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If you want to know something about Borrego Springs (past and present) then you need to know Liz and Abby.” That was the advice I got from a couple of vivacious hikers who were sitting next to me at breakfast on morning—and they were right!

Liz and Abby are Liz Carr and Abby Carr King, the Carr sisters. The Carr family moved to Borrego around 1970 after Jack Carr retired from the Navy. Jack and his wife, Betty, purchased the Bottle Shoppe liquor store and the family lived on the old Rancho Santa Margarita Estate off of Bending Elbow. “That makes it sound like much more than it was, trust me”, Liz said in response to the name of their childhood home. “Yeah, by the time we were living there the place had definitely seen better days,” Abby added. “It was a great old house that had doors going to nowhere and a huge rooftop deck over the garage where we could sleep under the stars. It was a great place to grow up. And so was Borrego.”

Of course, I was hoping the sisters would share some stories about the “good old days” in Borrego and they did not disappoint me. Delivered with the timing and rhythm of two seasoned stand-up comics, Liz and Abby told one story after another. There were the stories about the times they took off in their mother’s Chrysler New Yorker or her Nash Rambler, letting air out of the tires so they could “off road” in the sand and, inevitably, getting stuck and having to be towed. And stories about the races they and their friends held to see who could get from Borrego to Brawley, buy cheeseburgers at Jack-In-The-Box, and get back in the shortest amount of time. With visible glee, they recounted a story about one of their favorite summer activities: pool-hopping naked at the De Anza Country Club. “The club had a watchman and we knew his routine,” Abby explained. “So, we would figure out where he was in his rounds and then we would all strip down and run from pool to pool, staying just ahead of him.”

And then there was the list of what the sisters referred to as the “real desert characters.” “There was Mobil Dick and the Three-Legged Dog who had a tree-legged dog and worked at Leo Hahn’s Mobil station. He knew everything there was to know about engines,” Liz recalled. “That was the only name we ever had for him,” she explained as she demonstrated, again, how the name was like one long word. “And there was Wild Bill Weeta, the ex-con wrestler who went to a party at Fletcher’s Air Ranch and, after letting out a deafening whoop from the rooftop, leapt into the air in his BVD’s and made a perfect swan dive into the pool.” “Oh, yeah. And Lucky. Remember Lucky?” Abby asked her sister. Turning to me, she continued: “Lucky was the poster child for ex-cons. We loved watching him line up Swanson’s pot pies on the hood of his car. He would put them on the car in the morning and by the time he was through with work (he worked at Borrego Valley Grocery) his dinner would be ready.”

Clearly one of their favorite stories was one that involved their father. Liz took the lead. “You know, our dad owned the town liquor store and so he was pretty popular. And nearly everyone in town had pet burros. We were no exception because our dad won our burro, Christopher, in a pool game. Anyway, once a year dad and a lot of the other guys in town would produce the “Burro Racing and Light Opera Company” and everyone would get on their burros and ride them all around town.” I asked the obvious question: “Was there any light opera involved?” And I got the obvious answer: “After enough beers!”

I was genuinely struck by the depth of appreciation Liz and Abby have for their Borrego experience. And that appreciation is not all in past tense. Both Liz and Abby are quick to articulate the reasons they have chosen Borrego as their home. “This is a community in the true since of the word,” Abby, a previous mayor of Borrego, volunteered. “We take care of each other. We accept each other for who we are. Out here, you might be a character, but you are our character and that’s how it should be.”

Liz, who was the valedictorian of her 1974 Borrego Springs High School class, (she thinks it is important to note that she was one of 11 seniors and so, as she puts it, “everyone had to do something!”) went off to college and, upon graduation, returned to Borrego because “…it is my home. I love the wildlife and the quiet. I love seeing the stars and getting out in the dirt.” Then, almost in unison, the two sisters asked if I had ever heard the standard answer for why people live in Borrego. Confessing that I had not, Abby said, “Well, we tell each other that ignorance brought us here and poverty keeps us here.”

With that, both sisters broke into laughter yet again. As I joined them in their laughter, I could not help but think to myself that these two are the complete antithesis of that description. They are clearly not ignorant and their shared love of their hometown an each other represents an immeasurable level of wealth to which most of us only aspire.