The Daily Stoic - Chasing Dreams And Risking It All In An Abandoned Ghost Town | Ghost Town Living Chapter 1

Episode Date: April 7, 2024

Brent Underwood is the owner of Cerro Gordo, an original boomtown silver mine, established in 1865. Brent currently lives on a mountain above Death Valley with no running water, seven cats, six goats, and at least one ghost.Get a limited edition, signed copy of Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley from The Painted Porch. Youtube: @GhostTownLivingIG: @BrentWUnderwood @cerro.gordo.caSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you want to focus more on your well-being this year, you should read more and you should give Audible a try. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks focused on wellness from physical, mental, spiritual, social, motivational, occupational, and financial. You can listen to Audible on your daily walks. You can listen to my audiobooks on your daily walks. And stillness is the key. I have a whole chapter on walking, on walking meditations, on getting outside. And it's one of the things I do when I'm walking. Audible offers a wealth of wellbeing titles to help you get closer to your best life and the best you.

Discover stories to inspire, sounds to soothe, and voices that can change your life. Wherever you are on your wellbeing journey, Audible is there for you. Explore bestsellers, new releases, and exclusive originals. Listen now on Audible. Hello, I'm Hannah. And I'm Suriti.

And we are the hosts of Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast. originals. Listen now on Audible. shorthand, which is just an excuse for us to talk about anything we find interesting because it's our show and we can do what we like. We've covered the death of Princess Diana, an unholy Quran written in Saddam Hussein's blood, the gruesome history of European witch hunting, and the very uncomfortable phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behavior. Like, can someone give consent to be cannibalized? What drives a child to kill? And what's the psychology of a terrorist?

Listen to Red Handed wherever you get your podcasts and access our bonus short hand episodes exclusively on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondry Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding

of this philosophy and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. You guys know Brent, Brent Underwood, my former intern. I wrote a couple of Daily Stoic emails slash meditations about him. Earlier in the week, he was out at the Painted Portrait. We did a signing slash talk together, and then he was on the podcast last week.

But I've been reading his book, "'Ghost Town Living' chasing dreams and mining purpose on the edge of Death Valley." I've been reading it to my son. My son's a huge Cerro Gordo fan. We've been watching the YouTube videos now for four years, which seems crazy. But my favorite story from Brent and from Cerro Gordo isn't technically on Cerro Gordo

premise. It's about this guy, Burrow Schmidt, who basically just digs a hole in the side of the mountain. And Brent has this awesome chapter in the book and in the audiobook, which I'm bringing you today, that sort of compares this guy to a famous philosophical creature, myth, Camus, the myth of Sisyphus, right? Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, knowing it will roll all the way back down. He never completes his labors, but Camus famously says, we must imagine him happy. And Brent argues that in the 19th century,

there were these things called follies, like big projects that people threw themselves into that never seemed to really pan out. He was saying that we should imagine the people throwing themselves into those things as being sort of modern day Sisyphuses, and that we should imagine them happy, and that that's what Sarah Gordo has been to him.

So this is my favorite chapter in the book. I just read it to my son, Clark. So I think it's fit for all ages. He's getting it on one level. I think you as an adult or however old you are listening to this will understand it on a different level. It certainly struck me. And I think about opening this bookstore.

I think about leaving my high paid marketing job to be a writer. I think about dropping out of college. this bookstore. I think about leaving my high paid marketing job to be a writer. I think about dropping out of college. These things that I did in my life, they seemed crazy at the time. And they were crazy and they were heartbreaking and difficult and took longer than I thought at different times, but they've been wonderful experiences.

And I asked Brent if I could run a chapter of the audio book on the podcast. He said, yes. Believe it or not, he recorded this audiobook 900 feet underground in a mine, in the Union Mine. If you look at the book, it's got these beautiful maps of it. He recorded this way underground, which is, I understand it, the only audiobook such recorded.

