Oldie, but goodie

Aurora

"What a piece of work is man"…Shakespeare

Ghost towns are fascinating places. We headed for Bodie, one of the best. This eclectic collection of old wooden buildings nestles in a wide valley some 8000 feet up in the treeless hills north of Mono Lake.

After weathering 100 years in that harsh climate, some might call it dilapidated, but I suggest Bodie is aged to perfection. A few of the buildings lean a little in the wind, but most have been reinforced or re-roofed to preserve them. The state park system guards the place now, so the human scavengers won't strip away all the goodies, but everybody knows that the best protection comes from a curse that follows any soul foolish enough to steal artifacts from the place.

So the town preservers, a slice of the late 1800's suspended in time, that we can experience vicariously.

Most visitors eventually browse through the cemetery on the little knoll above the town, wondering about the people memorialized by brief descriptions cut in stone. They quickly get a sense for the difficulties these people experienced. The hopeful converged on this mining town from all over the globe seeking their fortunes, only to die there from disease, accident, or violence. 

We passed through on a holiday weekend. The parking lot was packed, so we just kept going on the rough gravel road. You can't find any ghosts when there are too many people there, anyway.

The road soon deteriorated into a nearly impassable, rocky obstacle course. Crossing into Nevada, we bounced along beside a small creek, through a spectacular gorge, and finally up the hill to the former site of Aurora. We passed a large rusting chimney, a crumbled mill, and then the huge open pit of a mine that seems to be consuming the whole area, modern man's answer to the problem of extracting mineral wealth from the ground.

Twenty rough miles from the crowds at Bodie, we had this ghost town to ourselves.

Aurora sprang up out of nowhere following a gold strike in 1862. In just a few years it had 10,000 residents, two newspapers, five mills, and the occasional saloon. Like Bodie, its neighbor down the road, it was a rough, often lawless place.

They scraped a few hundred thousand ounces of gold and silver out of the surrounding hills, made and lost fortunes, inspired Samuel Clemens to give up mining and take up writing, and then packed up and left before the turn of the century, when the veins finally played out.

Hardly anything remains from this ghost town but the most durable of wreckage. Anything worth taking was scrounged by folks building new boomtowns in other parts of the desert. The larger commercial buildings were torn down so post war Los Angeles could have homes decorated with used brick. The cemetery however, is still there, and I wanted my wife to see one grave.

Aurora's cemetery is smaller than Bodie's, but more poignant. In that place and time, children died young, and mothers often did not survive childbirth, so these tombstones mostly commemorate young women and little children.

Horace and Lizzie Marden left behind three tombstones in their family plot. Two remember sons aged 8 and 18. The third lists four children, one on each side of a marble obelisk, who ranged in age from 2 to 8 years. Pearl, Daisy, Dick, and Frank. These four all died between Feb.16 and 26, 1878.

We starred at that tombstone for a while, the big lump growing in our throats. Four babies, eleven days, nothing to be done but comfort the dying, console the living, and then wrap up the tiny bodies in this God-forsaken lurid town out in the middle of an uncaring arid wilderness.

Although I'd seen this grave before, it humbled me as if it were the first time. How could anyone be unaffected?

Imagine the tragedy of the Marden's lives, yet they stuck it out in Aurora for years.

What struck me at that moment was the resiliency of mankind. Our ancestors were hunter/gatherers. I guess we could have stayed that way, but soon people made their first metal tools from meteorites found on the ground. Then they learned to farm the earth, mine it, and travel all across it. Civilizations rose and fell, not unlike these ghost towns, often leaving little for us to know them by.

The primitive mining techniques of the late 1800's pale beside the massive operations of today, where an entire mountain is disappearing into the crushers just down the hill from the cemetery.

Good old mankind. How far we have come. How much has changed. We have mastered and scarred the earth far more than any other species before us. Not all of what we have done is good, or bad, but it is impressive.

We look at these ghost towns, with their faint records of lives lived and lost, and we grieve over babies dead a hundred years, and we realize, though mankind has greatly altered the earth, people really haven't changed all that much. Criticize man all you wish, but this comforts me.