The Queen of the Desert
california ecology tourism deserts the west
Alex Ross Blythe Roberson Andy Kravis Justin Chang Dexter Filkins Condé Nast
Alex Ross writes about how Susan Sorrells has transformed Shoshone, California, a Death Valley mining village, into a model of ecologically conscious tourism.
https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico
The New Yorker
“Next Services 57 Miles” reads a sign at the southern end of California State Route 127, which goes from the Mojave Desert town of Baker up to the Nevada border, skirting the edge of Death Valley National Park. It’s one of those two-lane desert roads that slices across the landscape like a never-ending airport runway. There’s an extended stretch that consists of a long downward slope followed by an equally long ascent. If you’re driving at night, the headlights of cars coming in the opposite direction float above one another in midair, like planes waiting to land. But cars are infrequent. For mile after mile, there are no services, no homes.

The fifty-seventh mile brings you to Shoshone—population thirty-one, as of the 2010 census. Palm and mesquite trees signal the presence of an oasis—a surfacing of the Amargosa River, which runs largely underground, from Nevada to Death Valley. Most travellers stop only if they require gas or a snack, although the Shoshone Inn, a seventeen-room motel, stands ready for the weary. The Chas. Brown Co. Market, on the left side of the road, is quainter and cleaner than your average roadside store, but there is no obvious reason to linger. If you aren’t pressed for time, you might be tempted to grab a bite at the Crowbar Café and Saloon, which convincingly presents itself as a vintage Western establishment, while also serving espressos and lattes. Next door is a small museum that documents Shoshone’s scrappy past as a mining community, with a surprisingly sophisticated collection of geological specimens tucked into the displays. Nature trails wind through the marshland to the back, where you don’t see the Amargosa River so much as hear it. As you head north again, you might notice a mid-century-modern house on the left-hand side of the road, next to an R.V. park. A keen-eyed architecture fan in your car might exclaim, “Is that a Neutra?” At this point, you begin to realize that there is something not quite ordinary about this tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

I first visited Shoshone in 2016, when I was working on an article about Death Valley. I returned last year to research a piece about Richard Neutra, who indeed designed the sleek modernist house in the village. But I’ve gone back before for no particular reason—because I never know whom I will meet or what I will learn. Scientists and their students bunk down at a facility called SHEAR (the Shoshone Education and Research Center), which is led by the geologist Darrel Cowan. At the Crowbar, you may run into members of the “Vole Team”—biologists from the University of California, Davis, who are trying to save the endangered Amargosa vole. Other researchers may be in town to inspect the local pupfish population, which was once thought extinct. You can also find race-car drivers, massage therapists, and deputies from the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office, one of whom keeps a chicken coop.

Shoshone could easily have devolved into ghost-town status—not a picturesque ghost town but one of those bleached, rusted places that appear to have emptied out during the Eisenhower Administration. The chief custodian of Shoshone’s renaissance is a woman named Susan Sorrells, who owns the village and a thousand acres of land around it. Her grandfather was the same Charles Brown after whom the market is named; he helped to establish Shoshone, in 1910, and he kept manning the gas pumps even after he became a California state senator. A complicated man with a secret past, Brown guided the town from its rough mining origins toward desert tourism; Sorrells, a Smith College graduate who studied African literature, has completed the turn from exploitation to preservation, seeking a mode of ecologically conscious living on the border between civilization and wilderness. She is now leading an effort to have a vast area of eastern California and western Nevada designated the Amargosa Basin National Monument. She deserves to be on anyone’s shortlist of the most interesting people in California.

