Valley of Death (3 page)

“I just don't see why there always have to be two different sets of rules for everything,” Leesa told them. “I'm never sure which one is right.”

“It isn't two different sets of rules,” Olivia explained. “It's one environmental policy. The Park Service has been given a mandate to preserve and protect certain areas of our country for all Americans to enjoy. That means these areas must be kept exactly as nature created them. Nature didn't intend for burros to live in Death Valley. They're interlopers—outsiders. They have to be removed, but the removal is carried out in the most humane way possible.”

Leesa didn't look convinced.

P
eering through the window, Jack stared across the barren valley floor toward the Funeral Mountains in the distance.

What would it be like to get lost in that wilderness, to wander without food or water—no, food wouldn't really be a problem. Before a person could starve to death, he'd die of dehydration.

The thought of wandering in the desert reminded Jack of the gift he'd received from his parents a few months before on his 13th birthday—a perfect present, considering all the traveling his family did to the different national parks. He grabbed his backpack, opened it, and took out one half of the gift. It felt good in his hands, with a nice heft to it. After he pressed the button that turned it on, he sat watching the little red light that pulsed on and off like the beacon on top of a police car.

“What's that thing?” Leesa asked.

“A two-way radio. Which means there needs to be another one just like it for it to work, and I have it somewhere in here…the other…,” he said, rummaging again in his backpack, “…unit.”

It might have been his imagination, but it seemed that Leesa cringed when he said the word “unit.” She sure was impossible to figure out. Oh well….

“Here it is. Now I'll show you how these work,” he said, and tossed the second radio to Ashley. “Face the window, Ashley, and I'll do the same on my side, then we'll talk real low.”

Ashley caught the handheld radio, then, turning it on, she whispered into it, “Go ahead, Jack, say something. Over.”

Jack pushed down the talk button on his unit and whispered back, “Can you hear me? Over.”

“I can hear both of you whispering anyway, so what's the point,” Leesa said, unimpressed.

“Mmm, this isn't a very good test,” Jack answered defensively. “If we were out in the open, we could talk into this thing and hear each other up to two miles away. Wait till we stop somewhere, and we'll give you a better demonstration.”

From the front seat, Steven said, “How about if we stop here to look at those sand dunes? I want to get some pictures.”

“OK, but not too long,” Olivia told him. “If we're going to reach Skidoo, we need to get there and be able to drive back in time for my meeting.”

The dunes were worth the stop. From a distance they looked like Egyptian pyramids: golden peaks, with flat sides rising and then narrowing to a point. Closer, they turned out to be huge heaps of sand sculpted by desert winds. “I'm going out to the closest dune,” Jack said, “so I can show Leesa how these two-way radios really work.”

“You better not, Jack—you're supposed to stay on marked trails in the national parks, and there aren't any marked trails here,” Ashley warned him.

“In this case it's allowed,” Steven said. “Wind constantly reshapes the dunes, so footprints left behind by hikers get blown away before the day's end. Go ahead, Jack. Walk out there so you'll give some perspective to my pictures of the dunes.”

“But make it quick, please,” Olivia told him.

Jack tried to run fast, but running in sand was like being in a dream where you want to get away from something that's chasing you, but you can only move in slow motion. With every step he kept sinking into the soft sand; finally, after he'd gone about a hundred yards, he gave up. “Ashley, do you read me?” he asked into the radio.

“Read you loud and clear. Say something else, and I'll let Leesa hold this handset so she can hear you, too.” In the distance, he could see Ashley hand the radio to Leesa, instructing her to press the button while she spoke into it.

“Hi, Leesa,” he said. “I have sand in my shoes.”

“I heard that,” Leesa answered. “This thing's really cool. But your mother says you're supposed to come back here.”

“Be right there. Over and out.”

At the Land Cruiser, as Jack was dumping sand out of his shoes, Steven exclaimed, “Hey, guys, look at those dust devils to the west of us!” Less than a mile ahead of them, wind had whipped sand and dust into half a dozen high whirlwinds that danced on the rim of the hills, all in a row, like a chorus line of phantoms.

“What would it be like in the middle of one of those things?” Ashley asked.

“Hard to breathe,” Steven answered. “And you couldn't see much. Dust devils are like little tornadoes, but not as violent. So if you were inside one of those baby twisters, you wouldn't get sucked up like you would in a tornado, but it wouldn't be much fun.”

“OK, guys, we better go,” Olivia urged. “There's a restaurant up ahead a little way, but if no one's too hungry, I think we ought to keep going and see Ashley's ghost town first, then we can eat on the way back. That way, if we're running late, we'll just pick up a pizza and take it with us.”

