Hot, arid Death Valley nothing like imagined

By JANET FULLWOOD
THE SACRAMENTO BEE

last updated: February 17, 2008 05:44:43 AM

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK -- Funny how certain music, images or words can trigger memories made while sitting in front of the television set as a kid.

Take 20 Mule Team Borax, for example.

If you're of a certain age, your mind's eye probably is seeing a long string of draft animals crawling across the California desert right now.

Pay a visit to Death Valley National Park and the sight of a splintered old wagon or two might trigger some long-buried memories. And next thing you know, you might just find yourself, as I did, immersed in learning everything you never knew you wanted to know about the iconic "laundry additive, deodorant and water softener" that from the late 19th century until the advent of modern detergents in the 1960s was found in virtually every American home.

Little-girl me couldn't have cared less about household cleansers, even though there always was a box of Borax and a can of Boraxo hand soap in our laundry room.

It was the 20-mule team depicted in the commercials, on the package -- and especially on the television show "Death Valley Days" -- that captured my attention.

The long-lived TV Western opened with scenes of a mule train moving through a parched, mountainous landscape, the driver cracking his whip to the strains of a clip-clop theme song. The "true story" at the heart of

each episode was introduced by a character known as the Old Ranger, and it invariably had to do with crusty old miners, overloaded burros, black-hatted bandits, crooked politicians, lovesick young men and ladies in long dresses.

"Death Valley Days" was standard Hollywood fare, but with a twist. It aired from 1930 to 1945 as a radio show, jumped to television in 1952 and survived until 1975. And it was sponsored by the Pacific Coast Borax Co., makers of 20 Mule Team Borax.

As a kid, I didn't draw any distinction between the "Death Valley Days" story line (which included many references to borax) and the commercials that interspersed it. In my mind, the stuff my mother poured into the washing machine got to us by way of those 20-mule teams, which I imagined still to be operating in a far-away, black-and-white place called Death Valley.

All of which goes to explain why my recent visit to this hottest, driest, lowest place in North America seemed nostalgic in a way I couldn't at first decipher.

In for many surprises

Biggest surprise: Death Valley isn't black-and-white at all. It's one of the most colorful places I've ever seen.

Second-biggest surprise: The borax business wasn't just a TV elaboration but a significant part of the story of the 3.4 million-acre preserve declared a national park in 1994.

Sue Hackett at the Borax Museum in Furnace Creek, the tourist oasis at the center of the park, knows as much as anybody about the "white gold of the desert." She presides over a one-room emporium laden with artifacts and exhibits on borax and other compounds derived from boron, one of the rarest minerals.

"There's a tremendous amount of history in here," Hackett says. "You come in to ask a question, and it just goes on and on and on."

In Death Valley and other parts of the Mojave Desert, enormous deposits of natural borax were formed by repeated evaporation of seasonal lakes over tens of thousands of years. Today, one of the most important commercial mines in the world operates near the town of Boron, not far outside park boundaries. Most of the rest of the world's borax comes from Chile and Tibet.

The substance is used for lots more than laundry. "Borax is rare," Hackett said, "but it has more than 1,000 uses."

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