The Mojave Phone Booth is Gone

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The Mojave Phone Booth is gone.
The desert-spanning lines
that once upon a time
Sung with happy voices from all over the world
Are now silent.

The Mojave Phone Booth is gone.
Lonely blow the gentle desert breezes that once
Brushed the faces of ecstatic people
standing in an old beat-up aluminum cage
Amidst Joshua trees and burros.

The Mojave Phone Booth is gone.
People who were instant friends
and shared visions of distant lands
Are now strangers once again.

The Mojave Phone Booth is gone.
No longer does the news expound
the virtues of a telephone in the
Middle of nowhere
that is on the
Center stage of the world.

The Mojave Phone Booth is gone.
No longer do people call a lonely telephone just
For the sake of calling it.

The Mojave Phone Booth is gone.
The desert and the world
Will never be the same.

No one, not even Mary Martin, superintendent of the Mojave National Preserve, or her boss, John Reynolds, quite knows the depth of what we lost on that fateful May morning in 2000 when, at the request of Preserve administration, a Pacific Bell truck lumbered up Aiken Mine Road and carried away an icon which had existed for longer than most locals can remember. An icon that had existed long before the Mojave National Preserve was ever conceived. An icon that probably existed when Mary and John were playing with toy telephones. An icon that will forever be missed.

We made a pilgrimage to the spot that had been so special to so many people on October 15, 2000. It was such a wonderful experience to see those old telephone poles once again, becoming visible near Charlie Wilcox’s place and extending southward for mile after mile as we bumped and ground though the treacherously sandy road. Our hearts were heavy as our Samurai traversed that familiar road, and a small tinge of denial entered our minds. We wished that rumors of the Booth's disappearance had been some kind of concerted media conspiracy, and that our shiny chrome payphone in a windowless booth would be still standing tall and ringing for us at the end of the line, bringing the voice of some total stranger who was our instant friend. Then, reality set in as we reached the Booth site and we were overcome with sadness that our beautiful Booth was no longer there. Not only was the Booth gone, someone had mercilessly removed the concrete pad and the four cinder blocks which had been alongside it.

We looked around a little, gleaning some pieces of Booth glass that were still there, some pieces of concrete which I presumed to be from the foundation, and a few scraps of wood from the pole, which for some unknown reason was half chopped into by some ruthless vandal with an axe.

The wire through which so many meaningful conversations passed is now cut.

Bob Bendig's sign has a few enhancements...

There was a beautiful memorial message to the Booth, outlined in volcanic cinder,

as well as a little political statement.

We made a phone call from our cell phone to family members, thinking that maybe a call made from the site might cheer us up a little. It did not. Without the booth and a connection to that unbelievably long phone line, with its trademark pops and pings, it’s not a Mojave Phone Booth call.

I paid my respects to the "dearly departed."

We walked around the area a little, and saw that, other than the Booth's "death," not much has changed.

The old stop sign at the cattle grate still swings in the wind.

The big, 300-year-old Joshua tree still watches over our favorite campsite.

The wires and poles still hum from time to time with that weird resonant sound.

The breeze still whispers gently through the bushes.

and...

Cattle still trample the desert, leaving deep ruts in the soil just a few yards from where the Booth stood,

crap everywhere, trample shrubs (these pictures were taken barely 1/4 mile from the Booth site),

and leave the desert an ungodly mess.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Mary Martin and the NPS’ motives were in removing the booth. I thought back on the letter I received from her office last June. Now, in light of what still goes on there, BLATANT, UTTER HYPOCRISY is the best term I can think of to describe the decision.

Here are my rebuttals to her and John Reynolds' reasons for removing the Booth and defending the action as 'appropriate':

• Vegetation damage? Question number one: Why are the cattle still there? I can’t help but wonder how anyone even remotely concerned with vegetation damage could use that as a motive for taking out a phone booth, visited by 25-30 people a week who traveled to it on existing roads, yet look the other way at hundreds of head of cattle wandering virtually uncorraled through the entire Cima Dome area, spreading waste, carving ruts in the ground, and eating the desert bare?
• Lack of facilities, such as trash service, etc? There is a nice new set of restrooms at Kelso Dunes, along with interpretive signs, funky-looking trash cans and nice fencing to direct visitors to a given trail. Why couldn’t the Booth be provided the same courtesies? There is a cleared area of at least an acre right next to the Booth that would be perfect for this purpose and have minimal effect on desert resources in the area. The piles of cinder still there could be scattered to make ground cover, walkways, etc. and the Booth could be one of the Preserve’s star attractions! How blind can the park administration be?? Should we really be trusting people like these to manage and preserve our public lands?

