Munchkinville, Munchkin Land, Midgetville, Midget Town: they are all names of a mythical place that I had heard of since I was in high school in the 1970s. It was always spoken in the second person. Someone’s brother, uncle, older friend, someone else had always been there. Never the person she was counting on. The story survives to this day. A niece of mine, who graduated from Palm Springs High School in 2000, had also heard the rumors; as she had a cousin who is even younger. Munchkinville was and is an Urban Legend of the city of Palm Springs.

He was in high school the first time I went looking for him. As legend has it, after the Wizard of Oz was made in the 1930s, some of the dwarf actors took their profits and bought land in the Araby area of ​​Palm Springs. They played a key role in the construction of their houses, wanting the doors, windows, countertops, and roof lines to be built especially for the little people. Much of the houses were made of natural rock and were built at the end of a long cul-de-sac out of sight from the rest of the world. They wanted to create a place for themselves in the celebrity paradise of Palm Springs.

The main road into the Arabian area in the 1970s was a curvy, narrow dirt road called Rim Road, barely wide enough for a single car. If two crossed paths, one had to squeeze against the mountain that carved the inside edge of the road, or dangle a tire dangerously close to the 50-foot drop on the other side of the road that ran over desert left free from winter flooding. It was late and it was dark. We ventured to Rim Road and then searched the few cross streets in the small Araby neighborhood. Eventually we crested the small ridge on top of the houses and an even skinnier dirt road took us further back along the edge of the mountains and then turned down towards the creek.

We dragged our car forward until someone yelled and pointed to a small group of rough houses, “There it is!” I tried to look through the haze in the car, in my head, and through the glare of the headlights and the darkness outside its misty pools of yellow light. I wasn’t sure what I saw, but it fit the description I had been given. A person inside one of the houses stuck their head out of a window. My brother yelled, “Oh shit!” and we sped away, laughing like idiots.

When I was old enough to have my own driver’s license, I tried to recreate our discovery. But I never saw for sure anything that reminded me of that dark and drunken night. Still, whenever a friend was asked about Munchkinland, he would claim to have been there or know someone personally who had. But if they were asked to take me there, they would always exclaim with a busy schedule: “I have to go.”

Fast forward over 30 years, to recently, one day I found myself in Palm Springs with a digital camera in hand and more time than I had scheduled. I decided to drive the same roads that I remembered as a teenager and see what I could. Until Arabia Drive I went. Over the years, it had become a normal street and provided easy access to the now prestigious neighborhood of secluded houses. Pushing my car down the different roads throughout the day, I determined that there were no crossroads leading to a group of houses beyond the easiest to spot, and none of them appeared to be crafted of rock. But in a street called Smoketree I found a rather new and sinisterly large iron, brick and mortar gate with little lions perched on top of the pillars and lions heads on the fence that looked anything but cowardly. The location of this gate and the small amount of road that I could see beyond it meant that I could travel just along the wash to some house or houses beyond the normal neighborhood.

I drove further through the neighborhood, to the top of Araby Drive and found a small wide spot in the road with signs saying NO PARKING AT ANY TIME. I parked. And he stepped up to let my car shield me from the view of any house below me while I took a piss. Ahead of me was an old water tower, and below it was an iron crossbar blocking access from Araby Drive to a much older and narrow dirt road, now overgrown and overgrown. He descended as he meandered around the base of the mountain, staying just above the water until he came to a small group of houses, made of stone. They were barely noticeable, blending in with the mountain and desert so natural and covered by decades of plant growth. I did not walk down. They looked as if they had not been lived in for years. And also my car was parked illegally.

Later that day, I posted my thoughts on Facebook to all my old lifelong friends. There were about 50 comments posted in return. Seems like everyone had a Munchkinville story to tell. Some believed they had found it when they were young. Others claimed it was a false rumor. But they all had stories to share.