Introduction“How the hell did you end up here?”
That’s what everyone asks me. They want to know how a kid raised on the high-octane streets of lower Manhattan could find themselves happily living in the middle of nowhere, two hundred miles from the nearest big city. They can’t imagine it—“the quiet,” “the boredom,” “the heat”—until they come visit. When we sit around my dinner table, under a blanket of stars, a home-cooked meal set out between us; when they feel their stress-induced blood pressure drop; when they find themselves voluntarily up at dawn, staring at the shifting sherbets spread across the sky, then they start to understand. All my city friends do the same thing: plan to come for one night—“That’s all the isolation I can handle”—and end up staying the week—“You have no idea how much I needed this. When can I come back?”
A home in the desert isn’t for everyone—you need special clothes, special wheels, and lots of moisturizer to withstand its brutality—but it’s not just for alien enthusiasts, wannabe cowboys, or hippies either. Around the world, the desert gathers expansive thinkers, dreamers who feel encumbered by the boundaries of apartment living, and builders who don’t yet know they can build. I’m no exception.
Several years ago, living in LA, I got in a fight with the girl I was dating and took off. I drove two and a half hours eastward, into the desert. I had been to Joshua Tree twice before, and had been dreaming of it ever since.
In any previous iteration of my life, I would certainly have been voted “least likely to move to the middle of nowhere.” Energized by the highspeed lifestyle of big cities, I have always found myself thriving at the humming center of cultural chaos. For twenty-seven years, that meant Manhattan and Brooklyn, then it spread to Los Angeles. My income has always been sourced from a modern multihyphenate conglomeration that includes photography, writing, hosting, and speaking. My father’s half of the family are all designers—my grandparents made hand-screened textiles for the Kennedy White House, my aunt designs lighting for all the parks and public spaces in New York City, and my father creates stages for large theater and dance productions in Europe—but I am more cerebral. I am chronically curious, and I have always expressed myself with my words more than with shapes and colors. I chase inspiration. The medium doesn’t always matter to me, but still, the idea of living in complete silence, building things with my hands, was as foreign to me as a language I’d never heard before. I am a city kid to the bone. And yet, the desert called.
Wary of the fickle nature of working in the arts, I had been fantasizing about buying a place in Joshua Tree that I could rent for backup money. Searching Joshua Tree’s zip code on real estate apps brought up a litter of impossibly cheap plots of land dotted with tiny shacks, sun bleached and battered, but
so cool-looking. I knew Joshua Tree National Park drew millions of visitors a year and there were virtually no hotels in the area, so basic math told me it would pay off. I had never bought property before, so I posted up at the local coffee shop with a frozen drink, cold-called a random Realtor, and two hours later was looking at my first listing.
The Realtor took me to see six houses that day, and four the next, spanning the entirety of the highdesert region. I got stuck in a sand dune on my way back to my own rental, and the sun scorched the shape of my sunglasses into my face, but I started to get a feeling for the place. The desert had sunk its hooks into me. Then, a month later, things took a turn: my search for a little cabin had morphed into an accepted offer on a six-bedroom, 2,800-square-foot house that had holes kicked into the walls and all the plumbing ripped out. I didn’t even own a drill.
Typically the people you hire to help you with big things like buying or renovating a home will encourage you to scale up. They want the up-sell because they get a percentage. Not this time. I found a contractor (whose more-than-passing resemblance to Channing Tatum somehow calmed me), and he, my new mortgage guy, and the Realtor all tried to talk me
out of biting off more than I could chew. “It’s two acres, two completely separate structures, four bathrooms. Do you realize how many mattresses you’ll have to buy?” But I could see the compound the place would become. I could envision the family dinners, the kids running around, the retreats that would happen on that acreage. I pressed on.
It took us nine months to gut and transform the place from a tangled web of unnecessary rooms and hallways to a minimalist haven. I took breaks to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on upside-down buckets in 117-degree heat as the house’s new form started to materialize around me. I watched hundreds of YouTube videos and sourced designs off Pinterest and taught myself how to build my own furniture.
Somewhere during that Summer of Building, I realized I didn’t really want to make the weekly trip “home” to LA. My dog was happier rolling in the dust, and I loved waking up in silence, wandering out into the sizzling sun, and looking out over the expansive plains to the mountains that shielded the moonscape of the national park. I was hooked. I went back to LA and turned everything in my apartment into a pile of Craigslist cash on the living room floor. I handed in my keys and left a note for the mailman:
Dear Ronny, Please send it to the desert. All good things, iOToday, I still sleep on a bed in that very house—the one that I helped build with my own hands. It was the first, and as you read this I’m crossing the finish line on my fifth gut remodel in the high desert.
Life is bendy and bizarre.
Copyright © 2020 by iO Tillett Wright. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
