It was a hot and dry summer night in 2019 when the Campbell family drove from Los Angeles to their new desert home in Joshua Tree.
As they were going over a hill on Highway 62, a drunk driver hit their car.
Ruby, 17, and Hart, 14, were killed.
To convey their grief, their parents – like thousands of people around the world – created a “spirit phone.”
Sitting on a patch of desert sand, the wind phone created by Colin Campbell and Gail Lerner consists of a wooden box that sits atop a cabinet with a chair nearby. Inside the box is an old rotary phone. There are no strings attached. But those who are curious can take the receiver to say out loud the feelings they have internalized – a chance to express, remember and, in a way, connect.
The first wind fence was built in 2010 by Japanese garden designer Itaru Sasaki after he lost his cousin to cancer and was later dedicated to the lives lost in the 2011 tsunami.
“Because my thoughts couldn’t be conveyed on a normal phone, I wanted them to be captured by the air.”
— Itaru Sasaki
In the San Jacinto Mountains, another wind phone is housed inside an old wooden toolbox attached to a tall pine tree in the community of Idyllwild.
Vietnam veteran Millard Elston, who was killed twice, built a fence and a homemade bench at his residence. Early in the morning, just before dusk, the sun peeks through the trees and warms the bench.
“It’s a sense of peace and comfort and you don’t feel pressured or in danger,” Elston said. “It’s just a way to express your feelings, when you have nowhere else to go or you just want some quiet time and let the wind take you.”
In the San Gabriel Mountains, a blue wind phone stands atop a misty forest near the Wrightwood clearing. A weathered notebook contains messages from those who have passed. On the cover of the booklet is an invitation: “Write the date and where you are from and your lover if you like.”
The airphone is dedicated to Robert Byrne, 28, whose disappearance in 1995 is still unsolved.
Her sister, Laurie Kathleen Byrne, created the call. He believes he was kidnapped and killed.
West in Duarte, an old tan rotary phone with a very long cord hangs from a tree in the garden. This wind turbine is located in the premises of the City of Hope, which is one of the leading cancer centers in the country.
Breast cancer survivor Nancy Clifton-Hawkins, who was treated at City of Hope, bought the phone on eBay for $50. The model he had in his childhood home in Long Beach.
First he used the phone to talk to his mother who died of lung cancer. He recently spoke to an employee of the City of Lethemba who was “in tears when he told me about calling his mother.”
“There’s something therapeutic about physically dialing a number,” Clifton-Hawkins said. “Even though you won’t hear a dial tone, you’ll always be connected.”
Colin Campbell remembers hearing that same connection. “I first encountered a wind phone on St. Jude’s Memorial Day and used their wind phone to call my children, Ruby and Hart,” he said. “It felt intimate and the words came easily.
It brought me comfort, and I wanted to tell others who mourn that way.
In nearby Altadena, another air telephone sits in a wood-framed phone booth with vertical glass windows at the end of a brick walkway.
“My original plan was to build it to dedicate myself to my father, who was suffering from cancer. After the Eaton fire, it became everyone’s job,” said Seamus Bozeman, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who lost his home in the fire.
The airy fence sits behind the Healing Arts Center in a quiet garden area. “It’s meant to be yours and you just say what you say in the air,” Bozeman said.
Next to the black rotary phone, which used to belong to Bozeman’s mother, a pink stone appeared one day with the words, “You are beautiful.”
Since most mobile phones are in public places, they can be subject to vandalism. Such is the story of the phone dedicated to Jacqueline Player, 26, who died by suicide. The actor’s cousin created a “Jax” wind phone and placed it near the walkway on Mt. Rubidoux at Riverside.
But what was a small souvenir is now the basis of an old rotary phone without a handset.
Earlier this year, the phone built for Ruby and Hart Campbell was moved to a public location. Now it can be found at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center, where many people can see it and send a message to the spirit.