Since they'd finished breakfast not much more than two hours earlier, everyone agreed to that plan. The drive was already turning out to be longer than they'd expected, and after another half hour Ashley yelled, “Stop the car!”

“Why? Are we at Skidoo?” Jack wanted to know.

“No, not yet, but Dad—you gotta get a picture of those rocks. Do you see them? They look like ghost heads,” Ashley declared. “Like a whole lot of skulls lined up in a haunted house.”

Squinting a little, Jack guessed he could see what she was talking about: A thick, dark, craggy layer of rock rested on an almost white layer at the top of a high cliff. The dark rock had eroded into shapes that Ashley, with her big imagination, saw as skulls, probably because shallow caves in the cliff face looked like empty eye sockets above screaming mouths. It would make a great place for a Halloween party.

“Death, death, everywhere you look,” Leesa murmured. “This place is depressing.”

Since Steven's camera was still on the front seat where he'd put it after photographing the dunes, he picked it up to focus on the ghost heads. Not too far behind them, a person on a motorcycle stopped along the side of the road, probably figuring there must be something worth photographing. That's what happened all the time in the national parks: Someone stopped to take a picture, and it quickly started a chain reaction, every following driver slowing down or stopping to see what was happening. At Yellowstone, if a bear or a moose ambled across a field, traffic could get backed up for a quarter mile.

In a few minutes Steven had taken the pictures Ashley wanted, and they were on their way again. Jack noticed the motorcyclist following, keeping a good distance behind them. He couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman. Leesa kept turning around to glance at the motorcyclist. Jack wondered why she seemed so interested, but he didn't ask. Maybe she just liked motorcycles.

The drive seemed to go on and on, or maybe it just felt longer because Olivia kept looking at her watch. “According to the map,” Jack said, “we ought to be getting close to the turnoff for Skidoo. And there's the sign. Turn left, Dad.”

The first hundred yards or so of the dirt road were fairly smooth, but then it turned into a washboard that rattled their teeth. “I hope it's going to be worth it,” Ashley said, her voice quavering from the jouncing. “I mean, it's my fault that we're coming way up here on the top of the mountain. The ranger told me it was a special place to visit, but I—I hope—“

“Don't worry about it, sweetie,” Steven told her. “I'm looking forward to it because I've never photographed a ghost town before. Hey, maybe I can get a picture of a real ghost.”

“Then you could sell it to the
National Enquirer,
” Jack answered. “It would rate the front page.”

Since the vehicle's jouncing made their voices jiggle, no one said much more until they rounded a curve in the road and came upon the ruins of the ghost town—although the only ruins they could see were old mine structures, with their walls collapsed and their boards faded or fallen down on the slopes. No houses, no stores, no sign at all of the thousands of people who'd once staked their lives and fortunes on hopes of striking gold in these mountains.

“This is it?” Jack asked. He wondered why they'd bothered coming here. There wasn't much to see. He started to walk along the pebbly, sandy, barren surface, and accidentally kicked a rusty tin can. When he reached the place a few yards ahead where the can had landed, he stopped to pick it up.

It was bent in the middle, squeezed into an uneven oval shape—the dusty inside coated with a residue of sand, the outside mottled with colors from copper to rust to the hue of dried blood. As Jack held the dented old can in his hand, scenes began to take shape in his mind. Some old miner must have opened this long ago—maybe a hundred years ago—to eat the beans inside. With pick and shovel, the man had dug inside the earth, hoping his miner's lamp would catch a flash of gold in the rock that surrounded him. Sweating, cursing the heat, drinking lukewarm water from a bucket, he'd have swung that pick again and again, waiting for good fortune to shower down on him. At the end of long hours of digging, he'd have gone home to a shack or a tent and opened a can of beans for his supper. This can.

“Can I have that?” Ashley asked. “If I tell you a story about Skidoo, and about the ghost that lives here, will you give me the can?”

“No, you can't have it,” he told her. “It's like anything else in a national park—you leave things where you find them. I'm putting it back.”

Leesa, who'd overheard them, said, “You know a story about this place, Ashley? I'd like to hear it.”

By tradition, Ashley was the family storyteller. Before they visited each national park, she'd check out library books to learn all she could about the place. Once they reached the park, she would talk to park rangers, asking questions. They always seemed glad to share stories about park history or about their own personal experiences, like the ranger in Glacier National Park who'd told about her terrifying encounter with a grizzly bear.

Steven climbed next to an old wooden platform that must have been used for who knows what in the gold-mining operation. After setting up his tripod, he started shooting pictures, pointing the lens toward the wave after wave of lavender-hued mountain ranges that stretched in the distance.

