Kyle, a former fashion photographer, manages the place and is passionate about raw eating. There is always salad to eat. I live on avocados, grapefruit, bananas, peanut butter and a pizza blowout once a week when I drive to town. Birdman Rick, who has been here for 20 years, looks after the chickens and peacocks. He started bringing a rattlesnake he’d befriended, Alfredo, up to the green juice mornings. This didn’t go down too well with some of the communards. There’s no HR at Garth’s, just big shouting matches. They tend to blow over, like the desert weather, which never stays the same for long.
There were days, back when I first arrived last June, when nobody seemed to like me here, and yet my friends and my parents on the outside would offer me so much love, and I thought, why the hell am I staying? I guess the answer is: the silence, the space, the sense of “Spirit”.
But if Garth’s is a hospital, then the desert herself is the biggest patient of all. In the summer she’s a hot-blooded mistress, but in the winter she’s a deranged attention-seeker screaming with wind. One day I’ll be shivering in seven layers (T-shirt, cashmere jumper, thermal top, hoodie, rabbit-skin jacket and overcoat) and the next I’m sunbathing. In the depths of winter, I put a tent up in the cave. Things were confused by the fact that my menopause had kicked in, so I’d get hot flushes and take off layers – and then Mademoiselle Desert would get the ice back in her heart and I’d have to crawl back into my thermals again.
Whenever I have to leave the cave to go to LA, I make a beeline for the fridge. I shovel various dairy products into my mouth. Then there’s the thrill of indoor plumbing; ablutions that do not involve a shovel and digging a hole. And air conditioning. And mirrors. I discover that some of those age spots are actually dirt.
And yet where is the lizard? Where is the cheeseburger dinosaur? Where is the giant’s garden? And so I return.
I’ve been here more than a year now, long past the quarantine I had initially intended. A couple of US friends have come to visit. One did a brisk walk round and then said he had dinner plans in Palm Springs. The other ooh-ed and ahh-ed and took photos, but then the ice ran out and she got hungry and grumpy.
When people ask me when I’m leaving, I wonder: if I’d just moved into an apartment, would they keep asking? My answer is to check out the board you see when you enter the gates. It says “Welcome Home”. And I do feel an irresistible sense of belonging here. My mother started out by saying things like, “You can’t be on holiday for ever, you know.” But these days she’s more interested in knowing if the gopher has come back to the cave, and what a coyote looks like, exactly.
I occasionally speak to friends in the UK on the phone. When my girlfriend and I split up, for instance (I love the desert; she loves LA), I spoke to one of my oldest friends in London, and it felt great to be comforted by someone who really knew me. I have experienced incredible love and camaraderie from my fellow communards when we’re “in our flow”, as we say here, but when we’re not, it can feel lonely. That’s where the lizards and the trees and the stink bugs come in. You can learn a lot from a stinkbug. Take it slowly. Learn to be alone. Have a thick skin.
But there’s still the question of spiders. I finally saw one. In the cave. She was big. She was white. She reminded me of a baby rabbit. Pink skin underneath, and white fur on top. She also resembled a horrifying crab. “This is it. This is the moment,” I kept thinking as my heart pounded. And the longer I looked at her, the more I wanted to touch her. To see if I could understand her better. So I did, and she scuttled off under the rock beneath my pillow. Basically, I’m sleeping on a spider’s nest.
Kyle, a former fashion photographer, manages the place and is passionate about raw eating. There is always salad to eat. I live on avocados, grapefruit, bananas, peanut butter and a pizza blowout once a week when I drive to town. Birdman Rick, who has been here for 20 years, looks after the chickens and peacocks. He started bringing a rattlesnake he’d befriended, Alfredo, up to the green juice mornings. This didn’t go down too well with some of the communards. There’s no HR at Garth’s, just big shouting matches. They tend to blow over, like the desert weather, which never stays the same for long.
There were days, back when I first arrived last June, when nobody seemed to like me here, and yet my friends and my parents on the outside would offer me so much love, and I thought, why the hell am I staying? I guess the answer is: the silence, the space, the sense of “Spirit”.
But if Garth’s is a hospital, then the desert herself is the biggest patient of all. In the summer she’s a hot-blooded mistress, but in the winter she’s a deranged attention-seeker screaming with wind. One day I’ll be shivering in seven layers (T-shirt, cashmere jumper, thermal top, hoodie, rabbit-skin jacket and overcoat) and the next I’m sunbathing. In the depths of winter, I put a tent up in the cave. Things were confused by the fact that my menopause had kicked in, so I’d get hot flushes and take off layers – and then Mademoiselle Desert would get the ice back in her heart and I’d have to crawl back into my thermals again.
Whenever I have to leave the cave to go to LA, I make a beeline for the fridge. I shovel various dairy products into my mouth. Then there’s the thrill of indoor plumbing; ablutions that do not involve a shovel and digging a hole. And air conditioning. And mirrors. I discover that some of those age spots are actually dirt.
And yet where is the lizard? Where is the cheeseburger dinosaur? Where is the giant’s garden? And so I return.
I’ve been here more than a year now, long past the quarantine I had initially intended. A couple of US friends have come to visit. One did a brisk walk round and then said he had dinner plans in Palm Springs. The other ooh-ed and ahh-ed and took photos, but then the ice ran out and she got hungry and grumpy.
When people ask me when I’m leaving, I wonder: if I’d just moved into an apartment, would they keep asking? My answer is to check out the board you see when you enter the gates. It says “Welcome Home”. And I do feel an irresistible sense of belonging here. My mother started out by saying things like, “You can’t be on holiday for ever, you know.” But these days she’s more interested in knowing if the gopher has come back to the cave, and what a coyote looks like, exactly.
I occasionally speak to friends in the UK on the phone. When my girlfriend and I split up, for instance (I love the desert; she loves LA), I spoke to one of my oldest friends in London, and it felt great to be comforted by someone who really knew me. I have experienced incredible love and camaraderie from my fellow communards when we’re “in our flow”, as we say here, but when we’re not, it can feel lonely. That’s where the lizards and the trees and the stink bugs come in. You can learn a lot from a stinkbug. Take it slowly. Learn to be alone. Have a thick skin.
But there’s still the question of spiders. I finally saw one. In the cave. She was big. She was white. She reminded me of a baby rabbit. Pink skin underneath, and white fur on top. She also resembled a horrifying crab. “This is it. This is the moment,” I kept thinking as my heart pounded. And the longer I looked at her, the more I wanted to touch her. To see if I could understand her better. So I did, and she scuttled off under the rock beneath my pillow. Basically, I’m sleeping on a spider’s nest.