photos from the edge 08 - the abandoned waterpark

photos from the edge 08 - the abandoned waterpark

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.

You can see the color images by clicking here.