“They sometimes called him the ‘silent panther,’ ” Sorrells told me, pointing to a picture of her grandfather that hangs on the wall of the Crowbar. The man known as Charles Brown was a tall fellow with a narrow face, a high forehead, and somewhat piercing eyes. He habitually wore a cowboy hat with a flat, clean brim. Sorrells was in her teens when he died, in 1963, and has clear, fond memories of him. “He loved to interact with people,” she said. “He could be a joker, but he also had this way of standing back and assessing a situation. He had a calmness, a quiet authority. He had very little formal education, but he had an innate way of cutting to the essence of things. I once talked to Governor Pat Brown, Jerry Brown’s father—no relation to our family. He worked with my grandfather and was impressed by him. ‘Charley Brown couldn’t be bought,’ he said.”

Sorrells herself is a youthful seventy-four, her hair long and tousled. She speaks in a soft, elegant voice, though she can be direct and down-to-earth when the occasion demands; she reminds me a little bit of Nancy Pelosi. Once, when we were talking about the fortunes of the tiny Amargosa vole, we were interrupted by a sputtering roar from the road, as several motorcyclists gunned their engines and sped off. When the noise subsided, she smiled, gave an airy wave of her hand, and said, “Oh, the ambience!”

Shoshone arose in the wake of the Greenwater copper rush of 1906 and 1907—the last of the wild mining booms that defined Death Valley in the first decades of Anglo settlement. Hucksters seized on reports that vast amounts of copper might exist in remote Greenwater, about thirty miles northwest of Shoshone. Two hundred and fifty million dollars of stock were sold, and a town sprang up. In the end, the total yield was a little over twenty-five hundred dollars. When the mining camps emptied out, Ralph (Dad) Fairbanks, a local prospector who had been running a boarding house, hauled several buildings to Zabriskie, a stop on the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad south of Shoshone. After the founding of Shoshone, some of those buildings were moved again; one of them, the former Greenwater labor-union hall, long served as Shoshone’s store and now houses the museum.

Brown showed up in Greenwater as one more scrappy youth looking for work. According to William Caruthers’s book “Loafing Along Death Valley Trails,” from 1951, Brown was appointed the town’s deputy sheriff, for lack of anyone else qualified to keep order. Caruthers, a desert-loving Los Angeles journalist whose he-man writing is sometimes too colorful to be plausible, describes how Brown subdued a rascally character named Death Valley Slim:

Slim rose, leaned against the bar. There was fight in him still and seeing a bottle in front of him, he seized it with manacled hands, started to lift it.

“Slim,” Brown said calmly, “if you lift that bottle you’ll never lift another.”

The bad boy instinctively knew the look that pages death and Slim’s fingers fell from the bottle.

I asked Sorrells whether she thought there was any truth to that tale. She laughed and shrugged. “Oh, well, I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a good story, anyway. We put it on the back of the Crowbar menu.” When the Greenwater boom collapsed, Brown stayed by Fairbanks’s side, having fallen in love with his daughter Stella. He went to work for Pacific Coast Borax Company, and eventually bought from it the land around Shoshone.

Who was Charles Brown? Caruthers offers little detail, reporting only that he had been born in Georgia and had run away from home. Sorrells told me the full story, which she has never made public. Charles Brown is a fictitious identity; her grandfather’s real name was Will Dallas Porter, and he was born to a well-off family in Shiloh, Georgia. Apparently, Porter’s mother died young and his father remarried to a woman of abusive temperament. Porter fled as a teen-ager, and worked for a time at a steel mill in Birmingham, Alabama. After joining the armed forces, he went West and apparently served as a medic, showing up amid the wreckage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Just before he was due to be shipped to the Philippines, he deserted. It was at this point that he became Charles Brown. If his past had been exposed, it would have destroyed his political career. Most members of the family discovered the truth only after his death.

“Thinking about it now, I don’t see what’s to be ashamed of,” Sorrells told me. “America was running this brutal colony in the Philippines, and he decided not to be part of it. Though the main factor may have been that so many soldiers were dying of yellow fever.”