I think you'll really like it. Maybe you can hear slightly different audio as you listen, but here is chapter one of Brent's book, Ghost Town Living. You can follow him on Instagram and YouTube. It's all awesome stuff. I'll link to that in today's show notes, but go grab Ghost Town Living.

We've got signed numbered first editions at the painted porch. I'll link to that in today's show notes also. And thanks to Harmony for letting us run the audio of this and enjoy. Chapter one, pick your spot and swing. It started as a pretty straightforward task. William Burrow Schmidt, a prospector, was tired of bringing his gold ore around a mountain, so he decided to go through it.

In the spring of 1900, in the El Paso mountains of the Mojave Desert, Schmidt began to chip away every day at solid granite using a pick, a shovel, and a four pound hammer. When enough broken rock accumulated by his feet, he'd carry it out, first on his back in a canvas sack, and later in a wheelbarrow. He'd come to the desert of California to save his life. Six of his siblings had died of tuberculosis back home in Rhode Island. Doctors, in their primitive ways then, had prescribed a hotter climate to avoid the same

fate. Never one for half measures, Schmidt picked the hottest, driest desert in all of North America to stake his claim. He reimagined himself a prospector, a frugal one at that. He reinforced the toes of his boots with discarded tin cans and patched his tattered, greasy trousers with old flower sacks. If you visit the tunnel, as I have, you begin to get a sense of the man, the compromises he was willing to make, the ones he refused to.

The first thing you notice about Schmidt's tunnel is that the further back you walk, the lower the ceiling becomes. At 6'2", I stand comfortably at the beginning of the tunnel. A few hundred yards in, I have to bend down to avoid hitting my head on the jagged, dust-covered rock all around me. I wonder if Schmidt, appearing in photos to be shorter than myself, had done the math on how much time he could save by reducing the ceiling height a few inches. As I continued forward, stooped over like Alice in the Shrinking Room, I realized that a few hundred yards was actually three or four years of hard work.

Maybe Schmidt had shrunk so much from hauling out tons of broken rock that he didn't need the higher ceilings anymore. It was dirty and dangerous work. From time to time, pieces of the mountain would fall on top of him. He'd dig himself out, and on more than one occasion, he'd limp towards a neighbor's house to beg a ride to the nearest hospital to get patched back up so he could return to digging. On a good day, he might make a foot of progress.

On a bad day, maybe only an inch. He added dynamite and orecarts into the mix. But still, progress was slow and imperceptible. Day in and day out, Burrow Schmidt woke up, grabbed his pick, and attacked the mountain. He knew what he had to do, every single day, for decades. There must have been some comfort in that. A photo of him from back then shows a man with a crooked back, pants filthy with grease, and a t-shirt ripped and full of holes.

Still, evident in a faded black and white photo is the start of a smile, a look of pride in his sunken eyes. In 1920, two decades into Schmidt's digging of the tunnel, a road was built over the mountain, making his tunnel useless. He didn't stop digging. Maybe he thought he was close to finishing. Maybe he had come to love the rhythm and the purpose of the task so much that he could not bear to stop. In any case, he would spend another 18 years digging the rest of the tunnel, day in and day out, committed to finishing what he started. As I go further back in the mine, the light at the entrance reduces down to the size of

a flashlight in the distance. I guess that I'm halfway back. Halfway was 19 years in Schmidt time, with 19 more years ahead. Then, on some otherwise uneventful day in 1938, having worked through the invention of the car and the television, through a world war, the great influenza, prohibition, and the great depression, nearly four decades after he'd begun, he saw sunlight on the other end of his tunnel. His pickaxe dulled and battered after nearly 40 years of hammering away at the rock inside the mountain, clattered to stillness at his feet.

A spark, a puff of dust, newfound silence. He had chipped his way through half a mile of solid granite. The exit was on the side of a steep cliff. There's a wash a few hundred feet below, but no practical place where the ore could have been transported from. Had he taken a wrong turn? Had the whole thing been doomed from the start? Schmidt was not the kind of man prone to existential questions.

