The _Bathroom Reader_ folks never contacted me before they published their write-up, so I thought I’d set a couple of things straight here, in lieu of going over to Wikipedia and throwing a mild onscreen tantrum at its Mojave Phone Booth entry.

The phone booth that came to be known as the Mojave Phone Booth was a historical object of longstanding use in the area and, as such, should have been preserved (certainly according to the Historic Sites Act of 1935 (49 Stat. 666; 16 U.S.C. 461-467). One wouldn’t have thought preservation would be an issue in a self-styled “Preserve” such as the Mojave National Preserve. In fact, the greeting from the first issue of the official handout of the newly created “Preserve” claimed that the Preserve “was established to preserve the outstanding natural, cultural, and scenic resources of this very special treasure,” while their website warned all visitors that

“All plants, animals, rocks, historical objects, buildings, archeological artifacts, and other natural and cultural objects are protected by law. Please do not disturb them in any way, leaving them intact for all visitors to enjoy.”

Why, then, would the NPS destroy the Booth–and secretly, without public hearings or warning of any kind?

Many outlets (including, appropriately, the _Bathroom Reader_) have uncritically repeated then-Superintendent Mary Martin’s vague excuse as it appeared in the NPS’s lone public statement on the subject: “increased public traffic had a negative impact on the desert environment.” Mary Martin never offered a shred of proof of this. And it wasn’t “20 to 30 visitors a day”–it was actually 25 to 30 visitors a *week*. So it’s odd that at the same time that the newly arrived NPS in the Mojave was publishing tourist material practically begging people to come and visit the “Preserve,” Commandant Martin decided that, as NBC’s Roger O’Neill sarcastically put it in his report on the NPS’s destruction of the Booth:

“In other words, despite 1.6 MILLION acres of sand, cactus, Joshua trees, and snakes, too many people — 25 to 30 a week — were tramping way out of their way to answer the phone.”

Martin knew very well that the reason she gave for destroying the Booth was bullshit (most Booth visitors would in fact clean up the area when they’d visit, and they drove in on established roads that had existed for decades–i.e., they weren’t off-roading), but she kept on with her charade, going so far as accusing me of hauling out the pile of white decorative rocks near the Booth, when those rocks had been there for years & years & everyone who lived out there knew how they’d gotten there.

(I have my own theory to explain Martin’s single-minded vendetta on the Booth, and it has nothing to do with protecting the desert and everything to do with a bureaucrat covering her ass in the spotlight of all the publicity the Booth was generating, which could prove detrimental to the career of a government flunky who–before the Booth rose to fame–appears to have taken other unilateral and illegal actions against some of the people who had been living in the Mojave since before she herself was old enough to wear baby (jack)boots. We shall get to the bottom of that in due course.)

Doc