From
left to right you will see the black hills I played on (also shown here,
to the right), a bent tree that
was my favorite to climb, the two houses we lived in, the school baseball
field, the school buildings, and the field I used to run across (where I
picked up the Rose Quartz). An interesting note. The hills were
black because of a phenomenon called "desert varnish". These rocks had
been undisturbed for so many thousands of years, their upper surface has a
black crust. Turn the rock over an it was tan or brown. Plow a road and
the earth was scarred "forever". The desert never heals.
Scrolling right, you will see the mine road, where
large mine trucks busily lumbered and bounced back and forth between the
mine and the plant, laden with huge blocks of gypsum that were blasted out
of the hills. Sometimes a block would bounce out of a truck. My mom and I
had to cross the mine road any time we walked to the post office or the
commissary. The trick was to time the crossing when there were no mine
trucks nearby. They stopped for nothing. When I was in kindergarten I had
to walk to school, crossing the mine road and continuing all the way to
the most northern building in town ( I'm not sure if I have the arrow
pointing to the correct building). Later a new building was built next to
the school building shown below, which I think held grades
kindergarten through 2nd grade. The
old kindergarten became the Girl Scout meeting hall. (Note: I don't recall
so many buildings in the area west of the plant, so I am not certain which
was the kindergarten/Girl Scout building).
You can also see the USG plant, the "ship of the
desert", and the building where the culled sheetrock was ejected.
This must be an early photo because the are no piles of culled sheetrock
south of the plant. There is
a train on the tracks. Our water came by train. The road to Blythe is east
of the railroad tracks, out of the picture in the foreground. A small
airstrip is out of the picture to the left. Once or twice a year a small
company plane landed, to the great excitement of all us kids, who ran to
greet it, as businessmen in suits sternly warned us not to touch the
plane. It was such a pretty blue. I couldn't help it, I had to touch it.