The Phone Booth in The Desert

The Phone Booth in The Desert

by a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads – Art & Other Odd Adventures

Dear Henry,

Years ago, when I first started taking photographs, I heard an urban legend about the ghost town of Lucin, and I became determined to see it for myself.

Lucin, Utah, sits in a stark and nearly uninhabited corner of the state, close to the Nevada border. Its brief moment of relevance came in the early twentieth century, when railroads—and steam engines in particular—were the backbone of long-distance travel. Lucin served as a water stop for the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads, and, for a time, that was enough to sustain it. When steam engines were phased out, the need for Lucin vanished almost overnight, and the town followed.

For decades, the place was completely uninhabited. In 1997, it was purchased by Ivo Zdarsky, a Soviet defector, though from what I can tell, he doesn’t spend much time there. Mostly, Lucin returned to what it had always been best at: silence.

Still, the West Desert of Utah is breathtaking in its own severe way. There’s nothing lush or forgiving about it, but the openness is intoxicating, the kind of landscape that reminds you how small you are and how much space there is for imagination. When I heard, entirely unsubstantiated, that Lucin contained a still-standing phone booth, I was hooked. I needed the photograph.

So Fish drove me more than 200 miles west of Salt Lake City, across a landscape that felt increasingly emptied of human presence with every mile.

There was no phone booth.

There wasn’t, in fact, much of anything. Just a historical plaque bolted to a fence, concrete foundations, and wind moving across land that had long ago stopped expecting visitors.

The legend, it turned out, was better than the reality.

Naturally, this means that as a joke, and perhaps as penance, we now feel obligated to notice and photograph every phone booth we encounter.

Oddly enough, one of the most unusual phone booths I’ve seen is much closer to home. At the corner of East Douglas and Parker Streets in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, stands the first and only phone booth listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Of course, Fish and I stopped for a photo.

Some journeys end with exactly what you’re looking for. Others leave you with a story instead.

xoxo
a.d. elliott

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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life

She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.

You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.

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