The Calif. desert town with 1 dive bar and a 50-foot-tall lighthouse |
Driving along Old Highway 58 toward Hinkley at night, the bright taillights of Highway 15 and the lit-up signage for fast-food restaurants in Barstow quickly fade away. Hinkley is about 15 miles west of Barstow, mostly out of the path of busier high desert traffic corridors. And it’s relatively dark — the unincorporated community’s population has steadily dropped for decades due to the presence of hexavalent chromium, a known carcinogen, in residents’ well water. As residents have moved away, most businesses in town have closed.
But up on a hillside above Hinkley is a bright-white vertical beam of light, seemingly in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by pitch-black darkness. The unexpected beacon in the Mojave Desert is “a full-size functioning lighthouse,” the work of artist Daniel Hawkins.
The Desert Lighthouse in the Mojave Desert near Hinkley, Calif.
Hawkins came up with the idea to plop what is usually a coastal landmark in the California desert nearly 20 years ago, all while driving along the California and Nevada border late at night and during the last leg of a cross-country road trip.
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“I felt very unmoored, and I was confronting an unfamiliar area. I was in a very dark, kind of dark visual void, and at the time, I had a lot of experiences with agoraphobia,” said Hawkins, describing it as “essentially like fear of heights, but with wide, open spaces.”
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