Sorrells believes that her grandfather’s grim background—his origins in the post-Confederate South, his time as a child laborer, his act of desertion—shaped his outlook and his politics. “He wasn’t a perfect man by any means. He was a Southerner of his generation, conservative in a lot of ways. But he had a sympathy for outsiders, for people who were struggling. He helped Native Americans in the area. When our local school started, about half the students were Native. He showed a concern for the environment that was unusual in his time.”

At times, Brown displayed a radical streak. In 1918, he supported the Nevada feminist and pacifist Anne Martin, the first woman ever to mount a serious campaign for the United States Senate. Martin’s platform included equal rights for women, labor rights, a wealth tax, and support for a worldwide League of Peace. Later, Brown embraced the New Deal and had dealings with Harold Ickes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior. After serving on the Inyo County Board of Supervisors, he was elected to the state senate in 1938, as a Democrat, and held office for more than twenty years. Adept at striking deals, he became a point man between Democrat and Republican factions. Sorrells remembers a visit from Earl Warren, who served as the Republican governor of California from 1943 to 1953 before joining the Supreme Court.

All the while, Brown remained rooted in Shoshone, minding the store and dealing with the local oddballs. These included John (Cranky) Casey, a prospector who read fiction and science journals in his spare time; Joe Vollmer, a German immigrant who operated a distillery in a cave-style dwelling and played Wagner on his Victrola; and Big Dan Modine, who ran one of Death Valley’s signature twenty-mule teams. (The actor Matthew Modine comes from that family, and is, like Sorrells, a great-grandchild of Dad Fairbanks.) Brown knew that tourism was the wave of the future, and devoted much effort to building up roads in the region. If another Caruthers story is to be believed, Brown once told a trio of city slickers that they might want to bring more than one gallon of water with them into the desert. They thought that he was trying to sell them unnecessary provisions. Supposedly, only one of them made it back alive.

As Brown grew older, he handed over the running of the town to his daughter Bernice and her husband, a lawyer named Maury Sorrells. Bernice was fiercely progressive in her politics, more so than her father. Maury, similarly inclined, won a place on the Inyo County Board of Supervisors, serving from 1948 until 1964. He, too, developed a statewide reputation, flying to Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other destinations in a private plane. Susan Sorrells, Maury and Bernice’s daughter, had an unusual childhood. One of her babysitters was an impeccably gnarly-looking superintendent of mines, who would bring her with him to the job, depositing her in an ore cart. But she also travelled widely with her parents. In 1965, she went with them to Selma, Alabama, to participate in the civil-rights march there.

Richard Neutra, a flamboyant product of fin-de-siècle Vienna, made Sorrells’s early years all the more interesting. Her parents commissioned a home from the architect in 1955, having made contact with him through John Anson Ford, a powerful liberal on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. Neutra, in keeping with his usual practice, solicited information about his clients’ routines. Maury described his workday—“I arise at 6:30 in the morning and open the store at 7:00”—and Bernice added aesthetic considerations: “I want a home that is contemporary, but not faddish or modish, rather something that will stand the test of time.” Once the house was complete, Neutra gave himself permission, as he often did with his far-flung clients, to show up unannounced at the house for visits. Sorrells remembers a side trip to Las Vegas, in the course of which Neutra methodically inspected the décor of the Dunes Hotel, his hands clasped behind his back. After a while, he delivered his verdict: “That’s disgusting.”

Sorrells had not intended to spend her life in Shoshone. After graduating from Smith, she took a job working for Senator Thomas Kuchel, a moderate California Republican who during the rise of Ronald Reagan had warned of a “fanatical, neo-fascist political cult” taking over his party. Sorrells then joined the Peace Corps, serving in Liberia, and spent four months in the Soviet Union. Returning to California, she obtained a masters in African studies at U.C.L.A. In 1974, she married the Kenyan-born writer and actor Kyalo Mativo. The marriage did not last, but Sorrells carried on with a cosmopolitan life, spending time in Berlin and in Geneva, Switzerland.

