Won't you get hip to this timely tip? When you make that California trip Get your kicks on Route 66 - Bobby Troup and the King Cole Trio
Cars heading west on the old Route 66, now I-15, fly out of the high Mojave Desert at breakneck speed toward Barstow. For miles the desert's palette has ranged from brown and yellow to a dull green of far-off mountains. Suddenly, across the hardpan to the north, unusual structures appear - a not-quite-mirage in the distance. For a brief moment, iridescent colors encrust strange concrete shapes, as though they'd landed from an alternate universe. They flash by, and then they're gone in the rear view mirror.
They're a photographer's dream, if you can slow down enough to get off the highway and retrace your path along a pitted frontage road. That takes you to an abandoned waterpark. We Californians have a quixotic streak - who else would think of building a waterpark in the middle of the Mojave Desert?
Bob Byers apparently did. Taking advantage of the Mojave River's intermittent and mostly underground aquifer, he created a lagoon with swings for his family in the early 1950s. It became a popular campground, and then over five decades expanded and morphed into a series of amusement parks - Lake Dolores, Rock-a-Houla and finally Discovery Park. The last one closed twenty years ago, perhaps victim to the magnetic attraction of Las Vegas, 150 miles east - the origin or destination of I-15's high speed river of cars and trucks.
I don't know who began tagging and painting the structures. As I took photographs of the strange buildings and skeletal remains of what must have been the supports for waterslides, I met four young Chicanas. They'd grown up in nearby Newberry Springs, but didn't know the artists, or perhaps they didn't want to say. They'd never known the park as a waterpark - "It was before my time," one laughed. It's a place to take your friends or novios, to wander through and wonder what it must have been like - so much water then, and so dry now.
Another photographer from Norway had heard about it somehow. We'd see each other at a distance, each trying to incorporate surreal colors and shapes into a visual language of images. Conversation was unnecessary beyond a brief acknowledgement, each of us pointing lens and camera at a new moment's discovery. I could have stayed for hours.
My partner exercised great and unusual patience, eventually falling asleep in the car as I wandered through the brilliant December light. But the new espresso cafe in Barstow, created by Italian/Chicana visionaries Yvonne and Elfrida Butticci, was calling out its caffeine song to me, and we left.
It was like a dream. These photographs are its fragments.
David Bacon @photos4justice on the daily lives and ongoing struggles (both personal and political) of farmworkers - interview on Against the Grain with C.S. Soong
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx
LISTEN: https://linktr.ee/thatshowthelightgetsinpodcast(or anywhere you get your podcasts) MAS QUE UN MURO Cinco Entrivistas sobre la exposicion en el Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo, CDMX:
