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https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/The-resort-of-last-resort-Writer-gets-along-2568812.php
The resort of last resort / Writer gets along just fine in desert getaway
By Carl Nolte
Published 4:00 am PST, Sunday, November 2, 2003
Photo: PENNI GLADSTONE
2003-11-02 04:00:00 PDT Smoke Tree Valley, Imperial County -- Phil Garlington is what Huckleberry Finn would have been like had he lived to be 60: a free spirit and former promising young man whose hair has mostly fallen out, someone who loves life but hates work, who lives in the middle of nowhere in a desert so barren the military uses it for bombing practice.
Though he is mostly broke, he lives on 10 acres of his very own land, in a shelter he built himself, a place he calls Rancho Costa Nada. In the lingo of the desert -- where there are also places like Rancho No Gotta and Rancho Elbow Greaso, Costa Nada means "It costs nothing. "
Garlington, whose roots are in the Bay Area, believes that places like the rancho are an option for those temporarily defeated by modern life, people who have lost a battle, but not the war, "somebody who wants to take a few months to regroup."
"It's not for everybody," he says. "It's an option."
For some in the Bay Area - and other major metropolitan areas, for that matter -- there has always been a romantic appeal in making a new life in the wilderness, in Alaska or maybe the California desert, and building your own place, like a pioneer.
Unlike his great-grandfather, Garlington had few pioneering skills -- he barely knew which end of a hammer meant business -- but he knows how to find land cheap and how to build a homestead on it. He bought the rancho for only $325 and slapped together what he calls "a hogan," basically a shelter from the wind, for an additional $300.
There are several disadvantages to life, Garlington-style. The rancho is in the Smoke Tree Valley, 53 miles from the nearest traffic signal. It is reached only by traveling more than 17 miles of unpaved road, some of it as rough as an old washboard, some deep in sand.
"It is basically wasteland," Garlington says. "Nothing will grow here." There are snakes, insects, searing summer heat and winter winds so fierce they would blow over a boxcar.
There is no electricity. The nearest neighbors, an irascible former Marine and his leathery wife, live three miles away. One's social life is limited. "Sex," Garlington says, "is like water. You have to go to town to get it."
The advantage is that one can live like a land baron for practically nothing, like a pioneer, like a homesteader out of the Old West. Nobody tells you what to do. Free as a bird; free as Huck Finn, drifting on his raft, except this is desert. All the good rivers have been taken.
"I traded money for leisure," says Garlington, who winters at the rancho and travels in the summer when the Smoke Tree Valley is blasted by the sun. "It's 120 degrees out here in summer," he says, "You'd have to be crazy to stay out here."
Garlington is not crazy. It's just that he's a 19th century man in a 21st century world. The son of a college president, in his youth Garlington was simultaneously student body president at San Francisco State and editor of the college paper. Glib, witty, literate, admired by women, Garlington lived a life rich in adventure.
He has been a sailor, a writer of unproduced screenplays, a mosquito killer, a mail carrier, editor of small town newspapers, a reporter on big city dailies. He can fly an airplane and knows his way around cyberspace. He has even written a book, "Rancho Costa Nada," chronicling his desert adventure.
What he can't do is hold down a job. "I am not a good employee," he says,
"I hate having to walk up the same stairs every day."
Last year, he was summarily fired as the editor and sole staff writer at the Palo Verde Valley Times, a weekly newspaper in the dead-end town of Blythe,
a metropolis of 21,000 souls -- 8,000 or so are inmates of two state prisons -- on the California-Arizona border. Though it is a pleasant-looking place, no one would mistake Blythe for paradise. The average high temperature in July is 108.5 degrees, and miles of empty desert ring the town.
Garlington had come to Blythe from the Orange County Register, where a bad attitude cost him his job. So Blythe seemed to be the final stop in a long newspaper career. "I was a big frog in a small pond," he says of the nine months of glory he enjoyed as the town's editor. But an old problem resurfaced.
Garlington cannot stand to take orders from his superiors. "The mere happenstance of holding the rank of 'employee' made me feel servile in the presence of a perfectly pedestrian, usually well-meaning dimwit who happened to be the boss," he says. Garlington was fired for insubordination -- and not for the first time.
"I was pretty near broke," he said. His only resources were a 401(k) retirement account, and his ace in the hole -- 10 acres of desert land, 45 miles southeast of the Blythe city limits. He had bought the land four years before at a tax auction.
The purchase grew out of a newspaper story he wrote on auctions of worthless land. The auction process sounded interesting, so Garlington put in the minimum bid of $100 himself on 10 acres somewhere in Imperial County. Whoever owned it had not paid the taxes -- $18 per year. So the county auctioned it off.
There was some other bidding, but Garlington got the 10 acres for $325, complete. "It was a joke," Garlington said. "I did it for a lark."
"You'll never find it," said the lady at the Imperial County tax office who handed him the deed. But she hadn't considered the wonders of the Global Positioning System; with a cheap GPS, Garlington and some pals found what would become the rancho.
He had a good job as a reporter in Orange County then, and the Rancho became a weekend retreat, good for skeet and target shooting and beer drinking with his pals. But eventually fate -- in the form of being fired from two jobs -- intervened and Garlington decided that the Rancho Costa Nada would become his home port.
At the age of 59 1/2, he was too young for Social Security, too principled to go on unemployment, too broke to pay rent. So he used some of his 401(k) money to build a dirt-cheap house.
A problem: He had not so much as taken a shop class. And whatever he built had to be cheap, as well as easy to construct. He came up with the idea on his own. A naturally curious man, he went to the library and did research on basic construction.
The solution was to build a shelter of sandbags faced with salvaged lumber. This was to keep out the wind. He bought used 100-gallon water tanks for $10 each. There were also assorted other materials: a cot, some plywood and camping gear, like a Coleman stove. He and another settler in the desert - - a man Garlington calls "The Hobo" -- rented a truck to haul the material.
It took a month or so to build the rancho.
Garlington gets free water from the city park in Blythe and hauls it out to the desert in his car, a three-cylinder Geo Metro that is barely capable of making it over the washboard roads. He uses sturdy marine batteries for power. "I am my own utility," he says.
The Rancho Costa Nada -- three buildings of various sizes -- is not to be confused with your usual suburban rancho. Though Garlington refers to one building as a "hogan," another as the "ramada" and the sanitary facilities as "the spa," the rancho is both plain and simple. It is also homely as dirt.
It is not as lonely in the desert as one might think. Five or six other people live in the Smoke Tree Valley. One is Jacob Ray Taylor, a 54-year-old former Marine gunnery sergeant who lives with his wife, Lorelei, in a place they call "Freedom Village," a kind of compound of old trailers, old cars and outcast pieces of this and that. There are also 50 chickens, eight dogs, 17 cats and a 28-year-old horse named Tasha.
Another neighbor is Talbot James Peterson -- "Pete" to the others. Peterson says he got the desert bug years ago; he likes the open space, the sky at night, the feel of the place. He is 74, a winter resident. Peterson says he's had five heart bypass operations, the first 20 years ago. "I live for today," he said. "I don't worry about it."
The valley is a strange place; sere and surreal. One night it is peaceful and quiet as the dark side of the moon. The coyotes yip and howl at dawn. The next night is made hideous by the sound of Marine helicopters, flying low, and by warplanes shrieking in to fire rockets into the gunnery range. The bombs land some distance away from the valley, but the bombs and rockets light up the sky.
"A light show," Garlington says, laconically.
Does Garlington have advice for other prospective settlers? "Well," he said, "If you are not broke, you are not going to do this."
Garlington's book, "Rancho Costa Nada," is not available in stores. It can be ordered from Loompanics Unlimited, a publisher of offbeat books, at www.loompanics.com.