Darwin: The Town Without A Government (Isolated Community Documentary) | Real Stories

hello and welcome to the doc exchange a real stories podcast in partnership with the grierson trust every week i'll ask a new filmmaker or filmmaking team about three documentaries connected by a single theme that have made a meaningful impression on their work and life [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] where are you from i said i'm from darwin he said well i hear the people in darwin are um a little on the crazy side he says are you crazy too i said why in the hell should i be any different i in 1953 jar jobs were hard to find and i went to gab nevada and i worked there for a while until the boss and i didn't get along and then i came here in the middle of the night and i woke up next morning my wife and i and i couldn't figure out how i got here [Music] oh there's a lot of things a lot of things that uh we just don't talk about what kept me here you know it's uh it was a home i found a home and i i didn't really want to go anyplace else i was here long enough to get used to it and there's family affairs and stuff that you know that kept me here so that's why i stayed here basically we met because my sister knew my husband i worked with her sister for the county and we met she introduced us and a month and two days later we got married what's with the buddhists we got the buddhas when my mother broke her hip and i had to do something and the buddhas had a scratch on them and the guy says oh uh it's a second you know he says oh he says this one was in a knife fight and i says i never heard of a peaceful buddha being in a knife fight what i like about darwin and the people in darwin is they accept you for who you are today yep not what you used to be not what you might be but they accept you for what you are today that's right you know that's one reason we moved here yep this is darwin's first and only library enter at your own risk i started asking around if people wanted to donate books or even the trailer i would set up a library i think we've got every book you could think of in here connie and i never really had anything in our adult lives with problems and i hate to say it when i was married connie's my fifth i'm her fourth yeah and it took that long for us to find the right person yep and i'm perfectly happy with connie with the way she is i don't want her to change i'm here we were living in sacramento and we both worked in the same place i got fired because of who i am boss did not like that got rid of me and we said about two months later penny got fired the day she got fired our landlord called and said i'm selling the house you need to be out in a month ryle is my stepson step-son daughter he prefers to be called him he gets very upset if you say she or call her by her real birth name originally he moved up here with his uh partner penny six seven months after we did we turned onto the road and it said no services ahead we had no idea what we were getting into [Music] [Music] [Music] my dad left when i was about six was 1986 about then and she pretty much raised me by herself and uh after i was out and i met penny we got a computer she got online and went on the hunt and then we both wanted to make sure that when we met for the first time it was in a public place you know because of all of the the crap going on about people meeting online and ending up dead someplace or something you know so we met at mcdonald's i believe donald's of all places our first date not too long after that i mean it wasn't like a month but three four months she moved in with hank and i guess hank knew some people out here they came to visit and at first my mom was like no i'm not living out here they drove up here to this property and sat and there was nothing here and they started looking around at the view and my mom started warming up to the place and planning out where she was gonna put trailers [Music] do [Music] listen to my speakers because i got seven of them in here i think it's a pretty good sound [Music] chapter come over here no there's no such thing as a mayor we had a we had one old lady here that made herself mayor nobody ever appointed her and she took it to heart but she's like everybody else she died this is the darwin post office at uh approximately 11 30 every day except for sunday this is uh rush hour central [Applause] you want me to tell them you need them i don't own a computer i wouldn't know do you want me to tell hank to send hank your way do you need him for something no no thank you okay bring me one of these okay this one is what you go with okay i got this five or three of these okay what a little mail oh so what do you need to do okay even a broken clock is right twice a day how i got to darwin was my mother-in-law needed somebody to look out for her and we came in 1990 and we've been here since then and while horses couldn't drag me out of darwin i got the best job regardless of you know it's the only job and the problem with a lot of the eastern sierras is people don't want to work where they're on something like drugs or whatever drugs or whatever i can say it is the truth 25 years ago plus uh my husband told me that we were gonna move to darwin when we were tired and i said you're retiring alone because i'm not going there as a postmaster i knew many things about i knew more about people than i want to know well the whole thing's going to take about three hours how much are they a bag five dollars a bag because that's what it costs for the ingredients i figure i'm not over pricing for what i put into them so when i took my pills last night i had everything but the one yep and that'll do it and i had to have that axle because that is what keep makes me be able to talk to people anyway this is scott wood hi hi scott i'm connie nice to meet you that's hank my husband well help yourself look at what we got um i was going to do a little presentation but there's not nothing i guess this is a good enough presentation let's give it a good practice gives you an idea what our account's about [Music] so [Music] today's tour we only had two people it was supposed to be ten but it ended up with two but we made enough on the donations to cover the gas and we get the history of darwin out there to people that most likely would never even know much