The Hub of Lonesome

With red dust coating his boots and clothes and skin, Tom Allen--effectively dyed the color of a picnic table--sits in a general store in this speck of a town near the eastern Mojave and talks about California as if it were some other place.

Not that he considers Nipton, just three miles west of the state line, part of anywhere else either.

“No way is Nipton Nevada, but it isn’t really California,” said Allen, 30, who grew up here and who manages an ornamental rock mine nearby. “It’s just Nipton. The hub of lonesome.”

The town (that is, six houses, a four-room hotel, an old town hall and the store) belongs to Jerry and Roxanne Freeman, the latest in a long line of dreamers who bought the town lock, stock and barrel.

Jerry Freeman, who had discovered the town 20 years earlier as a UCLA geology student scouring the farthest corners of California for gold mines, paid a reported $500,000 for it in 1985.

He has since given up his plan to transform Nipton--population 41, depending on whether anyone in the RV park has moved--into a self-sufficient community of hundreds enjoying lush, drip-irrigation landscaping.

This desert town doesn’t blossom quite so easily.

“A lot of people bought Nipton thinking it was on the verge of boom times,” said Dick Hill, a couple of spots back on the list of owners.

He owned Nipton for two years and said that it’s only the century-old town’s habit of always scraping by somehow, some way, that has kept it on the map.

As for Freeman, he now hopes to draw Mojave tourists with art workshops and ecologically sensitive desert camp sites.

“Finding a way to survive has been this town’s story from day one,” he said. “Look at the people who live here. They cling to the flotsam of life.”

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The town is an hour and a half from the nearest supermarket. Children have to catch a 6:30 a.m. bus for a 55-mile ride to school in Baker.

But it’s only remote depending on your point of view.

Linda Lou Darrow works as a clerk at the hotel and used to live 20 miles away, up on Kokoweef Peak, where there are still a few miners searching for California’s legendary river of gold. She moved to Nipton five years ago when her two children hit high school.

“It’s nice being able to flip a switch and have electricity or fall asleep without having to go outside and turn off the generators. It’s life in the suburbs. I love it,” she said, “but I could never live in Las Vegas or California proper.”

Darrow’s house began life as a railroad boxcar. Generation after generation added a room here and there, hanging blankets as doors. A Confederate flag acts as a window curtain. Every inch of wall space is taken up with snapshots, every surface piled high with mementos, papers, jars.

“I’m an Aries. We collect things,” Darrow said.

Out back, John Steffen, known as the Buzzard, is sitting under an elm tree contemplating one of his own paintings, trying, he said, to understand what he meant when he painted the mountain scene.

The Buzzard, 45, works in the same mine as Allen, spending hours of back-breaking work shoveling the red rock destined to provide landscaping for Las Vegas’ casinos and retirees’ trailer parks.

At the hotel, reminders of the town’s frontier days linger--most vividly in the well-polished .357-magnum pistol lying on the bed of innkeeper Larry Roberts.

Roberts was showing two guests the bar--a good-sized collection of liquor bottles kept under his end table--when they spied the gun.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen in the middle of the desert,” Roberts, 63, said cheerily. “Even though nothing ever does.”

Nipton’s largest neighborhood is a collection of dated trailers, where come midafternoon all is silent--without even the murmur of a single radio or TV.

Most of the people who live here work at the Stateline casinos at night and sleep during the day.

Chrissy Mitchell, 39, shares a 20-by-20 camper with her husband and fills in at the store and hotel.

Lately, she has been turning up bits of history with her metal detector.

“The other day I had an extra half-hour and I dug up a stove,” she said.

She also found an iron, actually made of iron, dating to the turn of the century--when gold was discovered nearby and a mining camp sprang up at Nipton, then a wagon trail crossroad known as Nippeno.

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Nipton isn’t the sort of old mining-railroad town where the artifacts have long been behind glass with price tags attached and where an old caboose is used as a restaurant and train museum.

Here, the trains still run and railroad spikes litter the ground. Prospectors come by the general store for supplies and more than one person will tell you that there’s gold in these hills.

Nipton’s residents describe life here as surrounded by beauty and friendship. They speak of the changing hues on the hills, the feeling of freedom and space they get from the vastness of the desert.

They call the expanse of land surrounding Nipton the lonesome triangle. The three sides are marked by Interstate 15, Interstate 40 and U.S. 95, each carrying a steady stream of people to and from the likes of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Although its succession of owners may have been disappointed by what they can see but not lure, the town’s residents view things differently.

“We’re so lucky,” Darrow said. “It’s like a wheel, and we’re the hub ringed by somewheres. But we’re nowhere and it’s beautiful desolation.”