Email
People seldom linger in Nevada's High Desert. Visitors speed down its arrow-straight roads eager to reach the gentler climes of the Pacific Coast 300 miles to the west, unnerved by the vast expanses of barren red earth and the cracked signs and blown-out tyres littering the highway's edge.
Towns are scarce and sparsely populated, situated only along the sprawling interstates. Black mountain ranges brood on each horizon. Occasional mesquite trees and patches of recalcitrant desert grass signal the only shade in a landscape of bleached earth and twisted rock that stretches for hours in every direction. And there, rising mirage-like from the sands at a lonely crossroads that serves as the gateway to Death Valley, the hottest, lowest, hardest place on the continent, stands an opera house.
The outside is straight out of a Sergio Leone western: a one-storey, whitewashed hacienda, three sides of a square set around a forlorn patch of contorted tamarisk trees and spindly bushes, with the box of the opera house adjoined to the end of one wing. Some broken machinery and an abandoned firehose sit blistering in the afternoon sun. Clumps of tumbleweed skitter across the forecourt.
Wondering whether I had somehow stumbled through a wormhole into Hunter S Thompson's warped mind, I stepped into the shade of the hotel's arched colonnade, and reflected on a simple fact that every long-term traveller on the road learns as a matter of course: America is a very strange place indeed.
Marta Becket, the venerable proprietor of the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, was one traveller who stayed. A classically trained dancer, she was born in 1925 and raised in New York. In her 20s she appeared at Radio City Music Hall and on Broadway. Then, on Good Friday in 1967, Marta stumbled across the Amargosa while touring a newly devised solo show around the backwaters of smalltown America.
The theatre and its adjoining wings were all but derelict when she arrived: a dingy collection of adobe buildings owned by the Pacific Coast Borax Company, one of the many mining firms whose abandoned complexes and ghost mines scatter the area, and originally used as a meeting hall and lodgings for employees. But something intangible and irresistible - a point on which Marta remains deliberately vague - compelled her to stay. She has been here ever since.
Securing the lease of the theatre for $45 a month, Marta set about restoring it; and a year later, in 1968, the Amargosa Opera House opened its doors to a bemused desert audience for the first time. For the past 30 years, in Death Valley's high season between October and May, Marta has provided her homespun programmes of dance, mime and musical revue for a ragtag collection of patrons, many of whom have inspired the characters that people her shows; Mormons, truckers, cowboys, farmhands, hippies, dreamers, tourists, gamblers burned on the roulette tables across the Nevada border nearby, even the femmes de nuit from local bordellos.
So far from civilisation, however, audiences were not always easy to come by. But Marta, as ever, had her own solution. Covering the interior walls of the tiny 50-seater opera house is a huge, handpainted mural of Marta's very own baroque theatrical crowd: a dress circle, royal box and gods, peopled by chattering faces and attentive eyes, that ensures she always has a full house to play to.
Audiences today are less troublesome. Features in Life and National Geographic, and the New York Times, glowing guidebook recommendations and a 1989 documentary (called simply Motel), together with the Opera House's inevitable word-of-mouth notoriety, have helped draw visitors from all corners of the globe, keen to experience a slice of vintage Americana and share Marta's vision. Now, well into her 70s, talkative, energetic and passionate about her life's work, she still performs in every show and works most days in the hotel. As I was shown to my room having completed the grand tour, Marta handed me a stubby candle in case of power failure, advising me that the desert marches to its own tune. So, I thought, do its people.
The Amargosa is a long way from anywhere. Las Vegas lies 110 miles to the southeast, Los Angeles 300 miles west over the soaring peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Baker, the nearest town, little more than a conglomeration of decrepit buildings, a gas station and a beaten-up diner, is 50 miles away. Death Valley lies 20 miles to the north-east.
Up until the second world war, Death Valley Junction, like much of Nevada and California, was a hive of industry exploiting the region's abundant mineral riches - gold, silver, tin, salt, borax and natural chemicals. Now the mines are abandoned, the industry automated, and their colourful names - Chloride City, Skidoo, Keane Wonder Mine - remain as testaments to a bygone era. Public transport is non-existent save for the occasional over-priced coach tour from Las Vegas, so your own car is vital.
A designated Save America's Treasures heritage site, The Amargosa Hotel itself has almost as much character as its owner. The walls are covered with frescoes of troubadours, cherubs, peacocks, vines, acrobats and harlots to match the menagerie of characters staring from the interior walls of the Opera House. Five of the double rooms have individual murals. Most have adjoining bathrooms with vintage tiles and fittings, and from my window I had a view from the rear of the hotel all the way to the Amargosa Range which forms Death Valley's eastern edge - as well as an appropriate desert scene of an old outhouse, a skeletal car, and a skinny-ribbed pony. Room prices range from $40 to $60 including tax. Culinary facilities are modest - a freezer of frozen food, a microwave, a water tank, coffee machine and a bar, all of which seem to operate on an honesty basis when the hotel falls dark at night.
If all this sounds like something out of a David Lynch movie, you'd be right: film buffs might recognise the abandoned garage across the road and the straight halls of the hotel from Lynch's 1996 film Lost Highway, and the Amargosa fittingly remains a favoured haunt, so I kept my eyes peeled for any electric-haired figures gesticulating wildly in murky corners. Souvenirs - stationery, T-shirts and calendars, videotapes of several of Marta's shows, and even a couple of documentaries about the Opera House's history - can be bought at the hotel office.
The best time to come is, of course, between October and May during the Opera House season. This year, Marta is performing two shows in repertory, Good Time Cabaret and The Dollmaker, accompanied by long-time compere Tom Willett. Tickets are $8 or $10. On performance days (Saturdays and Mondays), however, the hotel is often fully booked, and there are no other options for miles around, so it pays to ring up well in advance. Death Valley is also at its most temperate (and busy) during these months, though it remains searingly hot all year round. And high summer has its own attractions: you might well have the peculiar thrill of finding the Amargosa - and the night-time desert for miles around - all to yourself.
Later, sitting alone out on the hotel's veranda, fending off the occasional attack from demented crickets, I wondered about Marta's reasons for staying: the savage beauty of the landscape, perhaps, or the seductive pull of solitude, or some vestige of the pioneer spirit. Under the clear canopy of stars, staring out into the eerie hush of the desert night, reasons didn't seem to matter much. The desert, I remembered, marches to its own tune. All we have to do is hear it.
;