TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/052289/05228900.068

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 9KB | 149 lines

TRAVEL, Page 108

Parked in the Middle of Nowhere

Migratory retirees with RVs prepare to leave their place in

the sun

By Joan Ackermann-Blount


    Here you can do as you diddly darn," says Gerry Bloomquist, 65,
a retired dress-shop keeper from Minnesota who is wintering in the
outskirts of Quartzsite, Ariz. She sips a drink, relaxing in front
of her 33-ft. Holiday Monitor recreation vehicle, or RV, in a lawn
chair set on a piece of Astroturf. "My grass," she calls it. While
the sun, rattlesnakes and tarantulas bed down, Bloomquist and tens
of thousands of other tanned retirees enjoy another happy hour
parked out in the desert, gazing at the mountains, puttering around
their mobile homes, filling hummingbird feeders, thriftily
sidestepping the cruelties of winter and old age in as mercurial
and rambunctious a community as the Wild West ever saw.

    North of Yuma, east of the Colorado River and smack in the
middle of nowhere, Quartzsite is not an official town. Never
incorporated, possessing no mayor, no schools, no stoplight, no
town water or sewer system, no zoning rules or local police, the
"gem of the desert" is home year round to maybe a thousand people.

    But Quartzsite is subject to the same forces that control the
vast flocks of migratory birds that traverse the continent twice
a year. In winter the town swells to absorb 200,000 people. They
are refugees from the frozen North, most of them retirees making
their seasonal escape in RVs. Then, usually in April, when the
temperature begins to rise and the lure of the North is greater,
the huge encampment with its bustling activity rolls away,
evaporating like runoff from a desert cloudburst.

    There are several species of snowbirds: "boondockers," like
Bloomquist and her husband Len, 75, a retired farm-equipment
dealer, park their mobile homes and set up housekeeping;
"tailgaters," who use their vehicles as shops on wheels, selling
all manner of goods; and "tourists," who just drive around.
Quartzsite is not the only winter oasis that attracts such
migrants. According to the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association,
some half a million Americans go south each winter in motor homes,
most to established cities in Florida, Texas and Arizona.
Quartzsite is for those who prefer to rough it.

    "People can't figure out why we're out here and why we aren't
bored," says Gerry Bloomquist, enjoying the sunset with her
neighbor Mary Lueth. Back home in Minnesota, the Bloomquists and
Lueths live an hour apart; here in the desert they live at either
end of a laundry line. "Oops, there's our noise for the day,"
cracks Gerry, looking up at four Army helicopters.

    Cheap rent, warm sun and clean air are just some of
Quartzsite's attractions. Winter residents also enjoy an easy and
active social life: evening bonfires, potluck dinners, dirt biking,
rock hounding, panning for gold (and finding it), plus more dances
than you'd find in a teenager's calendar. In February Quartzsite
plays host to the largest gem and mineral exhibition in the
country. And there's an abundance of flea markets, where a person
can buy, among other things, crocheted cowboy hats, petrified
dinosaur manure, pet ID tags, Whitt's "hillbilly" billfold and
racoon-penis earrings -- all at bargain prices.

    It's a curious desert scene that kicks up a lot of dust. Part
Bedouin bazaar, part fair, summer camp, westward ho and Outward
Bound. Highway I-10 is the town's main drag, essentially one long
flea market running about 2 1/2 miles east to west. North of I-10
is the quiet neighborhood of mobile homes, where locals live and
where a new Quartzsite Alliance Church is being built because the
old one, a converted garage, can no longer hold the burgeoning
congregation. "Half the guys working on the roof have had heart
surgery," boasts Pastor Stanley Peterson.

    South of I-10 is La Posa recreation area, where boondockers
pay just $25 to the Federal Bureau of Land Management for the
privilege of parking all winter in the most primitive
circumstances: no water, no electricity. Water is purchased in
gallon jugs from private wells in town; power is produced by RV
generators run by propane. There is one set of public pay phones
six miles south of town, but trying to make a phone call out of
Quartzsite in the winter is nearly hopeless -- too many voices
crowding too little cable.