about darwin darwin had a a bad reputation for a long time of you know hookers and boos and gunfights gunfights and miners going berserk and then problems with uh law enforcement with a few of the people and finally darwin has settled down to a normal everyday town now and then we want to portray it that way yeah we want it portrayed that way we don't want people to think gosh i don't want to go to darwin somebody's going to beat me up and take my money and dump me in a hole someplace it's not going to happen not going to happen here yeah that was the best part of darwin as with the days of mining they like i say i went to mine as a green horn and i didn't know what to think of it or anything else but i stuck with it to keep my job and stuff and i don't know the miner are completely different people it's like uh construction people it's like engineers on a railroad everybody lives their own life the miners lived their own life and i thought it was pretty damn good myself you know one time all this miners went to town and fly we went to town and we went to the bar and the guys were raised in town this guy kept pulling with this one miner's wife and they ended up throwing this guy out of the bar so this guy went to the sheriff and told him that they took him out and tied him through a tree and left him there and the sheriff said who were these guys that's supposed to have done this well he says i heard a bunch of miners from darwin and the sheriff told him he says oh my god man he says get in your car and go home he says why he said you're lucky you're alive okay not tonight there we go this house started to be built up in the 50s by a guy who's working at the mine his name is monty branigan he lived in this house and i think his first wife name was lucky or something like that so all i heard is when i bought the house i said there is a hole in the ceiling and they said well you know we had to fight one day and this and that and and somebody shot you know with his gun [Music] and the bullet is still there in the ceiling and the bullet is still here you know 40 years later or 50 years later i'm not going to look for it and and monty's son sean he said i remember when i was a kid on friday i was not allowed to go out but i would kind of go and listen to all the people shooting at each other you know and all that and it was not that long ago thinking about it rough it was rough to raise children this was no town to raise kids in that's one thing we don't talk about too much [Music] [Music] it was a disappointing thing when the mind shut down we we all lost our jobs and i had to retire and when i'm retired i i didn't really like it i uh i didn't know what to do myself [Music] [Music] [Music] when the mind closed the hippies came in they're older people they're they're they're hippies old hippies or whatever like kathy goss i think those though she's from san francisco i i i was never a hippie i never really identified with that because i'm a little bit older than the generation that were considered hippies and i'm not a little bit younger than the people who consider themselves beatniks one time i was in saline valley with my brother and his wife and i checked my answering machine in san francisco and discovered through a series of strange phone calls that my roommate in san francisco had been murdered in our flat while i was gone by a young man he had picked up in a bar in san francisco it was like one of these gay murder things i got back to the house and it was just completely covered with blood the downstairs neighbors had heard it happen and had never called the police i was working on a book at that time with a woman artist who was doing a therapeutic painting process this therapeutic process was supposed to bring miraculous things into your life and lo and behold it did because not only was i able to dump all of this negative stuff but i also got word that there was a house for sale in darwin that i might be interested in and my neighbors here would probably notice if somebody was getting murdered in my house hopefully i don't like the city they can keep their cities as far as i'm concerned i was born and raised in one and when i left it i was glad to be gone and like like i say i raised my kids here i had a wife one wife died oh she actually got killed yeah she uh she got in a fight with some other gal and the gal hit her in the head and she died from a image in the brain but they never done nothing about it and i went to the grand jury and everything else and i'm not god so i let him do their thing i let them get by with what they thought was right so that ended down when i first started looking around after that wonderful morning not only did i like the quiet and the serenity of the place i started thinking about the history of it right away and i thought my first reaction was the cemetery i went to the cemetery and i actually was very upset because of the history that's in that cemetery that's lost it's lost back towards this end of the cemetery are the more recent burials and when we have our burials of the people of the town we all chip in and come out and we dig a 12-foot hole and we bury them in that hole and then we when they get uh put in we help put the dirt over the tree yeah we take care of our own here even after death it's here we're supposed to be over here some places don't step on the mountain i'm sorry excuse me there may be a relative under there here we have grebel healy he was a uh well-known author poet we believe a professor at one time very intelligent man very intelligent and he lived in the water tank up across from where we live the town decided he could no longer have a regular house because he burned two down falling asleep smoking so they put him in the metal water tank and set it up like a house i had a sink and a bed and a couch and he was just apparently really amazing man at some point in his life and for some reason he ended up out here and started drinking heavily and there were many times i had to walk over there and pick him up out of the dirt covered in his own waist and blood and help him to bed and when he died they dropped the coffin and gravel fell halfway out before they got him buried and people started throwing liquor bottles in to the grave apparently it was quite the scene well there's never been a church out here