Soon after breaking through the other side, he went back to the cabin he'd called home for 40 years, packed up his few belongings, harnessed his two mules, Jack and Jenny, and left the place forever. No ore was ever sent through his tunnel. But one man literally moved a mountain. In my time at Cerro Gordo, I've come to view Burrow Schmidt as the patron saint of the area and of my own undertaking. The tunnel that he dug inch by inch through unyielding rock is not a shortcut to nowhere, as the cynics would have it.

It is, for me, the most direct path through all doubts and fears that have haunted me since I took on the task of rebuilding and restoring this decaying ghost town in the middle of the desert. Burrow Schmidt's Tunnel is a monument to what a person can achieve when they put all other considerations aside and push on towards a single goal, heedless of the obstacles that stand in their way, taking on a seemingly foolish things, things that serious people took seriously, where are they now? So much has happened in the century since they finished, but the work, a bewildering but undeniable demonstration of human will, is still there. Call it projection.

Call it wishful thinking, call it my own need to justify a seemingly insane decision I have made that led me to Cerro Gordo. But I believe Burrow Schmitt died a happy man. The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart. Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus. I choose to imagine Schmidt as Camus's happy Sisyphus. I choose to believe that Schmidt found joy and purpose in a task that others would find to be useless judgery. I had no idea such a powerful sense of purpose could be wrung from rock. I do now.

My road to that epiphany had cut through a few mountains too. It led me to Cerro Gordo, a town just north of Schmitz Tunnel with over 30 miles of mines burrowed underneath. It was 2 a.m. when my friend, half jokingly, sent me a message that said, this might be your next project, LOL. Included in the text was a link to the article, Buy Your Own Town for Under a Million Dollars. I clicked the link as I'd clicked hundreds of real estate listings in my past,

but this one wormed deep inside my soul. The article included an aerial shot of a collection of sun-bleached buildings against a desert sky, as if Georgia O'Keeffe had freelanced a real estate brochure. In the distance, behind the shacks and the sand, magnificent mountains loomed, the sort of things that excite the heart of a guy who grew up in the relentlessly flat suburban swamps of Florida. The town in question covered over 300 acres, nestled in the mountains between the Sierra Nevada and Death Valley National Park. It had a name that, while a bit clumsy in English,

sounded beautiful in Spanish. Cerro Gordo, Fat Hill. It had been an almost legendary boom town, a mecca for silver and lead mining in the 1800s. And some of the vestiges of its storied past still survived. A church, a few cabins, a hotel named the American, which had once been considered fairly luxurious for location in the era, and a 900 feet deep shaft into the old silver, lead, and zinc mines. And then there were plenty the town didn't have.

No running water, no residents, no major stores for hours in any direction. Despite the lyrical tone of the copy and the arresting beauty of the photographs, it was clear that as far as fixer-uppers go, Cerro Gordo was in a league of its own. The kind of impossible place that could break a man's heart, his will, and his bank account. In other words, it was perfect.

It was precisely the kind of challenge that I had been looking for. My life at that point had devolved into the kind of numbing, comfortable sameness. When my friends sent me that listing, I was sprawled out on a worn and cozy couch on the front porch of a lovely 150-year-old Victorian mansion in Austin, Texas, that I had turned into a profitable and successful hostel, hosting travelers from

all over the world. History and hospitality were, at that point in my life, my stock and trade. But I was ready for a change, for a new challenge. If I'm being honest, I was looking for a change, for a new challenge. If I'm being honest, I was looking for the next thing to grab my attention. If I'm being really honest, I was looking for something to hold my attention and not let go. The way that tunnel through the mountain grabbed Burrow Schmidt. I just didn't know it at the time. I grew up the son of two public school teachers in the artificial uniformity of the suburbs

outside of Tampa. In my house, education was important. Degrees were important. Going to college was a given. The question was what to go to grad school for. A doctor, a lawyer, a banker. Solid, blue-chip jobs, the kind my parents would be pleased to boast about when the neighbors asked what I was up to.