• Complaints from local residents? Actually, most of the local residents appreciated the Booth's popularity and visited it often. Charlie the tow truck driver, as well as Terry and Lorene Caffee, the owners of the Cima cinder mine (also shut down by heavy-handed NPS overmanagement), often answered the phone and socialized with visitors. Terry and Lorene were outraged at the removal. "It stinks," Lorene was reported to have said. As for the minority who complained: This is a national preserve now. Why are local residents allowed to have this much of a say in what park attractions are to stay and which are to go? I thought a national preserve was something for the benefit of the people in general, not just the local residents. I don’t hear of any plans to block access to Caruthers Canyon – that is a popular area of the preserve, the access to the canyon trailhead goes right by people’s houses too, and people could possibly get stuck in the deep sand there.
• Stranded and lost visitors? How about appropriate signage and/or periodic improvement of the main access road to the site?
• Unattended/illegal campfires? A standard-issue NPS sign that shows a graphic of a campfire with a circle/slash through it would take care of most of that.
• Trespassing?Again, THIS IS A NATIONAL PRESERVE NOW! Property holders, not the NPS, should be responsible for protecting their land if they insist on owning property within NPS territory. If they don't like the popularity of a park attraction, they should MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE! In any case, there are two or three roads to the Booth site which don't impinge on anyone's private property. If the most direct access road had been graded for 2WD passability, the flood of traffic on the only road that passes through the property of a whiny cattle rancher would have never occurred.
• Posted graffiti? The Booth was the only object graffiti was posted on, and I think that added to its character a little. I guess you could call Deuce of Clubs’ rock sign (also removed by overpaid rangers with nothing better to do) graffiti, but it was only visible from the air, and from a very low flying plane at that!
• "Several truck loads" of white rock brought in? Sorry to rain on that parade, but the white rocks, according to Charlie (whose word I trust far more than that of any NPS bureaucrat), were there long before the phone booth became a celebrity. He stated that a trucker coming to the mine for a load of cinder had forgotten to offload the white rock before arriving, and dumped the rock there to avoid having to pay for the weight of something he already had. The rocks were only laid out in the immediate area of the original pile. I wrote to Mrs. Martin and informed her of that fact, but never received a response. And, a letter from Mr. Reynolds a year and a half later contains the same blatant lie. His response came when a last-ditch appeal to President Bush (whose cabinet supposedly was going to push "more sensible environmental policies") was merely forwarded to Reynolds' office for comment. With the exception of a few semantic changes, which make the letter appear at least to no longer blame Pac Bell for being the driving force behind the removal of the Booth, the response was exactly the same letter that Mary Martin sent out last year.

• Pac Bell’s easement expired eight years ago? Why is this suddenly an issue? If eight years have gone by without any problem, what's the problem? I’m sure it would be no problem for a mighty government agency to order an important and historic phone on its land to be kept in service if it really wanted to. Trouble is, it didn’t want to.
• New technologies have replaced the need for the telephone? New technologies have replaced many things, but that is not a reason to get rid of them. Many items, including the Phone Booth, have historical and sentimental value that justifies their continued existence. Furthermore, the Booth was still fulfilling a vital role as a communications center for the very same local residents that Martin and Reynolds were "protecting" by removing it. Mrs. Martin or Mr. Reynolds, did you ever answer a Mojave Phone Booth call? Did you ever get a chance to hear those peculiar pops and pings that give one an idea of how amazingly long that phone line is? I think not. Most bureaucrats don't see and appreciate the things they snuff out. None of the "new technologies," especially crackly, scratchy, mundane, downright revolting cellular, can really take the place of talking in an old phone booth, connected by solid metal to an exchange many miles away.
  By the way, Mrs. Save-the-Desert... New advances in vegetarian cuisine have also replaced the need for cows. Why do the cows get to stay when the Booth doesn't?
• Large gatherings without permit? Well, you may have a valid point there, but what is your definition of a large gathering? 5 people? 10 maybe? The largest gathering I personally witnessed there was about 12. The 1999-2000 New Year's Eve party (which I deeply regret not having attended, given the course of events the following year), reportedly attracted about 40 people. This may have qualified as a large gathering under your rules, but given you and many of your rangers' inexplicably strange and mostly negative attitudes towards the Booth and those who visited it, who would have had the courage to approach you for a permit?
• Rangers having to patrol the area and provide necessary help and assistance? A maintenance worker having to haul away trash? Well, LAA DEE DAA! You mean people actually have to do their jobs? What a concept. I'd love a job like that, where if an attraction requires me to do some work, my boss rips out the attraction so I can just kick back and relax in the desert!! I agree that some Booth visitors were uncaring, but for the most part we picked up after ourselves and each other. I'm sure that it was a rare instance that the ranger patrols saw something they didn't like. More often than not, it was Charlie, NOT Park Service Rangers, who cheerfully offered assistance to the stranded, and often drove them to the Booth himself. And, given that the Preserve is obviously alloted funding for patrols and resource maintenance, this is hardly a valid reason for removing a desert legacy.