“OK, everyone, it's story time,” Ashley announced. “I'm going to tell this exactly the way the ranger told it to me.
More or less
. I'll try to remember his words, but I might end up adding just a few of my own—for artistic effect.”

“Oh yeah, sure,” Jack hooted. “Artistic effect.”

“Jack, kindly keep your comments to yourself,” Ashley ordered, giving him a look. “First, I'm going to tell you about the name Skidoo. The man who started this town bought up 23 gold mining claims here for $23,000. When he told his wife about it, she said, ‘Twenty-three skidoo.'”

“Huh?” Jack and Leesa both stared at Ashley, who'd risen to stand like a performer in front of them. “What's that supposed to mean?” they asked her.

“Back in 1906, when the town got started, ‘twenty-three skidoo' was a popular expression that meant ‘scram.' The ranger said there might have been other reasons for the name, too, because the town had 23 city blocks, and they had to pipe water about 23 miles from springs at Telescope Peak all the way to Skidoo. It took them a year and a half to lay the water pipes, and lots of men and mules died from working in the heat, while other men just threw down their shovels and quit, leaving their burros behind to wander around the mountains here at Death Valley.”

After that rush of words, Ashley took a deep breath. “Now, no more interruptions, Jack. Pay attention. This is a scary ghost story.” Looking mysterious, she drew out the word “ghost” until it slowly melted into the word “story.” Then she added, “And the best part is that it really happened! It's all true.”

Like an actress priming herself for an important stage role, Ashley raised her head, pushed her hair back with both hands, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

“Oh, come on,” Jack said. “Don't be such a drama queen. If you're going to tell a story, just tell it!”

“Let her do it her own way,” Leesa said, softly.

Girls! Jack thought. They always stick together.

G
old! Gold was everywhere, some of it lying right on top of the ground, waiting for someone to shovel it up. By the spring of 1907, so many miners had flocked into Skidoo, they figured the population would reach 10,000 before long. Skidoo was on its way to being a real city, with honky-tonks and bathtubs and telegraph wires.

As the town grew, miners hammered together rickety wooden cabins or lived in tents close enough to the gold mine that they wouldn't waste time getting there. All of them itched to make a big strike—fast! To be the first ones to hit that thick vein of gold ore. Surely the very next swing of their picks would uncover riches beyond imagining.

Two men from Wyoming arrived to set up the
Skidoo News,
the first newspaper ever printed in Death Valley. A banker showed up with $2,000 in his suitcase, and in a corner of the town's grocery store he established the Southern California Bank of Skidoo. Water from mountain springs finally started to flow through that long, long pipeline to quench the thirst of the citizens and run the mining machinery. Skidoo even had entertainment—a herd of trained goats and a troupe of educated fleas.

But not everything was rosy in Skidoo. A man named Hootch Simpson liked to roar around town menacing people with his guns. The citizens of Skidoo—who called themselves Skidoovians—considered Hootch a troublemaker, a rascal, a scoundrel, and a dirty dog.

One day in April of 1908, Hootch Simpson entered that bank in the corner of the grocery store. He told the banker to hand over $20. The banker said that Hootch didn't have that much in his bank account, but Hootch yelled, “I don't care. I want it anyhow.” When he didn't get the money, he made such a huge fuss that the grocery store owner, whose name was Jim Arnold, threw him out of the place.

Three hours passed. Hootch visited a saloon, where he got madder and madder. Soon he went back to the store and said to the owner, “Jim, what do you have against me?”

Jim Arnold answered, “Hootch, I have nothing against you except that when you've been drinking, you are intensely ugly.”

At that, Hootch pulled out his gun and shot Jim Arnold dead.

Now, Jim Arnold was well-liked in town, while Hootch Simpson was considered a very bad character. Skidoo was still a frontier town, with no real law enforcement (this was almost a century before Death Valley became a national park.) Soon a group of angry Skidoovians got together and asked one another, “Why should we waste time on a jury trial when we know dang well what the outcome will be? Hootch Simpson, this worthless, no-good snake in the grass, has killed our upstanding citizen Jim Arnold. Hootch is guilty as sin. Let's just put a rope around his neck and hang him!”

So they pulled Hootch out of the makeshift jail and marched him to a telegraph pole, where they hanged him high, leaving him up there long enough to teach a good lesson to any other bad characters who might be tempted to commit a crime in Skidoo. After they cut Hootch down, they decided that a nice burial would be wasted on a scoundrel like him. So they put his body into a cheap coffin made of pine and dumped it into an old mine shaft. There are lots of abandoned mine shafts all around here.