Family tragedies brought Sorrells back home. Her father died in 1965, in a plane accident at the little Shoshone airstrip; he had been testing a new set of landing lights. Bernice carried on running Shoshone, but in the nineteen-seventies she fell ill, with colon cancer, and died in 1980. Susan’s brother, Charles, an accountant then based in Las Vegas, was too busy with his family to help run Shoshone, and so she assumed control of the village that her grandfather fostered. In 1985, she married Robert Haines, who operates a local propane company and works alongside her managing Shoshone.

In the early years, various parties offered to take Shoshone off Sorrells’s hands. The federal government approached her about establishing a nuclear-waste site. She resisted such schemes and forged a new vision of the town as a center of ecologically conscious tourism. The wetland habitats around the Amargosa River had been all but destroyed; Sorrells began to restore them, establishing nature trails. “My philosophy is that, if the ecosystem isn’t healthy, then people can’t be healthy,” she told me. “I didn’t realize it was going to lead me to spend quite so much of my life with the pupfish and the voles. But I’ve enjoyed the entire journey.”

Creatures that can survive in the desert tend to be hardy souls, but the juggernaut of human destruction has pushed several species to the brink of extinction and obliterated others altogether. Pupfish—tiny, minnow-like fish that occupy pools and streams at various points along the Amargosa River—were once thought to be extinct in Shoshone, but in 1986 they were rediscovered in a culvert next to the R.V. park. Sorrells joined forces with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and teams of biologists to foster a habitat that would allow the population to increase. There are now thousands of pupfish in a network of artificial ponds, which are planted with three-square bulrush and give a convincingly timeless appearance.

Reintroducing the Amargosa vole has been a more complicated undertaking. Voles are adorably diminutive creatures with big heads, beady eyes, and squat bodies. The Amargosa subspecies was thought to have been extinct until it was rediscovered in the late nineteen-seventies, in Tecopa, southeast of Shoshone. In 2012, Sorrells began talking to Janet Foley, an ecology professor at the U.C. Davis veterinary school, about creating a vole habitat in Shoshone. Davis had been breeding voles in her laboratory and wanted to see if they could survive outside of Tecopa, where fewer than five hundred live in a wetland area of about a square kilometre.

I watched as the team inspected the habitat, and then followed them to the established vole population in Tecopa. An older adult vole turned up in one of the traps. He had a damaged tail but otherwise was healthy. I held him for a moment—a slightly quivering ball of fur, emitting intermittent squeaks. After receiving a brief medical checkup—including an ear-cleaning, with ethanol—the vole was released back into the bulrush.

Ned, Patchy, Jake, and the others apparently did not make it through the winter. Hungry predators probably got to them. In the spring, the team returned to Shoshone and made a second release. When I last visited, in November, the mood was cautiously buoyant: one young adult vole, Alfred, remained extremely active. López-Pérez, digging into a fish taco at the Crowbar, filled me in: “Alfred was really, really tiny when we released him, but from the cameras we see that he is really big now. He is eating well and moving all around the marshes.” Foley added, “Alfred is a giant! And he knows everything about Shoshone. We’ve found that if a vole that knows what they’re doing, knows the habitat, if they mate with a vole that doesn’t know what they’re doing, the survival of the naïve vole dramatically increases. So we need to bring in females and take advantage of that.”

I asked Foley the inevitable question: why do the voles matter? “There are multiple axes for why we would care about this little rodent,” she said. “Its specific place in the local ecology is actually kind of important. It’s a big chunk of protein. For bobcats, coyotes, snakes, wading birds, hawks, this is a large fraction of their diet. But there are intangibles, too—getting people to realize what restoring the whole ecosystem does for us, too. I want this to be our legacy, saving this species.”

For Sorrells, all these stories are bound together: those of the voles and the pupfish, those of her complicated family, those of the airy, light-suffused home in which she lives. One day, when I stopped by the house, she showed me a copy of Neutra’s 1954 book “Survival Through Design,” which the architect had inscribed to her. “Neutra’s writings definitely influenced my thinking,” she said, “because he is always talking about a healthy way of living that is in harmony with nature, open to the outside.”

