Featured image credit: Mwf95
Decades before 2019’s “raid” on Area 51, 2017’s Fyre Festival, 2015’s dress color debate, and let’s not forget this magic moment, one of the first internet phenomena caught the world’s attention with a resounding ring. It posed the question: “If a phone rings in the desert and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” But more importantly, it answered the question: “If a phone rings in the desert and somebody answers, what do you say to them?” This is the tale of the Mojave phone booth; a pay phone at the side of a desert dirt road miles from civilization. At least until civilization came to it.
California Dreamin’ and Arizona ‘Zine-in’
On a fateful day in 1997, a man from LA, his identity lost to time, noticed a wayward telephone icon on a map of the Mojave Desert. Widespread use of GPS wasn’t really a thing yet, so a telephone icon miles from nowhere was a symbol steeped in mystery. Was it a design error? Or could there actually be a payphone in an isolated stretch of the desert? Curiosity got the better of him, and he headed out in search of the phone that would become legend.
And, at an otherwise non-descript point between Baker, California and Las Vegas, he found it. Excited by the sheer oddity of it all, he penned a letter to a ‘zine, dropping the Mojave phone booth’s number but not its precise location. And perhaps it would have ended there had garage band Girl Trouble not been playing Phoenix later that year.
After their show, a stranger passed the ‘zine to Godfrey “Doc” Daniels. Thumbing through it on his walk home, he became instantly curious about a phone number printed in the letter-to-the-editor describing the otherworldly Mojave phone booth. Back at home, he did what any naturally curious person would do. He picked up his landline and gave it a call.
Phone Calls to Oblivion
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From Daniels’s perspective, it rang just like any other phone. There was no way for him to know that, 12 miles from a paved road in the chilled Mojave night, the phone booth that would dominate his dreams was erupting in the darkness.
As you might expect, no one picked up the phone. Not that night anyway. But with that first call, Daniels was transfixed. At first, he’d call the number daily. Then, hourly. The Mojave phone booth became an obsession for Daniels; one too big for him to contain. So, he started work on a website devoted to the phone booth (no small feat in 1997 when the internet was still a few years from becoming the universal baseline of modern life).
About a month after the Girl Trouble show, Daniels was going through his usual ritual of punching the numbers into his phone, a cryptic code of (760) 733-9969 that seemed incapable of summoning anything but an ever-ringing void. But as he launched those sacred numbers into the circuitry, he was met with the sonic ellipsis of a busy signal.
On the Other Side of the Phone
Through his shock, he hung up and tried again, thinking he must have misdialed. He was met with the busy signal again. Frantically, he hung up and redialed, hung up and redialed, a technomonk genuflecting in the face of a miracle. And then his call went through, greeting him with its familiar ring, but with a long-lost feeling of anticipation burning through his stomach. It rang. And rang. And rang again. On the fifth ring, his heart started to sink as he felt himself falling back into the impenetrable darkness of the mystery.
“Hello?” The female voice instantly deepened the mystery while making it startlingly real. “Hello,” Daniels stammered, still in disbelief. “Are you in the Mojave Desert?” And thus he met Lorene, the manager of a nearby cinder mine crucial in the manufacturing of cinder blocks. Through his brief conversation with Lorene, Daniels discovered that the phone booth was installed to meet the needs of the local miners. But she’d never heard the phone ring before. Yet, as Daniels hung up, his satisfaction quickly melted into regret. He’d forgotten to ask Lorene the exact location of the Mojave phone booth.
Digging for Unburied Treasure
If anything, Daniels’s interest in the Mojave phone booth increased following his conversation with Lorene. He began to feverishly search for any stories of a desert pay phone. Again, this was before the internet really took off. Any attempts to scour the web for information on the Mojave phone booth would likely just bring up Daniels’s website. But after months of fruitless searches, he got his hand on a map in which a simple black “x” punctuated the implied Mojave topography. It was a slim chance, but it was also the only one he had.
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On a sweltering August morning, Daniels rounded up one of his friend and the two of them plunged into the unforgiving desert with the map as their guide. By the time they reached the turn-off for Cima, lightning storms were encroaching from every horizon. Yet they continued down the unpaved roads, past weather-beaten warning signs, propelled onward by the meager hope afforded by a dried-ink “x.”
The sun sank along with the explorers’ hopes, but suddenly, Daniels noticed a line of telephone poles, barely discernible against the falling night. And then, it was there, basking in the radiance of headlights. It was Daniels’s Virgin Mary sighting, his sasquatch, his white whale… right there, close enough to touch.
Answering the Call of Mojave Phone Booth
Daniels emerged from his van and stepped into the Mojave phone booth as lightning illuminated the desert around him. Bullet holes riddled its metallic frame and its glass was more a suggestion than anything. But Daniels reverently gripped the receiver and lifted the phone to his ear, then proceeded to page his friend back in Phoenix with that sacred code: (760) 733-9969.
Minutes later, the phone exploded with a deafening ring, resounding through the rocky vistas with shockingly more volume than in its city brethren. And as Daniels gathered himself to answer the call, the full circle of his holy pilgrimage came to its close. However, for most people who came to love the Mojave phone booth, the story was just beginning.