I didn't like blood, so being a doctor was out. Nor did I have the necessary tolerance level for boredom and bullshit to be a lawyer. So I focused on finance, where there was just as much bullshit, but far less boredom. Where the blood that was spilled was almost always virtual. I like the perceived swaggering, every man for himself nature of finance. There is something about the sociopathic coolness, the Gordon Gekko, Goldman Sachs, Patrick Bateman bad boys of big buckness that appealed to the 18-year-old me.

Deep down, of course, I had my doubts. I was not, at least I don't believe, a remorseless, me-first sociopath. But I tried to brainwash myself, watching a video entitled, Damn It Feels Good to Be a Banker, over and over, attempting to drown out the nagging pangs of my conscience I felt, but didn't acknowledge. I got a house in the Hamptons in a penthouse loft, wrapped a guy in a suit pouring Red Bull into a gray goose bottle, sitting behind my parents' house, entertaining myself by slapping the pond with a stick,

the life of an investment banker sounded like an adventure, one that might even make my parents proud. Simpler yet, grad school would give me an unambiguous answer to the question that nearly every young person gets bombarded with. What are your plans after school? I bought the ticket. I took the grad school ride. The dream came to an end in beautiful Gurney, Illinois.

I was there on a due diligence consulting gig, pitched to me as a job in Chicago. Even after you get the job, banks can't stop sweetening the picture of what they do. My job on this day was essentially digging through boxes of unpaid loans and attempting to see how much the underlying asset was worth. A family wasn't making payments on their grain farm. How much could we sell the mortgage for back in New York so somebody could foreclose on the family and turn it into a Walmart? The pay is good because the work is horrible. There was no Red Bull, no

bottles of Grey Goose either, just two-for-one appetizers at the Chili's out front of a strip mall. I looked around the table at my peers five, ten years further along than me. They were slouched over their sizzling skillets, forcing small talk and waiting to die. How long could I do the job before I was just like them? If you don't take the money, they can't tell you what to do. I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. And we're the hosts of British Scandal.

In our latest series, we're visiting one of the rockiest sibling relationships ever. Okay, so I'm thinking Danny and Kylie. No, no, no, I'm thinking Anne Boleyn and the other Boleyn. No, no, no, Barry and Paul Chuckle. No, it's Noel and Liam Gallagher. Now these two couldn't be more different, but they're tied to each other in musical dependency. Despite their music catching the attention of people around the world, Liam's behaviour could destroy their chances. However, their manager saw an opportunity to build a brand around their rebellious nature. It's got fights on boats, fights on planes, fights on land. They just fight everywhere. If you like fights, you'll love this. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wondry+, on Apple Podcasts

or on the Wondry app. The day I returned to New York, I quit. I traveled. I ran out of money. I no longer had a good answer when somebody asked me what I was doing. Neither did my parents. I moved deep into Brooklyn into a three-bedroom apartment I shared with four people. I wrote articles online for $5 apiece, graded standardized tests, anything, everything, to not be an investment banker.

Most of that money went to paying the debt for the schooling I wasn't using. I felt stupid, yet free. Eventually, I'd start a hostel in Brooklyn, which led to a hostel in Austin, with its secret speakeasy and mascot goat. I met an author who introduced me to another author writing a book on marketing. I worked a day job in digital marketing, I still do, to pay for my side job of hospitality.