never ever if you have a church or you have a community center or something like that there's usually some social focal point where people will get to can get together and and resolve their differences but if you don't have anything like that then the differences get resolved either through gunfire or some kind of physical violence oh yeah [Laughter] most of them have at least guns to defend themselves with whether anybody else likes it or not we live almost an hour from the nearest cop shop the cops are scared to come out here at least some of them are one of my neighbors installed out here on the corner and was and had conniption fits and tried breaking into my trailer and all kinds of crap and just threatening to go call the cops and tell him i tried to kill him and when the cops got here i went out and talked to him and the guy says do you have a gun i said yeah i got me a 22 long barreled single shot rifle it's in there do you have bullets to go with it i says yeah but they're in the shack he says well if i was you i'd get the tube together and have them handy so if he comes back you'll be able to defend yourself i was back east way back east and it wasn't so good for the best thing for me and my girls at that time was to come on out here this town needs to be really divided he used to be a petition down at the post office you know danny did this danny did that or surely did this and surely did that 20 people liked the way the water board ran the water the other 20 didn't you lived up higher than they did they'd turn their water on full tank go empty you don't have water but they do you know there's an old saying you know whiskey's for drinking and waters for fighting over the water board's pretty amazing system it's run by one guy it's like having the bush administration they eliminated a lot of people on the board that were in opposition to them which has been done in the past i've seen about six different generations of people go to this town in my period of being there and each time they change a little bit each time they change and there's always a few that want to run the town this is our 55 000 gallon tank which is the only storage we have we have an extremely fragile um transmission system it's eight miles it's gravity fed the pipe is over 67 years old well the lenley family are one of the pioneers in the movie business they my uh great uncle came to hollywood i think in 1906. and then during the time of hitler he was able because he was a very rich man to bring my grandfather and my uncle out of concentration camps to hollywood so the whole family at one time was here making movies i think the white boy was originally established in 1968. the state required a mechanism they could deal with so the board was then created to do that and we call this the refrigerator which it is this is how we monitor basically what comes into town how much water under what pressure and in what condition one of the problems that it hasn't really been a problem but has the potential to be a problem is that our source is on the base and this is the entrance to the base [Music] america's at war so some of the stuff they do there is very secret and they have made it more and more difficult for us to access our water [Music] i know what it entails to maintain the waterborne so i know that that whatever complaint i have outweighs the actual work that needs to be done can we get a motion to amend or approve last month's meeting all in paper all right um we will have the treasurer's report sure our budget is we budgeted 20 000 for the year is that what we did but but we only get 18 000 in water payments yeah but that's not a concern at this point we don't always spend the full 20 000 in a year's time let's let's hold on let's hold public comments these are questions no but we don't have those that's not what we do here we have public comments at the end of the meeting we'll the public can ask questions at public comments thank you okay the maintenance report we need to make a decision whether to move on and fix that tank ourselves or continue to wait for the state which could be forever and that tank is critical to us the thing to do is to get a laser printer when the laser printers are on sale at newegg or something you can get a laser printer and it uh you can print a lot more pages it doesn't take an ink it takes toner and you can print tons more and i'll look into that for you if you're interested well pcsd recently bought a new printer it's just a laser printer it's just would save you a lot of money okay um does anybody have anything else to say so then i vote to adjourn the meeting second all in favor meetings return we need any water line you know cat because i was on the board for three years there have been fist fights there have been brawls at waterboard meetings cathy talked me into being the president because she knows i won't take i don't like my time wasted and so i'm a i'm the number one and so in there you did not talk out of turn you did not waste my time and i ran a water board meaning we could be out of there in maximum 30 minutes minimum 15. [Music] this is my own invention this fire truck i built it because nobody wants to cooperate me with me so i've done it all on my own all right so hopefully and i decided to make my own fire truck because there has been so many turn downs in this town no it's not my idea no we don't want to do that you know so i just decided to make the fire truck myself [Music] it's never never been used yet and it's never been illustrated to the people how it works i've done the best i could and they don't want to have anything to do with it let the house burn down i don't give it down you know another thing about this if you look down the street there's a fire hydrant way down at the end of the street and they're down here's another fire hydrant but you don't see any out in front of my house that's how i get along with these people well i got me some sausage i'm gonna make me some biscuits and gravy milk's ain't good i don't know to check out i've had it while if it's over a week old it might not be yeah i guess it might not be i bought the real thing not that skim milk or water down i don't eat i don't buy that watered down either i came out as transgendered in 1999 when i was 19. when i met penny about a week into our relationship