Sorrells pulled another book off the bookshelf: Margaret Long’s “The Shadow of the Arrow,” published in 1941. Long had a medical degree from Johns Hopkins and assisted tubercular patients at her practice in Denver, Colorado. She was also an outspoken feminist and appears to have been Anne Martin’s companion. In the twenties, following Martin’s failed campaigns for the Senate, the two women fell in love with the desert, venturing into Death Valley and neighboring terrain. Charles Brown often served as their guide.

“It’s fascinating to me how many women came to the desert and felt more freedom,” Sorrells told me. She mentioned the authors Mary Austin and Edna Brush Perkins, the hotel proprietor Helene Eichbaum, and the itinerant heiress Lois Kellogg, who had a ranch in Pahrump, over the Nevada border. “I loved their stories, because it counterbalances all this male macho stuff. They give you a different idea of what the desert can be—a place not about extracting resources but about cohabiting with nature.”

She reached for a bound manuscript, marked “George Andrews Ross: Oral History,” and smiled fondly. “George was of Paiute Indian heritage, the Southern Paiute tribe that inhabited this area,” she said. “The town is named Shoshone, but the Timbisha Shoshone tribe is actually based over in Death Valley. George died in 2018, at the age of ninety-two. He was a really striking, handsome guy who fought heroically at the Battle of the Bulge. The house in which he was born, up above the vole habitat, is the oldest building in Shoshone, even older than the museum.”

Sorrells then showed me a hundred-and-sixteen-page prospectus for the Amargosa Basin National Monument, which she put together in collaboration with members of a nonprofit called Friends of the Amargosa Basin. The monument would be the crowning element of Sorrells’s vision: protected status for one million acres of land between the eastern edge of Death Valley and the Nevada border. The vast majority of this territory is under the purview of the Bureau of Land Management, and much of it has already been marked for conservation. Sorrells sees the designation as a way to enhance protections already in place.

Her days are now taken up with presentations to local groups, conversations with politicians, and fund-raising. She is in touch as well with members of the Southern Paiute tribe, also known as the Nuwuvi people. For a model of how to proceed, she looks to the Bears Ears National Monument, which President Barack Obama established in 2016, with a coalition of tribes advocating for the protection of Native sacred lands. The Amargosa Basin encompasses sites associated with the Salt Song Trail—a partly physical, partly spiritual journey of remembrance that winds through four Western states and is enshrined in a cycle of a hundred and forty-two songs. The Kaibab Paiute elder Vivienne Jake, who died in 2016, described the Salt Song ritual as nothing less than “bringing creation all back together.”

Such rhetoric can sound radical to conservative-leaning residents of the area, of whom there are more than a few; in 2020, Inyo County went for Biden, but only narrowly. “The hardest thing to get people to understand,” Sorrells told me, “is that this isn’t some sort of land grab by the federal government. It doesn’t affect private property. In fact, it empowers the local people to protect their homes. More people will visit, helping the local economy. But they won’t be riding their off-road vehicles all over the place. We won’t be seeing miles and miles of solar panels being put in, as is happening over in Nevada. You can capitalize on solar power without wiping out the desert tortoises and other members of the ecosystem.”

The sun was setting, and the Resting Spring Range, which rises east of Shoshone, had lit up with a brilliant orange. “I keep going back to what Neutra wrote about living near to nature,” she said. “The idea isn’t to drop out of civilization. It’s about finding a middle ground between a really frantic, wasteful way of living and, you know, Death Valley.” She gestured toward the great wilderness park to the west, beyond the little village cemetery where members of her family are buried, including the man who called himself Charles Brown. “I think that’s what draws people here,” she said. “That’s what drew me back. As a businesswoman, and as someone who has given my life to this place, I want people to just stop and linger.”