Sleepover in a Ghost Town

Panorama of Cisco’s main street

You can find some pretty funky listings on AirBnB: elephant houses, tree houses, potato houses.

When I was planning Julia’s awesome cross-country road trip home this year, I came across one such bizarre offering: a shack in a ghost town in Utah. Yes, there’s an outhouse (thanks for pointing that out, Mary!), and no, there’s no real heat, but what the shack lacks in comforts it doubles down on in sheer wonderment.

Here’s one of Julia’s gorgeous photos of our home for the night:

Shack at Night

I’m afraid of the dark

When we arrived in Cisco that night in early October, we’d driven all day and stopped over to watch the sunset at Arches National Park. We were a thousand miles from nowhere, so desperate for dinner that we ordered up a cheese pizza at 7-11, because there was nothing else around. (It wasn’t that bad!)

Pizza time!

Google Maps dumped us in the middle of the dark road and pronounced that we’d arrived, but there was nothing in sight. I shifted Julia’s car into park, turned on the hazards, and tried to figure out where to go next.

Road at night

Just then a police car pulled up, and the officer asked us if we needed help. Yes! There’s something moving in the woods over there, I really have to pee, and we don’t know where the hell we are!

Julia calmly told the officer we were looking for Eileen’s place, and he said “Oh, Eileen. Straight ahead. White Toyota pickup. Can’t miss it. Have a good night, folks.”

We pulled in to the ghost town, and the first thing we saw was a party bus, and there was a party going on inside.

Party bus at night

We parked, got out of the car, and I almost fell down staring at the beautiful night sky. Oh, hi, Milky Way! You, too, Big Dipper, and Orion, and Pleiades. I see you, Halloween orange moon, just rising on the horizon. Julia and I were giddy.

Entrance at night

Other shack at night

She immediately fished her tripod out of the back of her car (which was crammed full of all her worldly possessions, including a motherfucking IKEA solid wood bed frame she insisted on keeping, and which stretched the length of the passenger compartment and stuck out into the front seats and bit your elbow every time you got in the car). That night she took these long-exposure shots you see on this page, plus many more the next day.

We stumbled around in the dark, flipped on our phone flashlights, and found our shack. Then I left Julia at her tripod and followed the wooden path to the outhouse.

The outhouse without the smell

After I’d finished my business and burned my TP, I rejoined Julia, and she was kinda freaking out about someone walking toward us in the dark. We really couldn’t see much, but we both heard what sounded like a person or a creature shuffling this way from the open field out there. “Maybe it’s the chickens,” I think I said. We decided to try to ignore the sound and head inside to the shack. It had been a long day.

Julia took the top bunk, because she’s a spry child, and I set up my snoring machine next to the bottom one. I was sure Julia would fall off in the middle of the night, but that worry didn’t keep me awake. The folks inside the bus were still singing and having a good time, but they were being reasonable about it, and they eventually quieted down. We had a peaceful night. Until . . .

Cock-a-fucking-doo

There are chickens! And a rooster! And it sounds like he’s right next door! I checked my watch. It was 5:30 a.m.

Just like my snooze alarm at home, that rooster kept up his racket every few minutes for the next two hours, until we couldn’t take it any more.

We both eventually climbed out of bed, stretched a bit and said that believe it or not we’d slept pretty well until that rooster started up. I had to find him.

I walked outside and discovered that our shack was indeed right next to the chicken coop. And there were the five or so hens and our rooster. Next to the chicken coop, what we thought at night was a teepee structure turned out to be a giant swing!

And we discovered the source of the creeping sound that freaked us out:

Julia and I both wandered the compound in the morning light, taking photos and oohing at the wondrous sights all around.

The party bus has a mural on it!

Bus in the morning

Cisco van

Shack with Julia

There’s a giant snake growing inside a bus!

Snake bus!

Snake fangs!

There’s art everywhere!

Black Lives Matter

We had a long drive ahead of us, so we pulled ourselves together, sat for a minute, ate our 7-11 breakfast, and got ready for day 3 of our weeklong drive.

Cisco breakfast

Next stop: Rocky Mountain National Park!

To learn more about the amazing Eileen Muza, the creator of Cisco’s art town, check out this video on Vice.

The town map. Photo by me.