i told her and she's perfectly fine with it no problem the gender issue with ryle that that was a tough one um when ryle was really young i didn't know he had any gender problems um he didn't like to get dressed well i used to buy him all these cute little lacy dresses and little bonnets and and all this and he hated it and he never did tell me he hated he always wanted his haircut short and as he became a teenager uh he had dated different boys but then he came to me and said you know mom he said i don't like boys i said what i don't like boys i like girls so he thought at first that he was he was gay and that didn't bother me so much just then when he started hitting me with this well now i'm i'm a male trapped in a female body i both went to canal fling on that we both went and to top it off we winded up both going to a counselor who was let's see was a woman and became a man transsexual his name was gary it was right after that that i started finally accepting it but it was rough i learned a lot through life you know i'm not an educated man i only went to ninth grade in school but in my education it's all from on the street i got a son but i don't talk to him i haven't seen i haven't seen my son in 18 years and it's not to my fault to his own phone he became a dope head and i wouldn't stand still for it so i told him to get out and he's never met back my daughter she's yeah she's got her own way to life and i don't like him so she goes from man to man she goes from man to man never stays in one place too long my son i don't know nothing about him because he kind of leveled off this way in life you know and i don't know nothing about him for 18 years i don't really care i don't mean to be a harsh person but that isn't the way i was raised i was raised to respect your elders i was raised to respect your friends and people around you and have self-respect my kids don't know what that is they're too much me me knee-me that's all that's all i think of his knee they made him a dope head right here in this town and i don't even talk to him anymore i don't want nothing to do with them i've always thought if you're going to be a man be a man you know man up do the man's work some people will say well what is man's work versus women's work well with me it's the man's work is you get outside you work on the cars you fix the house you do most of the heavy toting and heavy lifting and rile's not into that um there are some changes in my groin region i'm not going to grow a penis that does not happen let me just clear that up but and emotional issues is i find myself being far more impatient than i was in the past a little more aggressive not to a violent extent but just more clear-headed um this is my voice recorder i've been using to log my voice changes while on testosterone my voice after second tee shot [Applause] my voice just before 8th tee shot my voice 12 weeks on t [Applause] and there they are my voice is dropping i'm happier than i've ever been i've thought about it for years went back and forth for a while you know is it really worth it do i want to do this and every time i questioned myself it came back yes i have to do this and the longer i waited the harder it became to function in society which is one of the reasons i ended up out here in darwin because being around people it kind of pushed me over the edge and i ended up out here on disability and now that i'm finally on hormones and and making progress i'm able to uh go out more talk to people i'm ready to move just everything's coming together well susan's on her second week of smoking smoking is that why she got a sucker in her mouth yep my husband and i quit two years before our honeymoon and we were having so much fun on our honeymoon we didn't want to deny ourselves anything and stupid us started again it's usually me when we try to quit that gets all you know uh snappy and stuff but this time it was her oh and you've just been angel i have been and so now i quit smoking one money two health everything i'm ready but in the meantime i'm a poster worker and i haven't killed anyone [Music] hmm [Music] wow [Music] this is interesting these are the handles here we go ah that's right over there you hand's still bothering you no it's his uh so why don't you play what's the matter with you i'm too busy kathy gives me these instructions you know now they're working on cars and going here and going there okay yeah nothing this one see what other ones don't we have listed here well here's the this says 2004. i think they're in here but i'm not sure what and seldom seemed slim with the old corn cob pipe and when he's getting pretty old there he was the last known single blanket jackass prospector in california i'll turn this over and one of the most famous people are probably in the desert country frank shorty harris managed to put more people to work in the world probably than any single man and dylan and kathy over here next door to us they're real good friends but they got their own way to life too we can't we can't go what the other man thinks they're not what you would call nudists they within their own being in their own house they do their own thing and that's none of my business somebody said i can't remember who it was i think it was howard or somebody who's not around anymore so there's sure is a lot of wasted talent in darwin and i think that about sums it up although i wouldn't necessarily call it wasted but there are a lot of people hanging out in these houses who have a lot of skills and a lot of gifts that we don't really know anything about this is uh one of the sculptures by mr jim hanault it's a kind of an eye in the eye in the rock i guess he does quite a bit of sculpture work my favorites are some of the smaller pieces how you think of this one mother yeah boy it gets dirty in there yeah it was going to be a party a paddy wagon police paddy wagon and monty and i made it that's the ball and chain for the prisoners and this is the billy club the cops use and that's lord wellington monty made him chester oh you stopped that you don't do that get in the house get get in there i never call myself an artist i never call myself a sculpture i never call my thing anything to do with art i do my own painting i do my own sculpturing which i've learned from other people and stuff mostly my paintings