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8 March 1997
Financial Times, 8 March 1997, p. XIX

Flight of the polyester-clad snowbirds

Nicholas Woodsworth learns there is more to Quartzsite than the Silver Buckle Saloon

I crossed the Arizona state line around sunset one evening, wondering, as I usually do at that time of day, where I was going to park my van Modestine for the night. The only place of any size was distant Phoenix. The prospect made me uncomfortable. Strange things happen out in the lonely deserts of the West at night.

Thirty miles farther on, without warning, Quartzsite came into view. On the map it hardly figured as a one-horse town, a place not much more than a wide spot in the road. Yet spread out on the plain before me, stretching to the horizon, was a vast human agglomeration - mile after mile of what, at a distance, seemed to be single-storey, white bungalows.

But Quartzsite, lost in the middle of nowhere, turned out to be an entire medium-sized city on wheels, its inhabitants housed in lumbering, self-contained motorhomes. It also turned out to be, to my mind at least, one of America's more bizarre and seriously demented places.

I pulled up outside the Silver Buckle Saloon, a large barn-like building and one of the few constructions that was actually fixed to the ground. Inside, playing to a crowded and over-warm hall, a band was sawing away at fiddles. Sitting at tables, playing pool, and lounging at the bar was some of the strange human flotsam that drifts back and forth along America's highways.

Warily, I took the only remaining bar stool. To one side of me was a hulking, white-bearded man his face burned by the sun, his lank, greasy hair covered in a bandana printed with skulls and cross-bones; he had not, by the goatish smell hanging about him, had a wash for some time. On the other side was a man dressed entirely in worn and dusty black leathers - trousers, jacket and boots, his hair long about the shoulders but short and flat as a table on top. He was having a solitary and ferocious argument with himself. It was effing this and effing that between each violent, knocked-back gulp of beer.

"Good God," was all that I, on the other hand, could find to say in hushed tones to myself. I wondered where on earth I had landed up. I nursed my beer and kept my elbows well in towards my sides. Avoiding all eye contact, I gazed out over the bar-room and Quartzsite's denizens at their Saturday night leisure.

There were monstrous tattoos out there, razor-honed hunting knives. spiky hairdos, beat-up cowboy hats, pierced tongues and navels, motorcycle jackets, Navajo beads and feathers. Quartzsite, it seemed to me that evening, was like a camp of post-apocalyptic survivors evolving mutant strains of life far out in the desert.

It did not appear all that different the next morning. Most of Quartzsite's inhabitants were not, in fact, the misfits, ex-cons, outcasts and psychopathic drifters I had seen the night before. They were solid citizens - polyester-wearing, TV-watching, mobile-home-owing, patriotic Americans. But they were, for all that, no less bizarre than the other lot.

Who in their right minds would flee the densely crowded suburbs of the great cities of America in order to set up house in an even more densely crowded suburb lost in the barren back of beyond? Millions of people, that is who.

When the phenomenon that is Quartzsite began 25 years ago, it was a casual meeting of a handful of prospectors, rock-collectors and semi-precious stone dealers. They gathered for a few days each winter in their trailers at Quartzsite, the site of long worked-out gold mines, to buy stones, trade information and socialise.

But Quartzsite was more than just old mines. It had sunshine, warm weather and vast ranges of public land where anyone could set down a mobile home without the slightest interference. Word got around and "snowbirds" - retired escapees from the extreme winters of the northern US - started flocking to the dusty roadside there in ever larger numbers and ever larger mobile homes.

Promoters - entrepreneurs who knew a bored, captive, financially solvent audience when they saw one - began buying up large chunks of desert and laying on organised sales exhibitions and entertainment. Quartzsite took off in a cloud of dust and has never looked back. Today it becomes an instant, moveable city each winter. Its summertime population is just over 1,000, but in January alone it becomes a temporary residence to more than 1.5m people. From its commercial, "downtown" centre, mobile homes litter the desert for 10 miles in every direction.

"Imagine you own a hardware store and have lived all your life in a clapboard house with a white picket fence in small-town America," said Howard Armstrong, the biggest promoter of them all. He had to shout as we roared along a Quartzsite "street" - a wide, dusty alley between endless vendors' stalls - in his humming electric buggy.

"You'd want to see the world, wouldn't you?" he hollered. I had to admit, I hollered back, that I might. "Well, all the world is here to be seen in Quartzsite," he yelled triumphantly, as we screamed round a corner into yet another endless alley of stands.

And, indeed. all the world is here. or at least the most crack-brained parts of it. Renting out space along the roadside to more than 2,000 vendors and their stands, Armstrong - a former popcorn concessionaire at the California Rose Bowl - has assembled all the loonies of what amounts to a latter-day travelling medicine show.

We puttered along through thick crowds of gawking visitors. We watched Arnie, the Ukranian-Cree fiddler, playing his instrument of choice, the electric toilet plunger. I spoke to baseball-capped, air-filter guru Denver Puckett, who guaranteed that his new, improved filter could add an extra 12 to 18 horsepower to my vehicle.

I gazed at large collections of handguns, knives, legtraps, high-powered crossbows and - my favourite steel-dart-firing blowguns.

I inspected sun-visors for dogs and cats, hand-sewn Indian breech-cloths for leather fetishists, medical magnets - "Nature's secret force for the relief of pain" and the Microwave Miracle Steamer (As Seen On TV). I inspected a thousand other outlandish items. And at Jim Fecho's rock stand - stones and gems are still big drawers at Quartzsite - I was given a clear-as-glass, six-sided rock crystal as a memento.

"The spiritual people are really big on the crystals they want the energy," Fecho, a professional rock hunter said. "At my stand they pass their hands over them. If I haven't washed them properly, they can tell. Too much negativity."

My own crystal has been properly washed. I can tell. It sits on Modestine's dashboard and positively hums. Quartzsite is now many miles behind, but whenever I pass my hand over the hexagonal stone I can still feel some of the energy - and some of the weirdness, too, that is America's.

[End]