That might have been the end of the story, but it wasn't….

Two hundred miles away, a reporter for the
Los Angeles Herald
heard about the shooting—but not about the hanging. He thought he ought to go to Skidoo to cover the trial for his newspaper. The reporter took his camera so he could get some good pictures for his paper, but when he reached Skidoo, he discovered that he'd got there too late. The citizens had taken the law into their own hands and had already hanged Hootch Simpson from the telegraph pole.

The reporter felt bad that he had missed the big story, and the townspeople felt bad, too, that they'd disappointed a big-city reporter. Then someone had an idea. Why not pull Hootch's coffin out of the mine shaft and hang him again? That way the reporter—who had come all the way from Los Angeles—could get his photographs.

And that's just what they did. For the second time, Hootch Simpson got hanged from a pole, even though he was already dead. The happy reporter took his photographs and returned to Los Angeles.

And that might have been the end of the story. But it wasn't….

The town doctor, whose name was McDonald, became curious about Hootch Simpson. What would make a man like Hootch turn so mean and nasty and dangerous, he wondered. To satisfy his curiosity, Dr. McDonald crept out of his house in the middle of the night. At the old mine hole, he pulled up Hootch Simpson's body once more. Then, in the interest of science, Dr. McDonald took Hootch's head home with him to study it. Just the head, that was all. The rest of Hootch was returned to his grave in the abandoned mine shaft.

For years, Dr. McDonald kept Hootch's skull on display in his office, where any other doctor who was passing by could examine it. Later, when Skidoo became a ghost town, the skull disappeared. No one knows what became of it.

Now, all these years later, Hootch Simpson's ghost still lives in the old mine shaft—during the day. But at night it wanders around Skidoo looking for its lost head. You can hear Hootch moaning and howling and calling out on the wind, “What do you people have against me? Give me back my head! Oooooooh! I've lost my head!”

 

Jack exclaimed, “That's about the dumbest ghost story I ever heard.”

“Except that it happens to be true,” Ashley told him. “Well, actually, most of it is true, but some parts of it might not be entirely true since the story got turned into a legend over the years. But most of it's true! The ranger told me you can find it in lots of books. Except…well….” She looked a little sheepish. “I did make up one small part of it. But I won't tell you which part.”

“That's easy,” Jack said. “You made up about Hootch Simpson wandering around here searching for his head.”

Wrinkling her nose, Ashley said, “What I really think is that he's looking for another head—
anyone's
head! Like yours, Jack.”

“Or maybe yours!
Ooooooh,
” Jack moaned, mocking Ashley. “I'm a ghost, and I want Ashley Landon's head.” Then, oddly, they did hear a moan, as the desert breeze churned itself into a wind. It blew through the dried-out old boards with a sound like the low notes of a cello. Grains of sand danced across the surface of the ground, raising dust all around.

“Looks like more dust devils might be forming,” Steven said. “We'd better get back into the Cruiser.”

“Wait, Dad, please,” Ashley begged. “Give me a few minutes to really look around, to imagine where everything used to be in the story I just told. I didn't have enough time to see stuff, and I love this old place. I love everything about Death Valley.”

“Five minutes,” Steven told her. “I'll give you five minutes while I pack up the camera. If this dust gets worse, we might have trouble seeing the road on our way down the mountain.”

“Ashley, take one of Jack's two-way radios,” Olivia instructed, “and leave the other one here with me. Jack, you go with Ashley.”

“Do I have to?” he complained.

“Never mind, I'll go,” Leesa said. “I owe her one for telling the story. Only I didn't know it would be so gruesome.”

“Thanks, Leesa,” Ashley said, grabbing her hand. “Dad, don't start counting the five minutes till we get a head start, OK?”

“I'm starting right now. One Mississippi, two Mississippi….”

Ashley and Leesa dashed off, hand in hand. In her free hand, Ashley waved the yellow-and-black two-way radio to show Olivia that she'd taken it.

When they were gone, Jack helped his father collapse the tripod and blow dust off the camera lenses, then pack them into their cases. “I got a couple good shots of these old mining structures,” Steven said. “Good thing I took them before the wind blew up, while the sun was still bright enough to light up the streaks on all that weathered wood.”

“Whew, this dust!” Olivia exclaimed. “I'm going to get back into the Cruiser. The walkie-talkie will work from inside the car, won't it, Jack?”