my own what i know of monty he went the wrong direction in life it's just one of those things in life where he just kind of missed his calling he could have i think he could have been somebody i looked at some of his work and it was fantastic but he only did it a little bit there you go the man that taught me how to do this sculpturing he said if you think you're a professional make an egg it's one of the hardest things to do in sculpturing is to make an egg out of stone and uh he was right so i gotta admit that uh i thought i was smart but i did i found out it wasn't i got a car he got a car from the white house oh come on i got it because i i'm a registered independent well that's what we are he doesn't even know you get that from obama yes he did i guess so it's got his name on it what's it say on you have witnessed great milestones in america's history over the decades and your personal story represents an important piece of american narrative you have to point it out everybody walks through the door i'm special look at how special i am oxygen often get some money for it i'm thrilled at our president i really am i never thought because also coming from this south my father was a bigot my grandfather was a bigot and i can't understand bigotry to hate a race i have a son who's a bigot and i i'll never get it i bred with the wrong person who took him on a car heist at eight years old as a lookout of course he got into drugs and methamphetamine is the worst drug ever invented [Music] so i really like the complete lack of organized religion and if people if there are christians out here i don't know about it because they don't pro there's no proselytizing out here anything like that when i was a kid my mom was very christian very religious we went to church every sunday and she got pretty crazy sometimes with her religion well before hank and i met i was really into studying the bible a lot and trying to find my true path you could say i was looking for my god or gods i started finding things that i felt in the bible were just just not matching up like they should just didn't seem true to me so i kept researching and researching and researching for years and years we met we got together and he kept telling me just keep searching keep studying you'll find the truth you'll find the truth when i first moved in with connie she she wasn't really cool with my witchcraft tendencies i was depressed one day and so hank looked up um a little ritual to help with depression it was just before christmas two years ago we were talking about getting our christmas gifts for all our family and this and that and we were talking about penny and so we thought we'd go online and look for different things that we knew she could probably use in her little rituals that she does well when we got online and started looking we started researching research and found out that christianity wasn't our true path if you're looking for a true religion you need to go at the beginning where it all came from and that was from paganism you can't blame the devil for making you do wrong because you don't believe there is no devil no devil there's no hell we happen to believe odin is our main god is our uh universal universal god [Music] staff is basically the same thing as a magic wand uh the male's usually is it more of a male object because it's tall and long i guess you'd say uh the facade symbols that's how they the word facility samhain uh we do halloween we do ritual for the dead ritual of the dead [Music] and of course this is our little sanctuary and meditation area we get we come up here and north south east west and look out at our beautiful view out there and meditate and meditate just think about what we live through in life all the killing and all the wars and all the uh hate and anger and you know i'm not a religious man but i don't hold no man against his own religion i don't belittle any man for what he believes as long as he don't belittle me for what i believe why do i like buddha because he was a philosopher he was not a religious man some of them have teeth and some of them don't all righty move over cheddar i'm gonna try to do a spread to see how our impending move is going to go so that could represent like an inharmonious partnership that's a word or conflict of emotions between two people or two sides which makes sense both of us being so unhappy where we've been this is what should be done and it's the death card which almost never means literal death the common theme came through stop wasting your time get your together and do it yeah let's go to iraq man it kind of looks like iraq it's pretty much the same train back to town we're taking you to it it looks like they got the hamas built and all that other stuff you know that's the hamas or whatever but that's where they do a lot of their shooting and stuff yes they're around the corner out there all that build those buildings you see all the way on your left way out there in that little canyon they do a lot of bombing up there you'll see big mushroom clouds come up a bit bigger than darwin but it's pretty top secret but you can't get this close [Music] it's not that area that i said look like an airport runway near area 51. and then the terrace trap is right there they're moving all the stuff out area 51 to different different secret locations and then every once in a while we see strange looking trucks coming through we've got airplanes have been coming into the airport at night now too [Music] i have to be nice to the base which is you know i mean they have a horrible job i mean going over to iraq and iran and they have the power to close our town down the navy base is really expanding its activities and i know people in darwin sort of joke about it every now and then and think well they could just accidentally drop a bomb on us over here oh sorry you know that was a mistake you know yeah this is a 25 pound bomb that i picked up in a plane crash out there in the desert these are one of my guns one here and one there kind of got guns laying all over the place so don't touch the guns they're all loaded they're ready to go you never know when you're going to need them they were in trouble and i think the only way we're going to get out of is go to war pakistan korea they're going to they're going to drum something up to get something going to get the economy going again we're that close to collapsing and i don't think people realize that you know you got too many people on the dole i mean you can take darwin for instance there's only 35 people here you know and and there's nobody putting anything towards the government they're all taking including me i'm on unemployment now because i'm not working not only my checks will be getting progressively smaller every month too yeah about time we get the revolt started no more chiropractic no more dental services psychology and incontinence creams and washes yeah you know i don't have to go to work this looks like it man if they were to take my check away today i turned my life over completely to crime pretty serious i'd turn it over completely and i'm pretty smart boy i'd be a pretty good criminal when you come in when you come into town out on the highway there's that you come up the hill there's that one corner where there's that that uh joshua tree looks kind of like a roadrunner well like my first time here we stopped there and i pissed on that roadrunner just to mark my territory because i pretty much knew then i was i was going to be here the rest of my life society and the way everything's set up all we're here to do is consume waste everything revolves around something that's ugly and i just don't want to be no part of it i look at every gallon of gas i burn as a black mark on my soul that's what you know pretty much the way i look at it okay i don't have water electricity because i don't really want water electricity actually um come on honey i went one time and i spent about five years in prison and um i went for drugs we should shoot a lot of dope every day and um i did a shot of dope one day that um shut my kidneys down for a minute they wanted to cut my hand off they wouldn't cut it off but i wouldn't let them do that but i pretty much lost the use of it this here is like um like i guess it's a labor safety device that i that i'd built designed to saw so i can stand inside the house there and look after the mirrors here and see who's coming towards my house i was born at the end of the end of the baby boom and uh they were telling me from the very beginning when i started school you know that we're gonna nuke russia and russell's get a new cuss and so i just all my life i prepared myself for for that happening because um you know a lot of people they want to just die when that happens but uh i want to come out on the other side and see what happens this is a really nice place for um you know in the event everything falls to because uh i'm pretty sure if uh you know that set a suitcase snook off in la there'd be hordes you know i've got the literature and found ways i guess basically to down probably close the road out here you know the main road so that people can't come in that way you have to prepare for a disaster whether it be here anywhere and um i myself have been getting very conscious of this 2012 is the um the pagan belief that uh it's gonna be the end i know there's a few people in town who are stockpiling uh the water and the food and the d and you know i mean even i hate to say it but even guns it's a survival garden we're better off having our own stuff growing out here instead of ending up with someone getting sick from not being able to have enough vitamins and stuff in them i guess that's about it we have tomatoes rhubarb green peppers raspberries and blueberries and strawberries are over there i've been collecting enough to where i can take care of the whole town if i had to see and i have a couple apple trees and one even has an apple on it make sure i get that window open because the wind flips it shut it won't open from the inside there's no knob that wasn't supposed to do that when i say i have silverware and pots and pans and dishes and menswear and ladies wear i have one whole box like this of porcelain dolls for little girls like the bible says protect the children and the children will be the future we ain't got no children out here basically i just don't need the guns in my house i'm not supposed to have guns anyhow so i keep them buried i think right here [Music] you know they've been very there for about five years now [Music] i can't think of a better place to be can't control it so i'm gonna get lawn chairs and watch it sometime in may 2012. [Music] happy 4th of july from the bishop police department enjoy the amazing fireworks show at the bishop airport and remember to be safe on this wonderful independence day don't drink and drive and don't forget about our brave troops and law enforcement who are serving our country every day [Music] oh look at this [Music] [Music] whoops i gotta answer the phone because he don't answer the phone hello bye we don't talk to them and they don't talk to us they just call up and listen to our voice i usually tell them go fly a kite or something nastier that way they get the idea monty answered it when i went to the choo choo fair and it was one of those and he just hung up on him but you hold it for like 15 or 20 seconds and then all of a sudden you get a click and then you get a busy signal so you know it's somebody just you know not wanting to talk or they haven't got their nerve up to talk yet we haven't talked to our kids in years but that's okay beside the point i've got other kids that we talked to it's just his two who don't talk to us my sons call all the time talk to us dave and joe but moni and sean don't do my parents well my mom and my stepfather are sad that we're moving um they respect that we have to do it there's nothing out here for us we can't further our lives i'm never gonna get off this ability out here and i'm never gonna go back to school out here so i mean they don't want us to leave but they respect that it's something we have to do in our lives well you can pick up the rock and bust it oh that's awesome i missed it it's okay oh did you grab his tail come back here yeah to worry about snakes here we're very close right now the whole house is gone i told you it was [Music] man oh good to show what it looked like it shows what it looked like before it burnt barker ranch was built by recreational ranchers who moved to the desert to enjoy the solitude and simplicity of living far from civilization the ranch became infamous in 1969 when charles manson and members of the manson family were captured at the site detectives later discovered that the vandalism suspects were also responsible for a series of murders in the los angeles area tragically the main house and workshop were destroyed in an accident in accidental fire in may of 2009 yeah accident my ass man yeah right here was where the patio started yeah this was all a patio area in here that was the bathroom where they found manson charles manson well he's definitely strange maybe even nuts uh but i don't believe a lot of the stuff that was going around because of the area here where he was at a lot of people said it's haunted i don't believe it's haunted it's too quiet to serene i don't know i have i have mixed feelings about charlie manson charlie manson was a piece of and he still is well i met the man and he is a piece of but yes i met him and it's not the same place it just doesn't look right can you feel the quiet calmness no bad vibes yep the rain's coming in in darwin it's what you are today that matters it matters you know if if uh you screw up in the they future not they may not overlook it right you know if you screwed up in the past most will probably overlook it because everybody makes mistakes in their lives you know you know and honestly a lot of the people in darwin have stuff in their past um and it's just it's like we it where darwin's a little magnet and people who have problems in their lives or in their pasts who can't live in this city or that city for reasons unknown and it gives us a start over too because you know okay as far as my past i had a what you'd call a pretty shady past uh i used to be a very violent person uh probably biggest influence was drugs and alcohol i rode with motorcycle gangs i stole burglarized all kinds of things and it took me quite a few years to grow up to realize what i had become and i didn't like what i was so i decided to make a complete 180 and most people have a dark side i did prison time you know not proud of it don't like to talk about it and uh met a few people in prison that made me realize i was on the wrong track one being charlie man and i know his story she knows my entire past the whole past you know and uh and there's probably a few people in darwin that know my past yes my son met hank in folsom prison hank taught my son to do the right time how to when you have to pick up and fight and when to stay out of it he was having problems in prison and uh he got to the point where his life was in jeopardy and i stepped forward and basically place myself between him and his problem and uh i guess i saved his life um that's how originally we probably thought about moving to darwin because i met susan through her son and she invited us up to just have a visit the best thing i ever did was move to california in the 60s it was the end of the the hippie movement pretty much but we thought we could make a change we protested the war in vietnam and we were right i did not raise a bigot prison turn my son into a bigot because whites cannot associate with mexicans or blacks you stay within your color he he came here with a stolen car someone here gave him dynamite and he was pulled over and this is ironic at a place called lake convict so he was taken to bridgeport and my husband and i went up to visit him we looked at that jail and we told the guards you need to keep an eye on him i said he will break out of this jail well it didn't take very long so they came to darwin during the escape and all through these hills there were i can't tell you how many people so i knew they were here you can't come to darwin without people knowing you're here so they came in carrying their guns horrible guns and [Music] realized that he would not be here so he was on the run for i can't remember how long not long no more than a month before they caught him and my whole worry the whole time was that they would just shoot him damon is so good with children and animals and old people and he's got a heart of gold and it's such a waste but we all have our path i love darwin i love the peace i love the quiet and here's where we wanted to retire [Music] just passed a multi-billion dollar jobs package we've posted several election year jobs bills that democrats were hoping to send to the president the senate passed the package a few days ago with us now from the fox business network headset proposals i wanted to show you this i made it for my my son that died and the strange part about it is is his mother died at 50 years old and he died at 50 years old he's buried on his mother's grave and i made this to put on it i'll get it there one of these days you got to look at blood somewhere along the line they just called up and said that he died i didn't expect it at all if i say that i didn't have any emotions within me when he died i'd be a liar but i never come out with it because i cried or nothing i never showed any emotions because how can you show emotions when they don't want anything to do with you we cried a long time ago we don't cry [Music] anymore [Music] i think all in all the move here to darwin for them was really a growing experience i hate to say when i first met him we had some terrible clashes and uh they got their acts together they uh started really really trying to get their lives together uh it wasn't all about them you know uh we started me and ryle started getting a lot closer which i think turned out really good for both of us because ryla is not my step daughter he is my son [Music] i'm having the slightest idea huh a lot of people come and gone don't even know who they are they uh lived hard worked hard and died hard i don't know they say god can do anything well how big is god i mean how big is he out here in this well that's wilderness god must be as big as the universe if we sit there and molded the earth in six days in our seven days put the water on it put all the animals on it put man on it now i i'm a realist i'm going to worry about the end of the world turn that camera around look at all this are they worried about what's going to happen to the world you got you got 150 years of people laying out there in that graveyard are they worried about what's gonna end i'm gonna end up just like them six feet under the ground [Music] oh [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 1,057,371

Rating: 4.7174253 out of 5

Keywords: Real Stories, Real Stories Full Documentary, Real Stories Documentary, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, full documentary, full episode, darwin california documentary, darwin, california, ghost town, documentary, evolution, death valley, charles darwin, theory, charles, natural selection, desert, lone pine, owens valley, travel, history, science, discovery, full, life, genius, pbs, species, abandoned, exploration, exploring, Isolated Community

Id: IvR2Ktfr8JI

Length: 87min 52sec (5272 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/whales-are-assholes]

Confused Australian wondering how Darwin was an isolated community.

[u/OliveSkinKing]

Plot summary: Darwin is a documentary feature about an isolated community at the end of a weathered road in Death Valley, California. Propelled from society by tragic turns, the people of Darwin (population 35) must now find ways to coexist in a place without a government, a church, jobs, or children. The film tells the story of a uniquely American place and yet a place that is unique even within America.

[u/mighty_boogs]

I've been there a few times. It's pretty standard for a small desert town. There are certainly shittier shitholes in Nevada.

[u/clam_fandango]

This was a great watch. Haunting and cool to see how these people live.

I am from remote South Australia (live in the big city now) and always thought that terrain was unforgiving but there really is nothing out there.

[u/steveblackimages]

I liked it. I lived in Peach Springs, Az. in the 70s and it was similar.

[u/A7MOSPH3RIC]

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Darwin,+CA+93522/@36.2716463,-117.6102592,5594m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x80c0eafaf887cfb5:0x53e4059c87986bb9!8m2!3d36.2679969!4d-117.5917348

[u/HelenEk7]

Google street view hasn't even been there..