Let Bodie Fall Down Slowly

A ghost town is better left to fall down slowly, as Bodie is kept, than restored and reopened as a place to visit.

What arrested decay keeps

Bodie sits in a high basin east of the Sierra Nevada, where the air is thin and the snow comes early and stays late. The streets are dirt, the sidewalks are weathered board, and the buildings face them in a straight row, as if the town were still waiting for a Monday morning. No one lights a lamp. No one sweeps a porch. The state that takes care of the place has not rebuilt it and does not plan to. It props it.

The state parks department calls what it does at Bodie “arrested decay.” A crew shores a wall when it leans, tightens a roof when it sags, and replaces a step only after the step is gone. It does not mean new boards, new glass, or new paint. Timbers brace the outsides of the oldest buildings, and a few doors are locked against the weather. When a window is gone, it stays gone. When a porch sags, a brace goes under it, not a new porch. The result is a town that looks the way an old house looks when the repairs are made with whatever is at hand.

The stamp mill still stands at the edge of town, its wooden frame weathered to a deep gray. Inside the houses, the rooms hold what the owners left behind. Wallpaper hangs in strips from the walls. Iron bedsteads stand in the corners, cookstoves sit in kitchens, chairs sit where someone stood up and walked out. On a quiet afternoon, a visitor can stand at a broken window and read a whole life through the frame. The absence is the real thing, and that is the strongest argument for leaving the town alone.

The altitude works slowly. Cold and dryness keep the rot down, and when the snow melts in the spring it runs off the hard ground instead of soaking far into the timbers. The town does not vanish all at once. It sits, going gray in a way that matches the hill around it. In a wet summer the boards darken, and in a dry one they turn pale. The whole town is a color chart of the season.

A restored town cannot help lying. Its boards are new, its quiet is arranged, and its story is told by a brochure. Bodie’s story is told by the wind. It works a shutter off its hinges, carries it across the road, digs a hole in the roof over the winter, and comes back the next spring to start on a wall. At night the town goes dark. There are no porch lights, no headlights crossing the sagebrush, no lit windows among the buildings. The sky comes down to the rooflines, and the only movement is the slow turn of a loose board in the wind. The nails loosen in the winter cold, and the boards work free one at a time.

What a rebuilt Bodie would lose

But the same decay that gives Bodie its power is taking it away. Every winter pulls a little more of it down. A roof collapses. A wall leans farther into the street. An interior that could be seen through a window last year becomes a pile of weathered lumber this year. The case against arrested decay is made by people who have watched a building die and want the next one kept. A ruin cannot always hold its own history. The words on the gravestones are fading, and the reasons the town was built are one generation away from unreadable.

The best restored towns show what is lost. A rebuilt boardwalk lets a visitor step inside a story. It can explain the stamp mill, the freight wagons, the families who buried their children on the hill and left town with their furniture on a wagon. Bodie cannot explain anything. There is no one to tell the mill’s story when the stamp mill is too dangerous to enter. There is only the outside of the thing, beautiful and incomplete. Unless the town were restored, that outside is all the next generation is going to get, and it may be more than they get.

Restoration would also catch things that decay has already set loose. A piece of glass falls from a broken window and lies in the dust until the wind carries it off. A roof collapse ends whatever is underneath it. The people who want to rebuild Bodie are not wrong to count each of those losses as a real loss.

Except that the moment restoration begins, the place stops being Bodie. A rebuilt wall is a copy. A new floor is a stage. The town is too old and too dry to be restored without replacing most of what a visitor would actually see. To make it safe for the public, the state would have to rebuild stairs, shore every ceiling, and install exits, handrails, and lighting. What would remain is the shape of the town, not its condition. And the condition is the whole story. The town’s emptiness is the exhibit. The best thing Bodie can do is go down in its own time, with someone checking the braces and the fire risk and the lock on the gate.

Bodie Foundation

Photos: Mike McBey (CC BY 2.0); King of Hearts (CC BY-SA 4.0)