GOLD COUNTRY : Surely a Fellow Could Find Some More, if Only He Had a Decent Grubstake

When a car comes down the street in the high-desert community of Randsburg, the local citizens look up to see what’s going on. There can’t be more than 150 people living in this tumbledown gathering of miners’ shacks. When you round the bend and first see the tilting maze nestled against a rocky hillside, it’s like stumbling upon a sprawling anthill. It was once home to wild and bustling days of fast fortune, but although those days are long gone, the town’s considerable reputation is carried with a rugged pride. The citizens know that they live on an unbeatable mother lode.

Randsburg has weathered many a boom and bust. Gold put it on the map in 1895, and the discovery of tungsten 10 years later really got it going. When silver came along in 1918, there were perhaps 2,500 people tented in this remote outpost. At the northern edge of the Mojave Desert, in the first foothills of the Sierra Nevada, it didn’t have a lot of what you might call restrictions. The law was 90 blistering miles away, in San Bernardino. During Prohibition, Randsburg and its sister cities of Johannesburg and Red Mountain entertained pilgrims from Los Angeles with 30 or so wide-open saloons. Bawdy houses were plentiful, too, unofficially sponsored by the potash works in Trona, where the workers were in dire need of entertainment and didn’t need a single earthly reason to stick around.

The hanky-panky wasn’t cleaned up until the 1950s, but by that time Randsburg was already withering away. The government had clamped down on gold production during World War II, and a good number of miners left to find their fortunes in factory wages. The bunch that stayed were the hardest bitten of the desert rats, who held on just to see the big mines open again. Legend said that the Yellow Aster mine, named after a florid dime novel, had in its time delivered maybe $20 million in gold--and at the old prices, too. Surely a fellow could find some more, if he only had a decent grubstake.

The town has always been heir to a combustible mixture of energies. Even these days, a half-hour journey down the hill brings you to Ridgecrest and the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, where scientists work on the Cruise and MX missiles, where Star Wars lasers are tested, where Tomahawk missiles fired from the Pacific Ocean crash onto the desert floor. And yet you can wend your way up the road to Randsburg and nearly find yourself back in the Bronze Age.

In the humming indifference of the steady sun, the shadows run deeper, all sounds carry farther. From old warped wood to corrugated tin siding, from the acres of rusty sardine cans to the outcroppings of ancient car carcasses preserved in light sheens of oxidation, everything seems to be working toward the same color--the thick red-brown of creosote and old telephone poles.

Early Saturday morning breaks over Randsburg with an unworldly silence. At half past nine, the bossy knock of a carpenter’s hammer intrudes into the air. The distant drone of a motorcycle rolls in from the hills. On the main street, a portly, bearded man known as Big Ray Galbraith erects a tent over his pickup’s tailgate. He sets out his jewelry and pans of dirt that may or may not be bursting with boulders of gold, then sits down in the shade and waits for tourists to snap at his lure.

Also parked in the shade are two dust-caked desert motorcyclists who have just come 25 miles overland from California City. They appear to be wrung dry and stare off in exhausted blankness. Until last spring, a Randsburg weekend meant that more than 100 dirt motorcyclists from all over would descend on their mecca like the range riders of old. A few complaints here, a little police enforcement there, have reduced their number to a handful of wily old pros who know the territory and know how to make a discreet entrance.

Big Ray can speak their language. He was once a boilermaker in the big city, and once he lived the Southern California high life. A divorce and some accumulated health problems brought him out here in the 1960s to live. Now the talkative gent is getting by, and he’s glad to tell you that he “owes nothing to no man.”

“Been here since ‘66,” says Big Ray. “My wife said she didn’t want to be married anymore, so I said fine and came out here. I’ve always loved it out here. I do wish, though, that Randsburg had more to offer to the visitors.” He waves a meaty paw toward the hills. “The government’s near made it impossible on the miners.”

At mention of the government, the bikers perk up. “You’re not kidding!” they chime in. “You can’t go anywhere around here anymore.” And they are off in a rhapsodic description of what it’s like to fly over the desert floor. It couldn’t be an act more unlike mining, but the dusty men are now united in common purpose.

Across the street, a couple of old antique shops begin to open up. It’s a fact of life that only about 10 independents are getting by solely on mining now, and that the rest are retired, drawing checks, receiving an outside dollar or waiting for the “weekend warriors” to blow through in search of history and a hamburger.

Down the street, just past Olga’s saloon, The Joint, Beatnik Bob swings into the General Store and rests his tattooed arms on the counter of the fountain. Bob is built like a fireplug. His eyes are almost permanently asquint, and he has that rough, sandpapery, muscular handshake that you get from all the miners. Tina brings him his first cup of coffee from behind the counter. A comely miss of 19, she has had just seven years of Randsburg living, has caught the 6:30 a.m. school bus to Ridgecrest, has seen a lot of the limited social life between here and Red Mountain. She’s getting ready to move to the Los Angeles suburbs to be with her boyfriend.

The soda fountain is of museum quality. Six bare light bulbs hang over a wooden hutch. Milkshakes are dispatched in faithful old cream-colored Hamilton Beach mixers. Folksy homilies are tacked up everywhere, and desert relics are piled to the ceiling. It’s charming as the dickens, and it is truly the heart of the village. Snoopy Lentz, a beaming, sinewy woman, takes her seat with a hearty yelp. She and her husband, Ken, are placer miners, but she can boast about the time that she and another gal, Pipewrench, entered a rock-drilling contest and beat a whole passel of men.

A little quieter, John Neagle sits down with his morning paper next to Beatnik Bob. A retired newspaper photographer from Long Beach, Neagle enjoys all the subtle victories of living in Randsburg. He knows, for instance, that he’ll never get a traffic ticket here.

Outside the General Store, a light tan Oldsmobile pulls up and three athletic, handsome city boys unfold themselves from the seats as if they’ve just driven a long way in a hurry. The lad in striped Bermudas brushes his hair back with his hand, looks around and adjusts his eyes to the hard clarity of mountain light. “Head rush city,” he says.

Opening the door to the Randsburg Museum is Karl Lindblom, a tall and heavyset man with a massive beard. He never tells his age, but he couldn’t be more than 40. His deep and conservative sentiments are with the remembered desert rats and their burros--the fellows who succumbed to changing times or, worse, to the dread silicosis. Lindblom knows they are gone, the same as the crusty old mine bosses who taught him--men such as Bert Wegman and Stewart Fraser. He declares that gone, too, are the carefree days when a guy could easily get his hands on some cheap dynamite and mine rails and sink a claim. Now, to Lindblom’s eloquent regret, the miners must shovel through paperwork. So he surrounds himself in his two-room museum with the documents of Randsburg’s past and holds to the hope that it could be the town’s future, too. It’s a scrappy town, after all, and it was made by hardened mavericks. It remains a hotbed of sedition. Every man has a proven scheme to find the heart of gold.

Lindblom hands out a card that reads “Primrose Mining and Milling Co.,” an assaying and assessment firm that keeps his hand in the earth. “And I run the museum on weekends to help survive,” he says. Well, of course. The whole town, in a way, is a living museum. Then he’s asked about his own mine. Surely he’s got a claim stashed way in the hills just lined with bulging pockets of gold?

“No, not at the moment,” Lindblom says, thoughtfully smoothing out his beard. “Right now I’m just biding my time.”