Hawthorne, Nevada: 89415

When we visited Fernley, nearly a month ago, we talked about two questions for puzzling out Nevada’s rural towns: why is this town here? and how is this town here? We don’t always address these questions, because the answers are sometimes too complex, and often too boring, to recount. However, in the case of Hawthorne, Nevada, one word explains both the why and the how of the town’s continued existence.

That word is BOOM.

We talk about boomtowns, about mining booms and railroad booms - those sudden meteoric explosions of prosperity which transform whistle-stops into cities, mining camps into metropolises. Nevada’s ubiquitous ghost towns illustrate how rarely these booms were sustainable. When the mines were tapped out, or when the railroad routed elsewhere, these towns withered as quickly as they had blossomed. I think of Friar Laurence’s description of young love in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die like fire and powder,

Which, as they kiss, consume.

In the blazing blast of the firework, says the Friar, production (kiss) generates destruction (consume), flame yields smoke: but the aftermath of such flagrant love is ash, always ash. We see this same paradox in the expansion and contraction of Hawthorne and other towns like it. Explosion goes hand in hand with extinction. But Hawthorne, unlike Rhyolite or Pactolus or Tybo or the Silver State's other ghosts, never quite went extinct.

BOOM suggests sudden, unsustainable economic growth. But, as Friar Laurence’s words suggest, it also suggests cataclysmic explosion. Audible booms, we might say – like the resounding detonations which rocked northern New Jersey in the summer of 1926, as millions of tons of ordnance exploded after lightning sparked a fire at the Lake Denmark Naval Ammunition Depot. That New Jersey depot was less than fifty miles from the heart of New York City, so the (wise) decision was made to store the military’s massive stockpile of explosives in the middle of nowhere. In Nevada. In Hawthorne, to be exact.

the dark green strip is Hawthorne; the white buildings are the depot

In preparation for our visit, we spoke with Vern, a church friend who grew up in Hawthorne in the mid-20th century. Well, technically, he lived in Babbitt – more on Babbitt below – but he was more than capable of filling us in on Hawthorne’s reliance on booms of various kinds. For instance: while he lived near Hawthorne, the high school had an enrollment of 400 or even 500 kids; now, there are less than 100 high schoolers enrolled. According to Vern, the town’s heyday was during the Second World War, and to a lesser extent during the Korean War and the Vietnam conflict. Developments in warmaking technology and philosophy, and the absence of a major US-involved military conflict in the 1980s, led to the contraction of the ammunition depot. The town, in turn, shrank further. (He also told us some fascinating stories about his time working on the bomb-production line at the depot, but we'll save that for our next post.)

The town’s variegated history is visible on every street corner. Quonset huts are everywhere, including one bearing faded red-white-and-blue paint, adorned with a plywood box office, a tattered marquee, and a name in unlit neon: Cactus Theatre. (Vern remembers going there in his youth.) We eat our lunch in the shade of the huge cottonwoods that stand around the old Mineral County courthouse – built in 1883 and superseded in 1970. The whitewash on the red-brick structure is worn and faded; most of the windows are boarded up. Crows croak and red-winged blackbirds warble in the foliage above; a solitary tiger swallowtail butterfly floats lazily in the sun near the courthouse’s portico. Chain-link fence crowned with barbed wire prevents unauthorized access to the building. Near the cornerstone, a red-white-and-blue-painted artillery shell bears a shiny brass plaque. Thanks to telephoto lens technology, we can read its legend from a distance.

2014 | NEVADA 150th | Mineral County | Time Capsule | Open in 2064

Hawthorne, we realize, is itself something like a time capsule: buildings like the courthouse (which stood for nearly a half-century before the first trainloads of bombs rolled into town) sit serenely next to facilities built in the mid-20th century, a few blocks over from the gleaming in-town headquarters of Day & Zimmermann (the civilian contractors who run the ammunition depot), and just down the road from a new-looking sheriff’s office. When we stop at the local library, we’re surprised to see a rose garden occupying the lot next to the library. The roses – deep red, delicate lavender, rich peach, distinguished yellow, white and pink and orange – overshadow simple black-and-white signs bearing folks' names. This is a memorial garden; the names are old Hawthornians. Another time capsule, this one floral.

