The Mojave Phone Booth Is Still Ringing

Nowadays, we’re all alone together and catching viruses left and right from the comfort of laptops in bed. But back in the Wild West of 1990s Internet, when something really caught fire on the ’net people literally hopped into their cars and drove for hours to party together in the desert. And talk to strangers.

Sounds great. Sounds kinda weird. What happened?

It’s 1997. A weekend desert wanderer is cruising through the Mojave National Preserve, out near the border of California and Nevada. He stops, sprawls out a roadmap, and notices a small payphone icon far, far off the beaten path. Really? Out here? Could it be? Curious, he pulls off a main drag and there, at a dusty, unpaved crossroad 15 miles out in the brush and far, far from the nearest building and interstate stretch, sits a Pacific Bell phone booth. Part baffled, part stoked, the man sends a note to some weirdo desert counterculture rag detailing the “discovery” and the phone’s number: 714-733-9969.

Soon enough a computer entrepreneur, a guy named Godfrey Daniels, catches the story. Intrigued at the man’s find, Daniels creates a site devoted to the Mojave touch-tone outpost. No one had a clue what was about to happen.

Even in those fledgling days, the Internet started doing its thing. People around the world began picking up on the Mojave Phone Booth, which turned out to be a public phone installed sometime in the 1960s when volcanic cinder miners in the area, alongside permanent desert locals, would operate the thing by a hand crank.

The story captivated netizens. It was all just so strange, fascinating, a bit otherwordly, fodder for borderline conspiracists. In no time it had people turning up from near and far, on word-of-mouth whims or solid leads pulled off first generation message boards or listservs, to see about something out of the ordinary. They’d find the shelled, steadily graffitied site marked with various signage: Mojave Phone Booth – You could shoot it, but why would you want to? and If they call it, they will come. They’d find it ringing.

It was something straight out of the Twilight Zone or David Lynch or Rod Sterling, or even Kyuss’ legendary blotter-fueled generator parties. (But not really.) Long before location-based apps, Hangouts, and certainly Social Media Week, Web fires – I suppose this is what we’ve come to know as meme phenomena – were confined to the freak fringes of a growing, albeit tiny, garden tended by those who a) were tapped into this crazy thing called Cyberspace, and b) had the general foresight to start sharing information with like-minded folks. The Phone Booth rush of ‘97-’98 in many ways presaged the virality of the inexplicably hive-minded streak of the modern day Internet.

Before long, a reporter with the Los Angeles Times was hanging around the booth. He’d pass the heat of the day by answering calls and speaking to randoms who were camped out and themselves taking and logging calls and getting high off the idea that here, at an unlikely intersection at once off the hook and on the grid, one could maybe find someone to connect with. The rings were constant:

A bored housewife from New Zealand. A German high school student. An on-the-job Seattle stockbroker. A long-distance trucker who dials in from the road. There’s a proud skunk owner from Atlanta, a pizza deliveryman from San Bernardino and a bill collector from Denver given a bum steer while tracing a debt.

One Rick Karr, a “spiritual wanderer” from Texas, even told the Times reporter that he’d gotten orders from the Holy Spirit itself to trek into the desert and take calls. Karr was found after having spent over 30 days camped out at the booth. He claimed to have fielded at least 500 calls, many of which came from a repeat number – from “Sgt. Zeno from the Pentagon,” the wanderer claimed.

Not surprisingly, area residents bristled at the influx of weird beard Internetters who’d suddenly taken to hanging around their quiet swath of land, boozing and blabbing loudly to complete strangers. The National Park Service would eventually tear down the phone in spring of 2000.

And that’s a shame. I mean, I get the noise complaints and general hatred over city folk encroaching on (see: spoiling) what’s left of America’s pristine lands. But the bummer here is that the Mojave Phone Booth just could not happen today. Well, it could, but it would happen a whole lot quicker, and with more Foul Bachelor Frogs and Socially Awkward Penguins. We’d answer the calls, thus disseminating the meme, but only from the comforts of a swivel chair or a laptop in bed.

Only a phone booth in the middle of nowhere in the mid- to late-90s could launch the birth of geocache, could arguably be one of the first memes, flash mobs or even serve as the middle ground between everyone living life unhooked from everyone of us living alone together in one giant socially networked sphere. Anything but silence.

ODDITY examines strange and esoteric phenomena and events from the remote, uncanny corners of technology, science and history.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @TheBAnderson