The Cinder Peak Policy Station
Half a century earlier, Emerson Ray, the owner of the Cima Cinder Mine, petitioned to have a public phone booth installed on a remote stretch of dirt road somewhere between I-15 and Kelbaker Road. It was a reasonable request. After all, his volcanic cinder miners needed a way to call home.
In 1948, the Cinder Peak Policy Station was erected, providing miners with a conveniently located hand-cranked magneto phone. It evolved over the decades, keeping up with contemporary standards of technology (and zoning). Initially, the phone shared the same area code as all of Southern California: 213. In 1951, the area code was changed to 714, and by the early 1960s, the hand-cranked phone was replaced with a rotary payphone.
Sometime in the 1970s, it was upgraded to a touchtone model. The area code was changed again, this time to 619, before finally settling into 760 when Daniels found it. The Mojave phone booth had already lived a lifetime before Daniels spoke into its receiver. No one knew at that time that its evolution had reached an end. Its remaining time in the Mojave was as short as it was eventful.
The “Loneliest Phone Booth in the World” Gets Less Lonely
In the wake of Daniels’s pilgrimage, his website gained traction, becoming one of the earliest examples of an internet phenomenon. It was even mentioned in the New York Times. People started their own websites devoted to the unlikely payphone. And the further the phone number spread, the more people called it. Calls poured in from all over the world, sending the Mojave phone booth’s shrieking ring into the atmosphere at all hours of the day. More amazingly, people were also trekking into the Mojave to answer these calls.
What was it about the Mojave phone booth that so captivated people on the verge of the new millennium? People often labeled it “the loneliest phone booth in the world.” But was this simply projection? Was the phone a remote avatar channeling any given person’s feelings through a filter of isolation? Sadness, loneliness, exhilaration, tranquility… they all found a beacon on this island of technology punctuating a sea of sand.
Perhaps for some, it was an escape; a fantasy far from bosses and bills, doctor’s visits, and insurance rates in a land where the sun scorched away such details, leaving behind only a gentle stirring of volcanic dust. Or maybe it was just the perverse thrill of making a human connection in a place where it shouldn’t exist.
Hysteria Over the Mojave Phone Booth
Award-winning journalist John M. Glionna felt compelled to visit the Mojave phone booth during the height of this mania. What little remained of the booth had been saturated with graffiti; people leaving their marks on the phone that had left its mark on them. Some visitors were more respectful, like a group of campers on their way to Burning Man who regularly used the Mojave phone booth as their meetup spot before heading onward to the larger camp.
The day that Glionna visited the Mojave phone booth, he was unexpectedly greeted at the site by Rick Karr, a 51-year-old nomad who had been camped out at the phone booth for 32 days. He claimed that the Holy Spirit had implored him to seek out the phone and answer its calls. During Glionna’s day at the phone booth, several calls came in from an individual identifying himself only as “Sergeant Zeno from the Pentagon.” But not everyone was as enamored with the spectacle that surrounded the payphone.
The Unceremonious Death of a Phone
On May 17, 2000, representatives of the Pacific Bell phone company arrived to haul what remained of the beloved Mojave phone booth away. There was no announcement, no chance for its fans to bid it adieu. Rather, it was unceremoniously carted away. That’s not to say the decision defied reason. Pacific Bell arrived at the behest of the National Park Service which cited the phone, or rather the people it attracted, as a nuisance. Rightfully concerned that trash, graffiti, and the general cacophony that accompanied the piercing ring of the phone were disrupting the environment, they chose sense over sentiment.
But the fervor over the Mojave phone booth would not be quelled so easily. Mourners traveled to the concrete base that had supported the phone for decades to leave flowers, trinkets, and other keepsakes. Then, when that too was removed, fans erected a makeshift headstone for the phone, fueled by news that Pacific Bell had physically destroyed the legendary piece of history. But when the National Park Service removed the headstone, that magical area miles away from civilization was finally allowed to return to nature.
The Second Life of (760) 733-9969
Per standard Pacific Bell procedure, the phone number associated with the Mojave phone booth was retired. But when Pacific Bell relinquished (760) 733-9969 to a competitor in early 2013, the number was purchased by tech enthusiast Jered Morgan (a.k.a. Lucky225). Now, when anyone calls the number, they are transferred to a conference room in the hopes of recreating the connectivity associated with the Mojave phone booth.
However, there was more behind the Mojave phone booth mania than strangers seeking connection. Sure, that was part of it. But the isolated phone was like a lifeline to a world untouched by our everyday fears, frustrations, and problems. It was an instrument of communication that left more unsaid than it ever told.
The Legacy of the Mojave Phone Booth
In 2018, Daniels self-published Adventures with the Mojave Phone Booth, an in-depth look at his journey to the phone booth along with the resulting hysteria and aftermath in the wake of its destruction. It’s likely a tale too alien for those raised on the internet to truly understand; a myth from the edge of the communication frontier. Yet, it captures the inherent nostalgia and strange innocence that so often accompanies absurdity. Go to that lonely stretch of the Mojave near the old Cima Cinder Mine today and you’ll likely be as alone as Daniels was when he rolled his van up to that strange sanctuary in 1997. Close your eyes and maybe, just maybe, you’ll hear a distant ring punctuating the silence.
