On the main street of an old riverfront town in the Delta there is a former gambling hall. This place and the town where it still stands were built and populated long ago by Chinese immigrants to California. The town is Locke, located at the apex of an elbow-bend in the roiling Sacramento River just north of Walnut Grove, and it packs a lot more substance than the post's title implies. You walk through Locke, you don't come out the other end without some history hitching a ride.
Flies own Telegraph City in the summer.
Flocks of fat, bumptious flies. Regular old house flies, every one of
them, with no valid excuse for occupying the place in numbers such as
these. These flies are not pictured here because they are too small
and too fast, but you don't care because you've seen a million already.
Although the last human residents fled about a century ago, there’s a
functioning windmill and a well in this deserted nowhere. A trickle of
clear water flows into an algae-lined concrete trough, next to stone
building shells that look like left-overs from a Clint Eastwood dynamite
scene. Two mules for Sister Sara? Hell, with all these flies you’d
think the 5th Calvary quartered here.
You cannot locate—by sight or by smell—rotting carcasses big enough to attract such a horde. And like I said, this population
consists entirely of house flies, Musca domestica, with nary a
blowfly or any other carrion specialist in the lot. They behave in a
salt-starved manner and will assign several squadrons to follow you
around and steal your sweat wherever you go. Within a few minutes of
climbing off your steely mount, you'll receive a welcome the likes of
which most people never get the chance to experience. Walk a hundred
yards across the yellow-brown grass and they provide an escort cloud.
Ride the same distance and they beat you to your destination. The only
reasonable thing to do is to accept their presence and refrain from
judging them. If you can do that, you’re ready for the mystery of
Chicken Boy.
Chicken Boy really lives here; it’s no myth. According to Chloride Jones, a local resident and ghost town researcher of some renown,
Chicken Boy is a visionary oddball, a graduate of Oakdale High a
generation or three ago. He is rumored to have researched connections
between the ancient ways of Freemasonry, 19th Century copper
prospecting, and stone walls erected by cattle barons. His keen analysis
was perhaps facilitated by a
chemical expansion of consciousness.
A few scattered ruins are all that’s left, loosely bordered by stone walls built by
the old cattle mafia. And thousands of holes everywhere from bullets, shotgun pellets,
and grenades. And an old bra discarded near the entrance to Chicken
Boy’s house. And the flies. For these reasons and many more, I
heartily recommend a visit to Telegraph City, Gateway to Historic
Calaveras County.
To find Telegraph City, follow these precise directions: Take SR 4
out of Stockton. Go east. Pass through Farmington--do not stop at the
saloon there, for you will surely regret it. Keep going a while. Look
for a road. If you get to Copperopolis, you went too far.
© Pseudocognitive
