Other Worlds
So, here's the thing - I have never considered myself a superstitious person, but more and more I find myself making hypothetical statements about the otherworldly. I'll say things like, "Well, I completely do not believe in anything like this, but, just as an example, what if the ghost of my aunt was in here looking at us right now? What if she just wants to spend some time with us? Wouldn't that be okay?" In Mexico, they say dogs can see ghosts. Every once in a while in my apartment, my dog would start barking at an empty space - under the table, under the bed, on the couch, or just in an empty corner. I'd try to calm her down, bring her somewhere else, but she'd just move right back over to the space and start to bark again. The instruction at that time was to swear at the ghost. Admit to yourself that it's there, and start swearing at it - "Chinga tu madre, vete pinche fantasma!" Stuff like that. Well, I didn't feel quite right with it. I decided that if there was a ghost there, we could potentially coexist, even if the idea of the swearing was to help him or her to move out of limbo and on to a final resting place.
I guess I have to say that, even if I am not entirely comfortable with it, and I'll keep making excuses, I kind of do believe in ghosts. Can you tell? I can't help it, I've just started feeling like they are all around. You can talk to them - they won't talk back, but you can imagine what they might say if they did, and my feeling is that you can pretty much get it right. Once, in my cousin's old car, which used to belong to my aunt, I thought she was there one day, right there in the passenger seat, and I let her be.
I'm sure many people wish ghosts did exist, but only so they could charge admission to see them. That's what Halloween is all about, and there's been plenty of exploitation of the idea of a ghost town.
In California, way the hell out there over the Sierra, practically in Nevada, there is a ghost town called Bodie, where I don't think that there really are ghosts, but since it was the premise for this post and I only got sidetracked into talking about real ones, I feel I must get back on topic. Bodie was a very, very late Gold rush town, populated so late that the guides are reluctant to even associate it with the Gold Rush - it was more of a last sputtering cough of the outpouring of sparkly stuff from the foothills of the Sierra.
It took me a long, long time to get to Bodie, and to tell the truth I did feel fear. I left in the early evening and used my GPS navigator to drive a black Jeep Wrangler in the dark over the Sierra very late at night. I started seeing signs for Lake Tahoe, and then started thinking that, you know, Tahoe is not on the way to Bodie from San Francisco. But my GPS is always right, so I kept going. And just like you I want human intelligence to triumph but it doesn't turn out that way. It had me go clear into the state of Nevada, where it gets all flat and gas costs a dollar less, just for crossing the border. I went to a 7-11 and looked at a map, and was horrified. The clerk and a random old guy buying gas said I should have gone through Yosemite, miles and miles and miles to the south of where I was. They told me how to get to a Best Western on Topaz Lake, still on the Nevada side, so I could find my way in the morning. But once I got there, the hotel clerk said that this was in fact the only way to get to Bodie from San Francisco, because the other highways I was looking at were closed after the year's first snowfall, which had been the day before. I was a little freaked out that my GPS knew that, or seemed to, but I figured it must have been programmed for November 1. Just to be clear, I don't think a ghost did that.
I got to Bodie the next day, mid-morning. I spent the day photographing it's freaky-ass empty buildings that have been preserved to look just decayed enough but not allowed to fall down. Some of the rooms had food containers and beer bottles and personal possessions left in them, but it just looked like people cleared out fast and no one cleaned up. I did not get the feeling that there were ghosts in Bodie, even after hanging around in the graveyard as the sun was setting.
But that doesn't mean that I didn't get to visit another world. On the way back, again at night, the Sierra, cloaked in that weekend's light snowfall, looked like sleeping whales illuminated in the starlight. I was alone again on Highway 88 after dark, and there were hardly any cars. At one point, even though you aren't supposed to stop on that road, I did. I turned off the engine and rolled down the window, and the silence hit me like a giant wave. There was no sound, but it was the farthest thing from silence I have ever heard. Finally I heard a car about a half mile behind me, so I rolled up the window and started the car again, and drove toward home between the majestic stands of redwood, cherishing that moment I stole out there in the middle of nature. It was something I didn't even know existed, and it made an impression on me that brought home the importance of preserving true wildlands. Maybe the greatness I felt was just in my imagination, but I don't think so. To me it was like a temple.