I am standing on a pile of stacked rocks and compacted earth, lifting my camera high over my head with its lens pointed downward at the rectangular mine shaft.
I am falling, sliding down towards the blackness, rocks the size of bread loaves tumbling around me and skinning my forearms and shins.
I am still again, the camera tucked tight to my chest, feet against wooden boards. On the other side of the ancient flexing boards is nothing but open space, the kind of empty hungry vacuum that nature abhors. My black shorts are no longer black. My body is no longer clean. It is painted in blood and dust.
Shifting in the rubble, I extract one appendage after the other. My brain and nervous system work in tandem, running diagnostics at lightning speed. Right elbow supinates, pronates. Ankle flexes, tendons intact. Chin to chest, smooth and painless.
Back at the car, I pour water from a Nalgene bottle down my arms and legs, streaking red through the ash. I look up periodically at the rectangular opening skirted by debris as though making sure it hasn’t moved or expanded, that the Earth isn’t folding into itself at this epicenter. With a mixture of frustration and regret, I wonder how long that constructed platform of stones and soil had stood intact and motionless before I stepped too far from its center of mass and collapsed it. I have damaged history. I have emerged bloodied but alive.
Across the road waits the rest of Bonnie Claire, a ghost town just miles from the eastern boundary of Death Valley. It is 9:00a.m. and the feeling of the sun on the back of my darkened neck like a warm hand tells me the temperature must be nearing 100 degrees. I walk carefully across the asphalt towards the swaying tin and iron scaffolding, still waiting for the adrenaline in my veins to metabolize and for the pain of the rockslide to hit.
Tracing a path through a mosaic of shattered glass, square nails and twisted tin, I delicately wipe at the camera lens with the cleanest corner of my shirt. The structure stands at least 30 feet tall on skinny steel legs the color of dark coffee. Sheets of corrugated metal perforated by bullet holes cling to the frame, rattling and whistling with each breeze. In the center of the building, a dark metal cylinder roughly the size of a refrigerator remains suspended high above the floor. I carefully avoid standing directly below it, my open cuts reminding my brain not to trust the test of time so lightly again.
This ruin is different from others I’ve visited in the Great Basin Desert. Where other ghost towns stand broken but rooted to the ground in perfect silence and solitude, Bonnie Claire has a voice. She moans, ticks, and pings as though alive and wincing in pain. She moves in a slight but noticeable sway as though the wind makes her nervous. She knows her own mortality well. She knows she was never built to last, as surely as I do.
Feeling like an unwelcome voyeur, I walk the same path in reverse, all the while listening to Bonnie Claire sigh and whimper behind me. I am not the first or likely the last human to abandon her. My right shin begins to swell under the seeping gash. I run a little more water down my leg and into my right sock. The heat is rising and it is time for me to move on. This is no place for the wounded living.