Our tour guide, a tall lady costumed in a red dress and an adorable red leaf hat, motioned to a tiled cove in the wall behind the sofa. It was a furrow that could have been a fireplace if there wasn't one directly across from it already.
"That's right folks! It was an natural air conditioner, and it could cool this living room down to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. But seeing how outside could easily reach 112 degrees, if the Johnsons had opened the door and told you 'Come on in', you wouldn't have turned your nose up to that."
She smiled winningly, and we continued onto Scotty's room in the Death Valley Ranch otherwise known as Scotty's Castle.
My parents had convinced me to go on a family vacation after I came back from Chile. Four days after I landed in Philadelphia, without a breath of hesitation, we flew into Los Angeles and then drove to Las Vegas and continued to Death Valley. It was our first day in the desert, and we were touring the only house to be seen in a hundred mile radius, Scotty's Castle.
From the outside, the house seemed dreamed up by a little girl with its silly tower and a strange, empty, moat-like swimming pool. But on the inside, it was beautiful.
The incredible story of Scotty, a con-man cowboy, befriending Albert Johnson, a 1920's millionaire, and the two living in a desert castle was brought to life by our guide. The house was remarkably intricate and well maintained. Room after room of stunning wood furniture, carpet and gorgeously Spanish lights greeted us as our tour group passed from Scotty's room to the sun room to the music room to the kitchen.
However, I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow I had seen this all before. This house, as wonderful as it was, was just as quirky and illustrious as some other place I had visited. And it wasn't until our tour group reached the kitchen with its old Spanish saying along the lines of Invita Ud. todos que quieren sentarse y Ud. seria el bienvenido or perhaps it was when we touched the master bedroom upstairs when it hit me.
I had gone on house tours before! I had in fact visited all three of Pablo Neruda's houses in Chile. And as interesting as a preaching millionaire, his wife and his lying cowboy buddy was, can they really beat the strange one known as Neruda?
The Nobel Prize winning, communist poet Neruda who was also a Chilean ambassador had the most insane mind that culminated in the craziest collections of things. No one is permitted to take pictures inside the houses so you will just have to imagine a love of ships and collections of mastheads, bottled ships, glasses, butterflies and art that just explodes in the house (or between three houses).
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| La Chascona (In Santiago) |
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| La Sebastiana (in Valparaiso) |
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| La Isla Negra (in La Isla Negra which contrary to what the name suggests is not on an island) |
I visited the last of his houses, La Isla Negra, three weeks before I left Chile. It was perhaps the complete opposite of Scotty's castle. Instead of being set in the middle of a hot sunny desert like Scotty's, La Isla Negra was situated on the coast 50 meters from the ocean. Instead of clear sun all the time, La Isla Negra waited in fog for most of the morning until the noon sun lifts the billowing curtain. It was from the collection of shells and sea creatures in La Isla Negra house that taught me what a narwhal was and that it was real.
Can you imagine that?
And that is perhaps why, even as I was listening to a gigantic self playing pipe organ led around by a woman in full costume in a tower of an imaginary castle in the middle of Death Valley, I couldn't help but sigh and hold a breath of wistful remembrance for the eccentricities of Chile.
