Time

Time. 

When you come right down to it, life is time. You get a certain amount of time to live, and no more. Your time is up. Life is time.

The COVID-19 pandemic, with its concomitant constant threat of death, has driven many of us to intense contemplation of just how much time we might have left, and how we can make the most of it. We have been reexamining the ways we lived before the pandemic, trying to decide what was valuable and should be retained or restored, and which time-wasting things (like commutes!) could be jettisoned or modified. 

Time weighed even more heavily on my mind as I took a recent photo trip to <a href = "http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=509">Bodie State Historic Park</a>. For those who don't know, Bodie is the best-preserved ghost town in California and perhaps the entire west. Miners descended upon the area in droves in mid-1870's, and the town grew to a population of about 8,500 people by the end of that decade. Like so many Gold Rush towns, most inhabitants had a rough, hard-drinking lifestyle, giving the town a bad reputation. The boom and bust happened in only a few years. The miners extracted the minerals from the Bodie Hills and took off in search of other riches as soon as the ore was depleted. By 1886, only 1,500 people were left, although a few inhabitants remained into the 1940's. Two catastrophic fires struck Bodie, in 1892 and 1932. Both times, firefighting equipment failed in a critical way. Most of Bodie's buildings have been lost to fire, and only 10% of the original town remains. In 1962, the remnants of Bodie became a historic landmark and were given into the care of the State of California, to be maintained as a public park in the state of decay at that time. Bodie is maintained in the 1962 condition, but with this decay arrested, so that we can see it as a ghost town. The curious may find more detailed history in <a href = "http://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/509/files/BodieSHPFinalWebLayout2016.pdf">the park brochure</a>. 

As always, when exploring our California history, we should remember the original inhabitants, who were here before the Gold Rush and were displaced by the miners. A Northern Paiute group called the <a href = "https://monolaketribe.us/">Koodzaduka'a</a> inhabited, and still inhabits, the greater Mono Basin and the area including Bodie.  Millennia of human history in California have not been so carefully preserved, but have been almost entirely erased.

Bodie stands as a testament to change in time. The town displays life in the past, how it was similar, and how it was different. Some sights are familiar--hotel beds, a pool table in a bar, a globe in a schoolhouse, and the prominent steeple of the Methodist Church. But their styling is archaic, and decay abounds. Nothing is left of the beds but frames and springs. The pool table, with its beautiful lion feet, is covered with dust. The shriveled, wrinkled globe lies askew. The church is in fairly good condition, and the styling of churches has not changed much.

Looking into the Oddfellows Hall, which once hosted the Bodie Athletic Club, we see a trapeze and rings hanging from the ceiling, and weights for lifting. While weightlifting is still common, most gyms today are full of electric cardio equipment with screens, and stylized weight machines designed to isolate the muscles carefully. Only a few of us still swing from trapezes and rings.

My favorite room is the school classroom. You can see the uncomfortable, old-fashioned, inflexible desks, and an old blackboard. You can see maps depicting an earlier world, and hardbound schoolbooks printed on paper. You can almost picture the students sitting in the classroom, ignoring the teacher and picking on each other. At the same time, you see the wrinkled, decayed globe, and the ever-present dust settled on each item.

Bodie's antique vehicles are a delightful highlight of any visit. You can see old-fashioned carriages and sleds that had to be drawn by horses, and also more modern horseless carriages. My favorite is beautifully-preserved Lottie, a bright blue 1927 Dodge Graham truck. She is usually parked in front of a pair of old-style gas pumps, paired with a bullet-ridden Shell sign.

The contrast with modern times is particularly striking in the morgue. The heartbreaking child and baby coffins remind us of much higher infant mortality rates as recently as a century ago. While we still see appalling racial and economic disparities, the chance infants have of surviving their first few years of life is much greater now than it was when Bodie boomed. Those child and baby coffins are a reminder that, no matter how frustrating and frightening our times may be, this is one of the best times in history to be alive. 

As I walked around Bodie, picking out features to capture with my camera, I began to think about how, like the mandate to preserve Bodie in a state of arrested decay, photography is also an attempt to stop time. Each photograph captures a particular spot on the spacetime continuum, and freezes it the way it was there and then, for future eyes to observe. This is what we are doing when we take a photograph, isolating an individual moment in spacetime and preserving it. Photography is a way of allowing us to see into the past, selectively. As photographers, we are selecting which parts of the past will continue to be visible and seen.

Ultimately, of course, this is all a lie and a game. We cannot stop the passage of time, cannot arrest the decay indefinitely. We can look at pictures of our younger selves, but we are no longer the same. Eventually, what is left of Bodie will be burned and lost. But our photographs allow us to cheat a little, to remember the past more realistically than we would in our minds, and to share what was with others.

Images from my visit to Bodie can be found in the <a href = "https://www.flickr.com/photos/7388553@N07/albums/72157719495290240">first day album</a> and the <a href = "https://www.flickr.com/photos/7388553@N07/albums/72157719449997191">second day album</a> on <a href = "https://www.flickr.com/photos/7388553@N07/">my Flickr page</a>.