Mastery comes from learning a variety of skill sets and combining them in a way nobody else can. That's what makes your specific skill set unique. I certainly wasn't a master, but I was learning what I loved and learning how to make a living doing that. And then came that serendipitous late night missive from my friend, a ghost town, smack dab in the middle of nowhere. A place I could revive and transform into a tourist destination,

hospitality steeped in history. I had just turned 30, that magical age when, as a friend of mine once said, no one ever again will say you accomplished so much at such a young age. And the clock was ticking. I had, by many measures, found a successful life, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I needed something more. Something that would demand that I tap into all the creativity I had. More than that, I wanted, no, I needed a real life challenge,

a test of my character, my abilities, my sanity. I wanted to see what I was really made of. The moment I saw pictures of the place, I was flooded not just with the excitement for the future, but also with a kind of borrowed nostalgia. Old memories flooded back of watching gun smoke with my grandfather. He lived with us for a bit when I was a kid, and he got me to watch his favorite show. I loved spending time with him.

And before I knew it, I was enthralled by the adventures of Matt Dillon, Doc Adams, and Miss Kitty in Dodge City, Kansas, as he was. There always seemed to be a problem to solve, a bad guy to hunt down, riches to explore. Their fictional Dodge City exists in the same rugged era in which Cerro Gordo reached its zenith. I wanted to restore both of them to their former glory. I quickly learned that it's easier to find a dream than it is to finance one.

The property was listed for $925,000, far more than I could ever afford on my own. If only out of curiosity, I called the real estate broker the next morning. I told him that I wanted to make an offer. Maybe I'd get lucky, and I could steal this out from under the noses of people that couldn't see what I saw. Get in line, was all he said. Apparently, the listing had been sent around among lots of friends, and they're already feeling hundreds of inquiries, including from the press,

which only made the property a more competitive bidding situation. I didn't learn much in grad school, but I did learn what makes a compelling real estate offer. Someone who had vision, someone who had passion, but more than anything, someone who could close quick. And to do that, I was gonna have to convince a lot of people to get on board to lend me their money. To do that, I was gonna have to learn everything I could about this town. I hung up and immediately dove into as much research on the town as I could find. Once upon a time, Cerro Gordo was a thriving mining town in California's Inyo Mountains

that extracted hundreds of thousands of tons of silver, lead, and zinc ore from the surrounding hills between 1865 and 1940. The many miners of Cerro Gordo produced so much refined silver in the first 30 years of the town's existence, roughly half a billion dollars worth in today's money, that Cerro Gordo, 213.8 miles by road from the bottom of Sunset Boulevard, would come to be known as the mines that built Los Angeles. It was an important place during an important time in California's history. The more I read, the more I fell in love with it,

and the more I wanted to go see it myself. As my car rattled into town, the vitality and significance that put Cerro Gordo on the map, and that jumped off the pages of the articles I'd read were a distant memory. In their place was the collection of dilapidated buildings I'd seen in the listing photos, most of them slouching earthward under the combined weight of 140 years of use. From the center of town, standing on the splintered deck of a general store that had been turned into a museum, I could see the hotel with the saloon over to my left, built in 1871. The chapel down to the right, built in the second boom of 1910.

The bunkhouse below that. Behind me, up a massive heap of waste rock pulled out of the mines, was the trestle of an old aerial tramway station, a building they called the assay office and a large structure called the hoist house that sat on top of a mine shaft that went straight down into the mountain for 900 feet. Surrounding the town core were a bunch of sun-baked cabins and about twice as many collapsed structures that used to be used for 100 different things. They were all made of a combination of corrugated tin and old timber planks

that had been scrounged and repurposed. Most of the buildings were uninhabitable. Many were full of junk. All were full of history, waiting to be told. The buildings were connected by a network of roads and paths. Some were wide and smooth and looked like they'd been around as long as the town. Others were packed down and rocky, the exact width of a backhoe bucket. On either side of them, in between the buildings, was nothing but undulating expanses of rock,

dirt and scrub brush dotted with hunks of rusted metal that had once served the town as ore buckets, or carts, rail track, drill rods and square nails, but were now just places for the tumbleweeds to collect and for the snakes to hide. It was lonely and desolate, abused and abandoned, the most beautiful place I'd ever seen, and I immediately fell in love. Two main questions turned over and over in my mind as I walked the property. How could I possibly buy this and what could it become? Maybe it could be kind be a rugged adventure land for grownups, an adult campground with small,