But the library seems timeless. Its aesthetic blends 70s-era particleboard and dark tile with a contemporary layout and an uplifting emphasis on natural light. When we enter, the circulation librarian is helping a patron adjust his clear face-shield; this settled, she turns to his research question. I want to find the springs, he says. I have three questions: where are they, how to get to them, and are they safe? The librarian walks him to the Nevada section and hands him a book: this is a detailed atlas, so you might find what you’re looking for there. He asks again for certainty, but she demurs. A spring might be safe last year and not safe this year, she reminds him. He thanks her and wanders off.

The librarian, we discover, is named Kathy. I’m not a local, she says, only been here forty years. There is no hint of irony in this moment of self-deprecation: locals in Hawthorne are folks like Ruby Hume – she’s ninety-somethin, used to be a dancer at the USO. Compared to Ruby, Kathy is indeed a newcomer. She likes the library a lot; she considers it one of Nevada’s best small libraries. She characterizes Hawthorne itself succinctly and poetically. It's a small town on the way from one place to another. (More from our interview with Kathy coming in a later post, too!)

2014 | NEVADA 150th | Mineral County | Time Capsule | Open in 2064

Buildings like the courthouse abide; so do other Hawthorne institutions, like the library and the ammunition depot and Ruby Hume. Other ghosts of Hawthorne past have not weathered the post-boom phase so well: and here we come to Babbitt. Take a moment, dear reader, to browse the PO Destinations page on this-here NPP website. Once you find Hawthorne on that map, you can find Babbitt's tracks too: blank road-lines in a semi-oval northwest of Hawthorne. If you drive to Hawthorne on US-95, as we did, Babbitt is much more difficult to see.

At the height of Hawthorne’s prosperity, the depot employed so many workers that more housing was needed: so Babbitt came to be. More than a hundred modular homes, easily disassembled, were erected. So were shops, sporting facilities, a playground, a park, a post office, and a bank. Streets that ran parallel to the highway were named after aircraft carriers; streets perpendicular to the highway were numbered. It was a fully realized community, and it is almost completely gone.

Vern well remembers life in Babbitt – the theatre, and neighbors who also worked on the base. Part of the reason it’s gone, he says, is the fact of its modular construction: the homes were, functionally, collapsible, so when their usefulness ran out, they were disassembled and moved elsewhere. Babbitt houses, he calls them. You can see them all over Nevada.

We drive slowly up and down the cracked streets of Babbitt-that-was, passing concrete sidewalks that once led up to front doors and now end in blankness. Periodically we see manholes, leading down into sewers choked with who-knows-what. In the whole townsite, only a few habited structures remain. Where the school stood, a compound of some sort is bounded by blank fencing. Signs direct visitors to check in with the commandant. In the southeast corner of the Babbitt townsite, the Whiskey Flats RV Park seems to prosper. We turn and turn again on the shattered pavement, weaving to avoid drifts of sand and the enthusiastic dusty green embrace of sagebrush run amok. It is hard to put into words, or to capture with photography, the sense of recency dissolving into oblivion that hangs over this place. Trees grow in the cracks of concrete-slab foundations: cherry-red fire hydrants sprout next to...nothing. Folks now alive, Vern and Kathy and Ruby Hale not least among them, would remember when this was a bustling town. Now, the desert has almost entirely reclaimed it, as if Babbitt's boom has finally busted.

The drive back into town offers us another way to see the boom-cycle that has sustained and endangered Hawthorne for the last ninety years. US-95 serves as the town’s artery, a narrow concrete ribbon anchored in Fallon and the Carson Valley to the north – areas experiencing their own economic booms – and, far to the south, in Las Vegas. Plans exist to drive a new interstate, I-11, through from Casa Grande in Arizona up into Reno; several of the proposed routes follow US-95. Whether US Route or Interstate, the road and its significant traffic (we are on the major migratory route for snowbirds, Kathy notes) has certainly attracted the attention of Hawthorne developers, speculators, and business owners. On the outskirts of town, just as Babbitt’s disappearing townsite subsides into the rear-view, a string of new buildings have emerged, occupied by national chains. A Safeway grocery store. A Family Dollar and, further down, a Dollar General. A Chevron gas station. A large and extremely shiny iteration of Dotty’s, a Nevadan casino chain. These are the indicators of a nascent or in-progress boom. Then, further into town, older, more established institutions dominate: the Mineral County Museum, the Hawthorne Ordnance Museum (“Ammo Boxes For Sale!”), and still further down, the El Capitan complex – a restaurant, casino, and convention center maintaining a distinctly retro-neon vibe. These are the relics, survivors of the town’s fluctuating fortunes, hanging on through booms and busts.