    "This isn't a town," says one boondocker, watching the traffic
in front of Dolly's Restaurant, where I-10 crosses I-95, "it's an
intersection." But in the winter that dusty crossroads is sometimes
gridlocked. "During the gem and mineral show, we counted 2,700 cars
moving through the intersection in one hour and 1,000 pedestrians,"
says Dave Springsteen of the highway department.

    The traffic coming through Quartzsite has varied over the
years: Spanish miners, prospectors, mules, stage drivers,
cavalrymen, Indians, cattle, even camels imported from North Africa
by the U.S. Army in the mid-1850s for a desert experiment in supply
transportation. A Syrian named Hadji Ali (Hi Jolly to the locals)
served as chief camel driver. Like most travelers who pass through
Quartzsite, the camels moved on; the hard-baked rocks were too
tough on their feet, and they didn't get along with the Army's
mules. But Hi Jolly's gravestone, a pyramid topped with a little
copper camel, remains, a permanent fixture in a town of transients.


    "We got to work like crazy six months a year to try to
survive," says Vangie Millard, who owns the Quartzsite Beauty Salon
and Barber Shop. Before the booming RV industry redefined the town
a decade ago, her shop was half doughnut shop, half beauty shop,
with just four dryers and one shampoo bowl; now there are no
doughnuts, and she has 16 dryers and eight shampoo bowls.

    After most of the golden oldsters have departed, the handful
of permanent residents settle down for the summer heat. "This is
one of the hottest places in the States," says Johnny Braswell,
owner of La Casa Del Rancho restaurant, "but you learn to live with
it." Braswell and his wife Betty have lived here for 17 years and
raised six kids, packing them off to school in nearby towns. In a
community where no one is in charge, Braswell takes it upon himself
to maintain the big Q sign on Q mountain. "A while ago, I filled
my pickup with 4-H kids, drove up there and poured whitewash over
the Q. Got to go up there again.'' Like everything else in town,
his business is geared toward an older clientele. "Ninety-five
percent of the people who eat here have dentures. We serve bread
pudding, oatmeal, mashed potatoes, and don't make the food too
spicy. We only serve the soft-shell taco. It's a whole different
atmosphere here. If it's someone's birthday, the whole room sings."

    At the east end of town, James ("J.J.") and Bonnie Jackson run
a shop for gold prospectors. "Lot of folks here got the fever, gold
fever," he says. The Jacksons have done well during their first
year in business selling gold pans, metal detectors, black-sand
magnets and an instrument that separates gold flecks from gravel.
("You run water through it, and the gold walks up the veins into
your little catchall. Just walks on up like it has a mind of its
own.") "Folks around here like to dig in the dirt."

    They also like to dance on it. South of town is the Stardusty
Ballroom, where twice a week in season 300 ballroom dancers
fox-trot and waltz to the supple beat of a five-piece band that
displays its name, Desert Varnish, on maroon baseball caps. The
dance floor is made of plywood panels, and the ceiling is the blue
Arizona sky. DANCE AT YOUR OWN RISK reads the sign posted near a
huge cactus. Couples dance in the desert, romance hovering like
heat haze; some dress in matching colors. Stuck in the ground
around them are plastic hyacinths, windmills, ducks. "I can't help
it if I'm still in love with you," sings a man to himself, staring
off at the mountains.

    Not far from the ballroom is a pile of rocks, a grave with a
planted cross that reads OLD MAN WINTER. By mid-May the grave and
a whole lot of tire tracks will be all that remains of the flock
of snowbirds that have migrated north to follow the seasons.
Traffic on I-10 will be down to a trickle, and the swamp coolers
in Dolly's Restaurant will be cranked up, working overtime to beat
the heat.