Welcome to my midlife crisis. It seems to have arrived just in time to rescue me. But how I can get fascinated by a dead town in the middle of the Mojave desert, I don't know, yet it happened this morning. Daggett, California is one of the sorriest places I have ever been, and that's saying something, since I have been to some crappy places. Daggett is located just off I40 past Barstow. Blink, you'd miss it. I would have missed it, too, but my car beeped at me--I needed gas, pulled off 40, and there it was. Daggett. The back of the beyond of nowhere, except hot. Most of the town's buildings--the ones that still exist as actual buildings--look like they are about to melt into themselves from the heat. Residents generally live in trailers. The main exception I found was an "apartment complex" called inexplicably "The Haven." The haven was located down a street barely wide enough to admit my car. It turned out to be a square of four double-wides shoved together and chopped up into separate units, with 4'x4' backyards that all contained various kinds of rusted junk. Although I didn't spot anyone, I could tell people were living in these. They had made patios with a central, shared barbeque pit out of bricks they'd piled in the center, which had been recently used.
Daggett also seems to have its own peculiar and noticeable conventions as a community, although I'd like to meet their zoning committee. "Beware of Dog" signs were universally posted on fences or in windows, even though I only saw one old yellow dog that looked up tiredly when I drove by. I didn't hear any dogs bark either even as I walked the ragged fences they were tacked on. Another universal residential habit were the curtains. These consisted of sheets tacked up outside the windows. Many of these were gayly colored, albeit a bit faded. The purple Dora the Explorer sheets in the window of a shotgun, single-room "house," made me quite sad--and I use the term house a bit loosely. What sort of little girl would live in such a house? And if it wasn't a little girl who lived there--I shudder to think of that as well.
So what was Daggett's charm that led me to circle the town repeatedly and even photograph it? Shock, mostly, I think, that or the 103 degree heat that had me panting like that early AM Yellowstone wolf I referred to below. I felt like I'd landed on Mars. I really could not understand why anyone in their right mind would live there. For Gods' sake, why? I kept asking myself. Why would such a place exist, why would anyone stay there voluntarily? Had they never been, you know, anywhere else to understand how much this place sucks? Are their brains fried on peyote or heat? Yet, signs of humor, signs of appreciation for life abounded. Right there in the desert next to the Marine Corps Logistics Center, the Santa Fe Railroad, old Route 66, population 200: Daggett, California. Go figure.
The picture is of the nicest house I saw in Daggett. If I've done a poor job of explaining this town, I think the picture will say it all for you. Pink flowered bushes, pink-painted..pipe of some kind that matches the trim on the house, and a pink, unrunning old car decorating the front yard...yeah, I dunno. It's the sort of place I can't understand, cannot describe, cannot even fathom. Daggett. Hoo-boy.
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