Parked in The Middle of Nowhere
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.