The Death Valley ballerina – finding a dancer’s legacy in the desert

Death Valley is the lowest and hottest place in North America. I visited with my husband, Erik, in mid-June, the temperatures rising to 48°C (118F), and our rental Ford Mustang straining to stay cool. The last thing I expected to encounter was the ghost of a ballerina among the rocks of this dry, dusty desert.

The adventure began as we drove into Death Valley Junction, Erik sensibly reminding us to buy an extra gallon of water from a gas station… ‘just in cases’, as we liked to repeat to one another. He was driving, winding the car along undulating roads, a barren rocky landscape rising either side of us. The desert seemed entirely devoid of life, the heat of the summer burning away, or perhaps hiding, the wild flowers, cacti and succulents that I knew must exist somewhere. I couldn’t quite believe it, therefore, when we reached a junction and there in front of us was an opera house. Or at least it said it was an opera house, this low white building with the lettering of Amargosa Opera House above the entrance.

I quickly forgot about it, my attention shifting to the barren rocks, the heat mirages in the road, the glistening white salt flats. Although I knew this was a brutal place, the red and gold rocks that rose above salt flats had a mesmerising beauty. We stopped at Zabriskie Point, walking the short distance up a slope, though in that heat it felt far longer. Looking out onto those brown, ochre, orange and gold crags, white flats behind them, I struggled to understand how anyone could live here. It was too hot, too empty, too vast.

We drove on, soon finding one of the few hotels in Death Valley. Nestled within a natural oasis, The Inn at Death Valley was a welcome respite from the heat. Soon, however, we were back in our car with me driving this time as we explored the desert.

When I parked up at Badwater Basin and took a few steps out onto the salt flat (the lowest point in America at 282 foot below sea level), sweat flowed down my legs, suncream instantly melting. We were back in the car ten-minutes later, the seats burning. I drove us through Artists Drive, a stunning six-mile road that cuts between a spectacular paint-box of rocks. Stopping a few times, we studied the surprising variety of colours in the rocks. The main vista was named Artists Palette for its splashes of pink, green, red, blue, gold, orange. More beauty amongst the brutal heat.

But it was when the sun went down and the stars came out that the desert found a new life. We drove out to a little car park at an old mining station, put down the roof of our convertible, and let our eyes adjust to the stars. Patterns emerged quickly, and we picked out the familiar constellations. We waited a little longer and soon we could see a swirling blanket of silver, the Milky Way visible beneath the brighter stars. When we moved to the ground, hiding ourselves from the moon’s brightness behind the shadow of our car, we could see even more.

Morning came and we continued our drive, filling our water bottles before we left the hotel – it would be more than six hours to get to our next stop: Sequoia National Park. I took care as we drove along the long and empty roads, the Mesquite sand dunes to our right, too wary of the huge distances between us and the nearest town. With not even the tiniest bar of phone signal, we were alone.

It was thirty miles into our journey when I hit the rock. I rounded a corner and was too slow to swerve out of the way, a rock slide littering the road. My front-right tyre ground against a large and sharply pointed stone. The noise as the tyre blew was frightening, but I managed to get us on to a layby where we could assess the damage. The wheel was destroyed, a puncture in the tyre like a bullet hole.

Perhaps some hopeful part of us thought that maybe there would be phone signal on higher ground. So we packed our rucksacks with water and suncream (plus a few sticky Clif bars) and started walking back up the road, throwing the fallen rocks off the tarmac. We needed another car to rescue us, not for them to blow their own tyre.

Five cars passed us without stopping, one even accelerating as it hurried on by. I was surprised that they weren’t bothering to help us. Two people walking at the side of the road in rising heat in Death Valley. We obviously needed help. But no one was willing to stop even for a moment to ask us if we were okay. Mostly, though, I was cross with myself: if only, I kept saying, I had swerved an inch further and avoided that rock. But there was nothing I could do to turn back time.

Finally, a car slowed down and wound down their window. A lovely Italian couple, working hard to understand our language, realised what we were trying to say and took us in, driving us ten-miles to the nearest gas station.

Panamint Springs motel and gas station was to be our waiting place for the next few hours. There was still no phone signal, but they had a landline.

It was while I was anxiously listening to Erik on the phone to a tyre repair shop eighty miles away, that I saw the photograph.

A ballerina in a long white tutu, her arms outstretched, her feet en pointe. Perhaps a scene from Giselle or Les Sylphides. And beneath the framed photograph, she’d signed her name: Best, Marta Beckett, 1999.

An ethereal ballerina in the desert, next to the scorpion sucker sweets. It didn’t make sense to me, not with my hands still shaking from the accident, the gas station ice-cream I was eating for breakfast quickly melting down my wrist.

When we finally got back on the road (thank you to Ridgecrest A & L Auto Repair!) and a few hours later we got internet signal again, I looked up everything I could find about Marta Becket (born Beckett). I wanted to know who she was, why her photograph was in the gas station, whether she had danced in Death Valley or if was she a visitor.

Her story is a remarkable one. Originally a ballerina from New York City, she performed in the corps at Radio City Music Hall, as well as on Broadway. Then, in 1967 during a one-person theatre tour across the country accompanied by her husband, she got a flat tyre… in Death Valley. While her husband changed the tyre, she wandered through the dusty ghost town of Death Valley Junction. (It would be hard to call this a town, in fact, when the population is currently only four people.) But it was the dilapidated theatre that caught Becket’s eye. Later that year she returned, rented the theatre, painted beautiful murals of splendidly dressed audiences on the walls (so she was at least dancing to someone, she allegedly said) and began a regular season of performances.

The story goes that a group of National Geographic journalists found her performing to an empty auditorium in 1970. So entranced were they by this ballerina living out her artistic vision within a barren desert that they wrote a profile on her. Soon, she was drawing crowds from all over America, her little opera house a popular visit for Las Vegas tourists 100 miles away. The desert ballerina had not been deterred by the silence of the desert rocks around her. Instead she became a legend, an icon of art and entertainment in the brutal desert of Death Valley.

Marta Becket gave her final performance in 2012. She was in her late eighties. She died five years later in her home in Death Valley Junction, at the age of 92. As we continued our road trip, winding our way through Sequoia and up to Yosemite, I kept imagining this ballerina appearing between the rocks of Artists Drive, or floating above the mirage of the salt flats. She never gave up on her dreams, despite the silent, brutal desert. Rather she found a way to create something of beauty within the dusty heat.

While I have no intention of ever returning to Death Valley, nor will I open an opera house in a hot and dusty desert, Marta Becket’s story did inspire me. It reminded me, at a time when I needed the reminder, that the journey to living out my dreams of being a writer was never going to be easy. There would be struggle, loneliness, silence, a few rocks along the road.

But dust and rocks and emptiness didn’t stop Marta Becket from dancing in the desert.