We were trying to think of something to do CLOSE TO HOME. I wondered whether there were any swimming pools within an hour's drive of us (that's what we call close to home), since the Ridgecrest city pool is always horribly crowded and we're a bit fed up with the base pools. We considered Trona's pool, but somehow that just sounded so hot (it was predicted to be 105 in Ridgecrest and Trona's often a bit hotter). Then I suggested California City, about 50 miles south of us.
Cal City, as most people call it, is a very peculiar place -- I know, I know, the pot calling the kettle black, but really it is. Founded in 1958 by a college professor turned developer, it was planned as an enormous city that would rival Los Angeles in size. And get this, they LAID OUT the whole enormous planned city. Most of which -- the vast majority of which -- was never built, most of the roads not paved. Most of which is still there -- you can see the grid marks if you look on Google Earth -- and the city actually maintains the unbuilt, unpaved sections of itself. In geographic terms, Cal City is the third-largest city in California, though its population is only about 14,000.
It has some jobs -- a prison, a Honda proving ground (I think), and lots of people who work at Edwards Air Force Base live there. But overall, the town has a very depressed feel, almost like a ghost town. California City Boulevard, the main drag, is a BIG wide street -- with almost nothing on it. A few businesses here and there. Empty storefronts. Vacant lots. If you wanted to live in that part of the Mojave Desert, you could have your pick of where to build your dream home. But then you'd have to drive 50 miles to Ridgecrest to go to Walmart, so maybe it's better just to live in Ridgecrest. If you wanted to go to Denny's, though, you'd only have to drive 15 miles to Mojave (another jewel of the desert). I don't know, the choices are tough out here in eastern Kern County.
But Cal City does have one amazing feature -- a huge park with an enormous lake in it. The first time I saw the lake, I was looking at our part of the world on Google Earth, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. "Look at that!" I said to Rocket Boy. "It looks like a lake!" "It can't be," he said. I looked it up online, and sure enough, Cal City has a lake. A 26-acre artificial lake, according to Wikipedia. In the middle of the Mojave Desert, in a town of 14,000 people (more than a third of them renters) and almost no businesses.
More to the point, Cal City also has a pool. So this weekend I looked up the hours for the pool, and on the Cal City Parks & Rec page, under Aquatics, I found this:
PADDLE and CANOE BOATING
Marina offers paddle boat and canoe rentals to the public. 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm. Saturday, Sunday and Holidays. Memorial Day thru Labor Day.
And then it gave the fees for the different kinds of rentals. Hey, we thought, what fun to rent a paddle boat! Much more fun than just boring old swimming. So we told the twins we were going to do this and it would be sooooo fun, and we got all packed up and drove to Cal City, arriving a little before 3 pm.
There were very few cars in the big lot. We parked, got out, and walked toward the lake. Ducks and coots, hoping to be fed, swam up to us. To our right was the pool and to our left was an extremely decrepit building with a sign on it saying something like "Community Center Building restoration in progress." Uh huh.
We walked down to where we thought the boats would be and there were no boats. We walked down the walkway to the island thing (see first photo), which had picnic tables and was just very attractive altogether. No boats. No canoes. No sign that there had ever been a boat or canoe in or near the water in the last 50 years. Rocket Boy and I both experienced the feeling that we have gotten so familiar with in the last two and a half years -- the realization that the real story of whatever we've gone to find is oh so very different from what we've been led to believe. It's a very desert-y feeling.
Rocket Boy walked back to the pool to ask someone about the boats and came back with the news that the pool attendant had lived in Cal City for 6 years and had never heard of any boats going on the water.
So, we could have gone swimming then -- we had our suits and the pool was not at all crowded. But we didn't want to, somehow. So we walked over to the playground area of the park, which was pretty well shaded, and let the boos play for the next hour or so.
We did take one little walk, up a nearby hill (probably built from the dirt they dug up when they built the lake). There's a complicated system that pumps lake water up to the top of the hill and then it flows down the other side in a waterfall -- maybe that's how they aerate the lake? It was interesting. Here we are at the top.
But most of the time we just sat on a bench and watched the boos play. It was over 100, so even in the shade you don't really feel like doing much. We watched the other people in the park, and they watched us. Not a very high class of people there (we did nothing to raise it), but I suppose the rich people were all at home in their air-conditioning. I watched two teenage boys with blue and purple hair walk across the grass, one telling the other about a dream he'd had. Another group of teenagers led by a man in his 20s with Michelle Bachman eyes went over to a secluded part of the park and had some sort of meeting (I figured they were part of a gang).
At 4:30 we dragged the boos off the equipment (they could easily have spent another hour there) and drove the 50 miles home. That night, Rocket Boy wrote an email to the California City Parks & Recreation Department, asking them to update their website. I won't hold my breath on that one.
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