Cooler temps mean that events start being held again (in the hot summer, everyone just crawls into their little holes, like tortoises). And today was the annual Old West Days (though it's just one day) in Randsburg, a mostly ghost (former mining) town about 20 miles south of us, down Highway 395.
This is our third September in Ridgecrest, but the first time we'd attended Old West Days. In the past, what really stopped me from going was the thought of the parking situation. There's nowhere to park in Randsburg. Tiny little dirt roads snaking through the gentle hills of the town. I couldn't figure out how they could accommodate hundreds of extra cars. That was on my mind again today, as I drove down 395, but I'm a braver woman now than I was two years ago. It turned out that the "parking lot" was in fact those gentle hills. Here's our parking place:
And we were a very short walk from the main street of town. We were parked right behind the bandstand. Here's the band:
The main street of Randsburg has a couple of restaurants and bars (excuse me, saloons), numerous antique stores, and not much else. We arrived around 11 am, and along with everyone else we walked up and down the street looking at vendor booths...
...and local color.
You could buy hot dogs on the street, but there weren't many places to sit down and eat those hot dogs, so we went into a "restaurant." Where we had hot dogs.
Only $3 a dog, $3.50 for a kraut dog (I had a kraut dog). Rocket Boy had a pastrami sandwich, which I think was $5.
We did a bit of shopping: bought some candy from the Historical Society booth, and Rocket Boy actually found a hand drill that he wanted at an antique shop. He asked the woman how much and she said $8. I thought he should have bargained her down, but he just said OK, and we gave her a $10 bill. But she could only find a single $1 bill in her pocket of change, so we ended up paying $9. I guess I won't worry about it.
Randsburg reminded me of similar mining ghost towns in Colorado, and of course that made me think of our old friend Clifford, our next-door neighbor back in Boulder, who died of cancer in his 80s about 7 months after we moved out here, breaking both our hearts. Rocket Boy and I both adored Clifford and used to invite him along on most of our weekend journeys. He was a Colorado native, and spent his work life as a field biologist for the Colorado Department of Game & Fish. He was smart but folksy, opinionated and crotchety.
I told Rocket Boy I was thinking about Clifford, and he said he was too, so we started imagining what Clifford would say if he were with us today. What we came up with was pretty colorful. Clifford liked old things and old places, but he wasn't sentimental about anything.
The boys did pretty well during the two hours we were in Randsburg, but toward the end of that time they were getting whiny. What finished them off entirely was a mock shootout that took place a few feet from where we were standing.
"It's not real," I kept saying to Baby A, who was traumatized. "They're just pretending. No one is dead or hurt. The guns aren't real. Well, maybe they're real, but the bullets aren't real. They're just loud. No one will hurt you. It's not real," but to a three-year-old it was pretty darn real, so we hurried back to our car, and after several attempts managed to find a path out of town (many other cars were parked randomly around us by that time).
"What do you think Clifford would have said about Randsburg?" I asked Rocket Boy, as we drove off.
"He'd say, "What a dump," " Rocket Boy said, and we laughed, remembering our friend. Actually, Clifford might have been a little more charitable than that, because he did like old things. But he also called a spade a spade, and Randsburg is pretty much a dump. A nice dump, though. We had a good time there today (except for the guns).
And now, just because I can (it's my blog), I'm going to include a photo of Clifford. This is from July 2008. I think we were at the visitor center in Rocky Mountain National Park. Babies were four months old. I miss him.
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