• Minimal environmental impact – Compared to the widespread cattle damage going on in the Preserve, the impact on the desert caused by a few people a day driving on existing roads to answer a phone booth is infinitesimal. I hope Mrs. Martin and Mr. Reynolds are aware of this, and if they aren't, it's time to appoint individuals to these posts who better understand desert ecology and aren't just bent on ruining an innocently good time for thousands of fans of a telephone in the desert. Better yet, turn their positions into elected offices, so we the people can really let these oppressive bureaucrats hear from those for whom these public lands are being "preserved"!!
• Historical value – According to Charlie, the Booth was in that spot, in one form or another, since the 1940s. It was a valuable part of the mining history of the region. According to the NPS’ own Historical Sites Act, the Booth was an historical structure deserving at the very least preservation, and at the very most a museum dedicated to it. Why isn’t someone held accountable for destroying a piece of history? Most of the bureaucrats up Mary Martin’s chain of command whom I contacted ignored my complaint, and the only one who did respond just parroted her letter to me verbatim, which shows that they don’t even care about someone not following their own guidelines. What a travesty the NPS is! Teddy Roosevelt would turn over in his grave.
• A source of innocent, wholesome fun for many – Why is the government so against anything that people might enjoy, especially something as innocuous as a phone booth in the middle of nowhere? There are so many negative influences in society that go unchecked. Why would the Park Service single out this extremely positive worldwide phenomenon to snuff out? It was a wonderful magnet of attention to thousands of individuals of many different cultures, as well as radio stations, TV shows (even Tom Brokaw was a big fan!), and movie makers (remember Dead Line?) It was in a great location, which added to its popularity, and getting to it was part of the adventure. It was always fun to call it and see who, if anyone, would answer. It's too bad that the phone had to be on land the government would eventually take over, and too bad that the short-sighted bureaucrats who were appointed to administer this land couldn't see things this way.
• Removing something because it's visited a lot goes totally against what the NPS is supposed to stand for! As Deuce of Clubs pointed out, the NPS homepage says, "Visit Your Parks." One of the reasons that the land was preserved is (or should be) so that people could go and visit it! Unfortunately, we are not all the same, and some people are trashier than others. But this doesn't seem to keep the NPS from shutting down other attractions. The NPS should have been glad, even overjoyed, for this welcome attention to the Preserve. Before the Booth, the Preserve was practically anonymous, known only to a handful of desert rats and people who follow desert politics. Now that the Booth has put the Preserve on the world map, its administration rips it out to show the world how uncaring and totally out of line with its mission the NPS is. In the simple language of one Homer Simpson, "D'OH!!!"

The Mojave Phone Booth was one of the most wondrous phenomena I have ever taken part in, and I am glad for having had the opportunity to visit it twice before it was heartlessly wrenched from us. I only regret not having gone more times to see it.

I have been an environmentalist for as long as I can remember, and have great respect for the environment and the creatures who inhabit and comprise it. However, I saw no problem whatsoever with the Booth being where it was. Granted, I am not a high-paid, regulation-savvy bureaucrat like Mrs. Martin and Mr. Reynolds, but I think I am looking at the same desert they are, and the damage caused by the cattle they permit to continue grazing there is undeniable. If they can’t see the utter hypocrisy inherent in their decision, I have pity on them and strongly urge them to consider a different line of work. The Booth was not a threat to anyone or anything, and the world has been robbed of a wonderful thing.

When thinking about the prematurely snuffed out Mojave Phone Booth and the good it brought the world, I was reminded of the final stanza of Edwin Markham’s great verse about Abraham Lincoln:

A lonesome place indeed.

Are you as ticked as I am? Here's who to pester. Let's not let the Booth die quietly!!

Mary Martin, Superintendent
Mojave National Preserve
222 E. Main Street, Suite 202
Barstow, CA 92311
760-255-8803
Mary_Martin@nps.gov

John Reynolds, Regional Director
National Park Service
Pacific Great Basin Support Office
600 Harrison Street, Suite 600
San Francisco, CA 94107-1372
415-427-1300

Fran Mainella
Director
National Park Service
1849 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20240
Phone (202) 208-6843

Congressman Jerry Lewis
2112 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
909-862-6030 / 202.225.5861

And, last but not least, the ONLY politician I've gotten a positive response from thus far !!

Senator Dianne Feinstein
United States Senate
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C.20510
202-224-3841

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