“Don't call it a walkie-talkie. That's what they used to be called a long time ago when they didn't work as well. This is a two-way radio, Mom, and yes it will operate from inside the Cruiser. Just remember—push down the button when you want to talk, but don't push any of the other buttons.” Jack felt protective of his dual radios, because he knew how expensive they were. He wasn't too happy about Ashley having one of them out there wherever she was, but he supposed she couldn't really hurt it in five minutes.

The wind seemed to be blowing harder, driving grains of sand against Jack's bare legs. He wished he'd worn his jeans, but even in February Death Valley was warm enough for shorts. As Jack and his father opened the Cruiser to put the camera equipment in the tailgate, they could hear Olivia saying, “Your time's almost up, Ashley. You better start back.”

Ashley's electronic voice answered, crackling with a lot of static,
“Just one more minute, Mom. I can see something over there, but I'm not sure what it is.”

“Where's Leesa?” Olivia asked into the handset. She waited for half a minute, and when Ashley didn't reply right away, she asked again, “Ashley, can you hear me? I said, where's Leesa?”

Still no reply. Jack came around to the front of the car and told his mother, “You're probably doing something wrong. If you hold down the talk button when the other person is saying something, you won't hear a word.”

“I'm not holding down the button. She's just not answering. Ashley, Ashley, do you hear me? Come in, Ashley.”

In the moment of silence that followed, Jack said, “Let me try. Ashley Landon, this is your big brother telling you that you better answer—
now!
—because Mom's starting to worry. Over.”

Steven said, “If she's not answering, it might mean the batteries have gone dead.”

“Impossible, Dad. I put in fresh batteries just before we left home.” At that moment they did hear a voice, but it wasn't coming through the two-way radio. The shouts sounded so distant it was hard to tell which direction they came from, especially since the wind made noise blowing through the old rafters.

“Is that Ashley yelling?” Steven asked. After a minute a figure began to appear through the dust, slowly, like a shadow, barely visible at first and then….

“It's Leesa!” Jack yelled. “Ashley must be right behind her.” But when Leesa came closer, they could see that she was alone.

“I lost her!” Leesa cried. “She just disappeared! I got a stone in my shoe, and when I stopped to take it out—she was gone!”

Steven shouted, “We'd better find her, fast, before this windstorm gets worse! Jack, keep trying that two-way radio. Olivia, get the binoculars—both pairs. You and I will climb to that rise over there so we can see better. Ashley can't be very far away—she's only been gone a few minutes.”

Jack, too, climbed onto higher ground so there'd be less interference while he tried to make contact with the other radio. Speaking with his mouth right next to the little holes that worked like a telephone mouthpiece, he said, “Ashley, come in. Ashley, if you're playing games and jerking us around because of that stupid ghost story, I'm gonna clean your clock good when you get back. And if you've lost my radio handset—“

Leesa told Jack,” She didn't lose it. She was talking into it the last time I saw her.”

“So give me an answer, Ashley. Now!” he said. “Mom and Dad are really getting freaked. This isn't funny.”

Nothing. Not a word. In a shaking voice, Leesa said, “I'm sorry now I asked her to tell that ghost story. All about death. Maybe this is a bad place.”

Soon Jack saw his mother running down the slope toward the Cruiser, which made him think he'd better get down there too. “Come on,” he told Leesa. “Looks like something's happening.”

Olivia had opened the compartment between the two front seats and was pulling out the Landons' cell phone. She told Jack, “We can't see her anywhere. I'm scared she might have fallen into one of the old mine shafts. I'm calling 911.” Since the cell phone was connected to a no-hands speaker, Jack could hear both sides of the conversation:

“This is 911 responding. Please state your name and the nature of your emergency.”

“I'm Olivia Landon and my daughter is lost. She's only eleven—”

“Where are you calling from, Ms. Landon?”

“From the old ghost town of Skidoo in Death Valley. Ashley could have fallen into an abandoned mine shaft, and that's why her two-way radio isn't working—”

“Ma'am, you've reached 911 in Inyo County at the Independence, California, center. I'll have to relay your call to the main dispatch in San Bernardino, and they will then call Death Valley National Park, so there's going to be some lag time. I suggest that you dial the Federal Emergency Communications Center directly. I'll give you the number.”

“All right, but hurry!” Frantically, Olivia dug through her purse to find a pen and paper. She scribbled down the number, repeated it, and then punched in the numbers again.

By then Steven had reached the Cruiser. “Did you get someone?” he asked.

At the same time Leesa began to sob, “It's all my fault. I should have stayed right beside her.”

In the confusion, Jack missed most of what was being said between his mother and the person on the other end of the line, until he heard, “
Stay calm, Mrs. Landon. We'll get a search-and-rescue team there as quickly as possible.”