The United States is a land of many languages, dialects, accents and vocabularies. English is not necessarily the first language of the American Indian or the Chinese American, the Spanish American or the American Jew, all of whom inherited ancient tongues. But apart from children's pig Latin and the pidgin English still employed occasionally in Hawaii, one of the oldest invented languages in the U.S. was devised and survives in the California hamlet of Boonville. TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler visited there recently and tried to speak with the people. Here is his report.
The road had been hairpin turns through foggy mountains for the past 20 miles. All at once there was the sign: Boonville, pop. 1,003. Sure enough, there were some shacks along the road. No lights anywhere except the eerie blue glow of a television coming from one window. We stopped there, and after a minute one of the oldest men alive appeared. Stooped, toothless mouth indented, wearing glasses with handmade brass temples that could have been a hundred years old, he looked happy to have someone to talk to. We asked him about a place to stay. He looked surprised:
"You piked to boont in your moche geekin' on a motel?" he said. "Motel's strung, kimmie, but pike in the nook an' whittle a slib by the jeffer. Got enough zeese for a gormin' tidric. You from Belk?" We repeated our question, more slowly. He seemed to understand. "There's a nonch sluggin' nook ye can pike to," he said and gestured up the road. We thanked him and went back to our rented car, which wouldn't start. Finally, we walked the way he pointed, found the rickety New Boonville Hotel, roused a pale clerk, and were shown to a room where the floor had the solidity of a trampoline and the only decoration was a 1948 calendar from a Chinese laundry in San Francisco.
Link with the Past. Boonville is the Cannery Row of the '60s, a case study of isolated humanity intertwined with the land and the elements. It lies 100 miles north of San Francisco at the southern end of Mendocino County's Anderson Valley, a corridor 30 miles long that takes the Navarro River northwest to the Pacific. The southern half looks like Scotland: steep hills, lush fields dotted with sheep and shacks with wood smoke coming out of the chimneys. The valley is beautiful and silent. Two thousand people in maybe 150 square miles. Having few of the distractions of urban life, they see death clearly and have no urge to escape it. All they ask is a little sex, a little booze and a little humor in the meantime.
For more than half a century, their humor has come largely out of their exotic argot. It is their link now with a more exciting, more amusing past. We went back next morning to the house of the old man who spoke the language. His name is Phocian McGimsey, but everybody calls him Levi. He is 73. His grandfather came West to Boonville in 1852. He told us that the language is "Boontling," which is a corruption of Boonville Lingo. In English sprinkled with Boontling, Levi described what Boonville was like in those days: a rough frontier town first settled in the 1850s by subsistence farmers and sheep and cattle ranchers, most of them of Scotch-Irish descent.