The
arrow points south down a road that soon turns to sand and
bends around a basalt outcropping to Zzyzx Springs, an old
health resort started by a charismatic quack named Doc Springer
in the early decades of the 1900s. A Los Angeles radio personality,
Springer used the airwaves to drum up business, which, at
the height of his career, was brisk. His resort might still
be thriving today if he hadn't built his establishment on
land he didn't own. Essentially a poacher, Doc Springer was
eventually evicted, and his erstwhile spa is now used by biologists
as a research station. (For
more info about the Desert Studies Center, click here.)
The
old Zzyzx Springs sign near Doc Springer's resort in Mojave
National Preserve (5/96)
And
so Doc Springer's real legacy is not a miracle cure or a vacation
spot, but Zzyzx itself. The name he invented (which, by the
way, rhymes with Isaacs) has never ceased arousing curiosity,
and it's been appropriated by more than one science fiction
writer. I, too, have fallen under its spell, and have used
Zzyzx Road as a location in a novel.
