Patton’s nearby desert training ground for WWII forces, and finally to support workers at the Kaiser Steel Eagle Mine. The town’s claim to fame is as the birthplace of the Kaiser HMO system, formed when a steel executive devised a plan to pay a local doctor a nickel a week for each employee to cover most of their future medical needs.

The mine shut down in 1982, and Desert Center hung on for a bit, filling and feeding highway travelers until 2011, when the old café and gas station finally closed. When hopes for redevelopment faded, the entire contents of the town were auctioned off in 2019. Only a few empty buildings and scattered belongings remain today, stark reminders of the town’s heyday. But time continues to take its toll, and one day soon only a few concrete pads and tumbleweeds may remain to mark the town’s existence.

The cafe closed in 2011; its contents were auctioned off in 2019.

I have long been drawn to photograph places like this before they disappear. As I wandered this barren landscape at the outset of my journey, I felt a spark of creative energy take hold, fueled by my imagination and nostalgia for days gone by. Though the town’s zenith may predate my existence by several decades or more, it reminds me that one day, too, the markers of our own time will crumble and fade into dust. Left to rot and decay, like this forlorn town in the desert, or scraped and replaced, like so many parts of Los Angeles to the west and Phoenix to the east. Either way, our time here will soon be forgotten. In some sense, then, the photographs I make of places like this become meditations on impermanence and observations of a generation’s changing relationship to the world as it ages.

While this melancholy may lead you to believe that I left Desert Center depressed and morose, quite the opposite was true. I felt engaged and alive, ready for the road trip before me. Wandering among these ruins with my eyes open and imagination engaged, I had left my real life behind and embraced my artistic one.

I was finally present in the moment, recharged and ready for my journey. Excited to see where it would lead, and how it would end.

On the Road #2: March 19, 2023. Desert Center, CA, along Interstate 10 roughly 170 miles from my starting point and 200 miles from my destination. 1 mile (walking); 1 hour.