A few blocks away from El Capitan’s (relative) sprawl is Hawthorne’s post office. It’s a long, low, 60s-era building, desert-dun bricks alternating with white paneling over the windows. A weathered windbreak awkwardly looms in front of the automatic door. Metal letters in that distinguished sans-serif PO font cast slanting shadows in the bright desert sun:

UNITED STATES POST OFFICE

HAWTHORNE, NEVADA 89415

We arrived in town during the lunch hour, which tends to be a busier time for post offices. So, after exploring elsewhere in Hawthorne, we returned to the post office, parked, and went inside.

Despite our delay, the retail lobby of the Hawthorne PO remains somewhat busy. As I enter, an older man finishes transacting his business and leaves. About five minutes later, another patron enters; in another five minutes, somebody else comes in. After all, this town has three times the population of Genoa and thirty times the population of Gerlach; so I interview Phil, the postmaster, in fits and starts.

My first impression of Phil: he’s conscientious, a stickler for the rules. When I ask him whether I can ask a few questions, a hesitation shades his eyes. There are certain questions about the Post Office that I’m not allowed to answer, he says – the first time I’ve heard that response. I reassure him that my questions are harmless, and he adds one more caveat: I’m the only one working a window, so if someone comes in...he trails off, but the implication is clear. He’s willing to chat, but not if it interferes with his work.

Phil has been the postmaster here for three years. Before that, he served in Montana – we still have a place up there – and Casa Grande, Arizona (one proposed terminus for I-11, as it happens). He’s a PO lifer: between Montana, Arizona, and Nevada, it’s been more than 30 years. He likes the job, considers himself fortunate to have work that provides for me, my wife, and our four kids. I ask him how he landed this job. My dad was a PO lifer too, he says, so when I took the test and scored well, I said, why not?

Hawthorne suits Phil; it shares the small-town culture of his previous postings in Montana and Arizona. It’s not as cold as Montana, he grins, and not as hot as Casa Grande. But it’s comfortable, he says, and laid-back. I ask him about retirement plans; as a lifer with more than three decades of work under his belt, it’s bound to be on his mind. It would probably involve traveling, he says. He imagines the migratory life of the snowbird: Montana in the summer, Arizona in the winter.

Walker Lake, which gives the town its name

For now, he’s here; not quite a Hawthorne institution yet, but fulfilling a key civic role. Throughout the town’s expansions and contractions, Hawthorne’s post office has served continuously for 140 years. It’s a small operation – like Genoa and Gerlach, Hawthorne doesn’t deliver mail. Everyone in town has a PO box, though there is a contract driver who delivers out to Walker Lake, Phil notes. (Walker Lake is a small community on the shores of Walker Lake, 11 miles north of Hawthorne.) Most of the rest of the area’s residents do live near Hawthorne, and thus near the post office; the ammunition depot’s vast landholdings around the town keep Hawthorne pretty well hemmed-in. Those who don’t live in Walker Lake get PO boxes and collect their mail at this one central location, like so many other rural Nevadans.

Before I leave, I ask Phil for one more favor: a photograph of him. The rule-follower re-emerges. I can’t let you take pictures into the work-area, he replies, gesturing to the open-plan office behind him, where a few workers sort parcels and mail. But then he brightens, points to a door into the lobby – I could come through there...

We write and mail our postcards. A breeze has sprung up, harbinger of the summer rain-showers we’ll drive through on our way home. As we head out of town, climbing south around the end of the Wassuk Range, I ruminate on a phrase of Phil’s, one that ultimately shapes this essay.

I asked him about the people in Hawthorne. It’s mostly old, yeah, he says. The three separate customers who Phil served during our interview were retirement-age; I see more elders outside, as I leave. We’re going through kind of a dip right now. But there’s a new mining development opening up soon. You’ll see.

It’s gonna boom again.