GHOST TOWN LIVING

Life at 8,000 dusty feet, with a view of Death Valley.

“I am the luckiest man in the world. I am also a prisoner of this place…with one of the most breathtaking views” in the U.S. So writes Underwood, who wandered into the old, long-abandoned mining town of Cerro Gordo, California, and for reasons even he can’t quite explain sank his life savings into buying the place. Not for nothing is it called a ghost town. Most people who came there died before they reached 35, of all sorts of causes: alcoholism, mining accidents, gunfights, epidemics, dehydration, and so on. The author writes that buying the town still cost less than a two-bedroom house in Los Angeles, the city that Southern California’s mines made, and calls the purchase “the best money I have ever spent.” Remaking the town, he adds later, has not a little in common with trench warfare, and he took a lesson from the British army’s custom of regularly moving soldiers off the line for a few days of rest—even though he found it difficult to tear himself away from the task of restoring some of the town’s old buildings. And what a task that turned out to be: As he writes in exquisite detail—so vivid and vibrant that readers will think twice about following his lead—one of the great challenges was getting concrete and water up the switchback trail to Cerro Gordo, made just a little easier by the fact that locals at lower elevations became as invested in the project as was Underwood himself. In the end, he writes, rebuilding the town involved rebuilding himself: “Cerro Gordon takes you as you are, but then it changes you.”

It’s not quite Thoreau, but it’s still a pleasure to read Underwood’s account of bringing history to life.