unelectrified cabins and safari tents, maybe some yurts. I had a friend with a line on some Airstream trailers. Maybe we could park those all around the property. My other friend was a fine artist who could come up and give each one a unique paint job on the inside. Maybe we would renovate all the larger buildings and turn them into event spaces or meeting spaces, and then rent the entire town out for corporate retreats

and film productions. We could build stages against the hillsides and host conferences too. Or maybe we could just let every piece of the place tell us in its own time what it wanted to be. As I went through all the possibilities my mind was able to conjure, it was clear that whichever path I chose was going to require far more than I was capable of. But that didn't stop me from using pretty much every penny I had to my name, and

a shitload of pennies from the bank, and a group of friends turned investors to buy Cerro Gordo and become its newest owner. Much like Schmidt might have done in his day, the way most mines were financed in the silver boom, a dream and a handshake. By some people's calculation, I just committed myself to an incredible amount of risk. I had tied my financial fate to a dream that was defined primarily by uncertainty. Still, never once did I wonder, how do I get out of this place if it becomes a money pit? I never thought, what should I do if all those crazy ideas failed?

I only contemplated the first two questions. What should we do and what's it going to take? There is no playbook for bringing a dead town back to life. But given what had gotten me to Cerro Gordo, I felt just about as qualified as anyone else out there. Mainly, I didn't want to become one of the the massive men, as Thoreau puts it, who lead lives of quiet desperation. On June 13th, 2018, a Friday the 13th, of course, I officially took ownership of a ghost

town with no way of knowing, not even a little bit, how my life would change as a result. As much as I might have wanted it to be different, there's simply no way of projecting or preparing or planning for an adventure like this. Instead, like bro Schmidt, I just had to grab my hammer, pick my spot on the rock and swing. What other choice made sense? Since purchasing Cerro Gordo, most of my plans have gone very awry. Every day is chaos with a side of adventure.

There's been more than a few hospital visits. I've lost nearly 30 pounds since moving on the hill. I've lost a relationship. I've lost business partners. I've lost most of my life savings. Many. I've lost a relationship. I've lost business partners. I've lost most of my life savings. Many think I've lost my mind. Many think I've wasted the better part of my earning years dithering away on an impossible task. I wouldn't change a thing. I came here as a city kid who couldn't tell a plumbob from a pizza, but now I can build things with my bare hands, operate pretty much any piece of heavy machinery, survive in the wilderness,

rappel deep into the earth and claw my way back. I've battled fire and flood, earth and air, and I'm still standing. And that counts for something. That counts for a lot. There's a 19th century word for works of a man that are remarkable for their achievement, for their ingenuity and the spirit of dedication that it took to create them, but which add nothing tangible to the world. As they cannot be commoditized, they have no practical purpose, and they're hardly the sort of thing a reasonable man would spend the best years of his life constructing.

They were called follies. I hate this. It's a dismissal word coined by people that have no imagination, who measure out their lives in standard units, dollars, and data points. People who fail to appreciate the magnificence of an obsession. The kind of people who could never begin to imagine what it means to move mountains. Or to try to bring a dead town back to life. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke store.

You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The obstacles away, you go as the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather bound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com. Hey Prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Your girl Kiki Palmer is out here doing all the things, winning an Emmy, acting, singing,

looking fabulous. And my favorite role yet, podcasso's. In my podcast, Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, I'm talking to so many cool people. Some of my favorite conversations have been about growing up as a child star with Allian AJ, queer rights and trans issues with JVN, abusive relationships with Dr. Drew,

silk presses with the VP, and the music that shapes us with Mean Girls' Renee Rapp. So many to choose from. And in this new season, just wait who I'll be talking to next. Snoop Dogg, Sterling K. Brown, Saweetie to name of you. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Watch full episodes on YouTube and you can listen to Baby This Is Kiki Palmer early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus.