Off the grid and on the edge: Community and isolation in California's high desert

Some come to Wonder Valley with a pioneering spirit. A plot of land and a modest homestead cabin is still affordable there. With a little grit, it’s possible to live under open skies, surrounded by mountains and bathed in golden light at sunset.

Some come to make art. Others are happy to sit on their porch late into the night, playing their guitars for the moon and the stars and, some say, the aliens, too.

Some come to Wonder Valley to escape. In the sparsely populated basin east of Twentynine Palms, it’s possible to live far away from old troubles.

“This is a great place to run away from something,” said Pastor Max Rossi, who heads one of the two churches serving Wonder Valley. “From a bad relationship, from debt, from bad parents, fears. People can run away into the desert and hide quite well.”

But what makes it possible to build a new, freer life in Wonder Valley – space and isolation – is what makes it challenging to survive there. Living in Wonder Valley is not easy. Some fear it’s getting even harder.

Threats are baked into the desert and always have been: Blistering heat, venomous snakes and scorpions, bobcats and vultures. Scarce water and, perhaps more importantly, scarcer company mean any of these threats can carry life or death consequences.

Newer threats pose different challenges.

One is the peril – but also the promise – of tourism. As more visitors fill Joshua Tree National Park, some of the tourists drive further east, to a less-traveled destination, to Wonder Valley. There, some locals have refurbished cabins and turned them into short-term rental properties, which can be lucrative in a place with few jobs. But tourism begets more tourism. And as word of the serene desert getaway spreads, the increasing presence of transient desert-life voyeurs threatens to erase the rustic allure.

Finally, an increasingly pervasive fear has festered: In a place where authority and norms have felt so far away for so long, the residents of Wonder Valley worry they can no longer live how they please. Residents pass along rumors of county officials patrolling properties, telling people to tidy their yards, remodel their cabins or leave.

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Sidebar: Graphic: A guide to code enforcement in Wonder Valley

In February, in a community not too far from Wonder Valley, Daniel Panico and Mona Kirk were arrested on their five-acre property. They were camping with their three children in a fort that sheriff’s deputies interpreted to be their home. They were separated from their sons and daughter, handcuffed and sent to jail on charges of child abuse.

More: Three Joshua Tree children were living in a shack for years, parents arrested, police say

More: Officials called it child abuse. Joshua Tree parents say 'we did very well with what we had.’

In Wonder Valley, some saw themselves – or one of their neighbors – in this couple.

When Lindsey, a 35-year-old woman who has lived there in a run-down Winnebago for the past two years, read about Panico and Kirk in the news, one thing stood out to her: One of their friends, quoted in the article, remarked the couple didn’t really live in the fort on their property.

“I’m like that, a little bit,” Lindsey said. “I live here. I sleep more nights here than I don’t. But I have a network of friends that have slightly more resources than I do.”

Not everyone in Wonder Valley lives like Lindsey – on a limited income, perhaps with tenuous access to resources like utilities and transportation.

But to understand the particular segment of the population that does – people living on little means in the high desert – The Desert Sun interviewed Wonder Valley residents, reviewed real estate and demographic data, studied code enforcement records and visited the region several times between February and May.

In a place where people go to live simply and get away from it all, they can choose how connected they want to be. This is especially true in Wonder Valley, a community of about 900 people located several miles off state Route 62, which cuts through the high desert.

Some, like Lindsey, disconnect from the common comforts of running water and electricity – but bond with fellow residents.

“There’s a pretty robust sense of community and neighborly charity out there,” Lindsey said.

Others live on the margins of an already deserted place – but by living in isolation, they must battle the desert’s threats alone.

Lindsey felt trapped in Los Angeles.

“I was out of money and looking for a way out of Hollywood and the city,” she said. “And I didn’t want to pay rent anymore. I was just like, ‘This is madness. I can’t do this.’”

So she traded the six lanes of stop-and-go L.A. traffic for a five-acre plot on a dirt road near Wonder Valley’s main drag.

The Desert Sun is not using her last name because she fears it could jeopardize her living arrangement.

Lindsey had just gotten out of a long-term relationship and lost her job as well. Then an acquaintance offered her an escape: Five acres out in the desert. She was looking to sell it fast, for a few grand.

Lindsey cobbled together the cash. When she bought the property for $9,000 in 2016, it had nothing but a rundown, one-room homestead cabin, filled with someone else’s rotting possessions.

“I stopped believing that I needed to live in an urban area to have a life that was worthwhile,” she said.

Today, Lindsey, a petite woman with strawberry blonde hair that often looks windblown, lives completely off-grid, on a property dotted with scrubby plants.

She’s converted the cabin into her living room and decorated it with potted succulents, wind chimes and found objects. From her couch, you can watch the wind whip up dust devils on the horizon.

Lindsey sleeps in a broken-down Winnebago with neither water nor an electrical hookup and cooks over a propane stove. She uses a 45-watt solar panel on the RV’s roof to charge her laptop. Nearby, she’s built a small wooden structure that encloses a composting toilet – a five-gallon bucket with sawdust. When it fills up, she buries the waste near plants.

Her property doesn’t have running water so she goes to the Joshua Tree visitors centers and fills up 20 or 30 gallons at a time. She uses about one gallon for showers and as little as possible for cooking and washing.

“I don’t wash my dish every time I use it,” she said. “I wash it once a week.”

To an outsider, Lindsey could appear isolated. Her Prius died a year ago, so she walks more than a mile to the community’s only bar and relies on others for rides out of town.

She’s had break-ins, but only when she wasn’t there. They took some tools, jewelry and her weed. She owns bear spray, but not a gun. Lindsey seems to have made peace with the risks.

“It’s not enough to just make it through your first few break-ins,” she said. “You have to make it through your first few break-ins and then be able to see the person at the bar who you know took your (stuff) and be cool.”

It’s a tough lifestyle, but it allows her to focus on creative endeavors.

She’s building a 120-square-foot artistic space from recycled materials and other people’s junk. She envisions her property becoming a place where people can create art, while experiencing the sanctuary and inspiration of the desert. She wants to turn another abandoned homestead cabin into a tool library, where residents could share building equipment and enlist help with their own projects.

She’s poured her heart and sweat into the projects, while forgoing a steady income.

In LA, Lindsey worked as a wardrobe assistant while pursuing acting. Now, she makes just a few thousand dollars a year from reading tarot cards and making “weird art,” but she’s able to spend nearly all her earnings on her own work.

While she lacks a financial cushion, she has the support of other Wonder Valley residents.

She watches a neighbor’s dog when he travels. In exchange, she can bunker down at his air-conditioned home, which is nice when temperatures swell into the triple digits. Another friend regularly donates building materials to Lindsey’s art project.

“I now have a network of friends that have slightly more resources than I do,” she said. “I can help them out with things and they can help me out.”

On Friday nights, Lindsey changes out of breezy pants and the loose shirts that protect her fair skin from the desert sun, and slips into jeans, before heading to the Palms Restaurant, essentially the only business in Wonder Valley. As her neighbors greet her, she slides onto a bar stool and orders a cold cocktail and a warm meal.

Soon, the weekly open mic event begins. Lindsey’s neighbor Jim plays the guitar, performing the songs he sings on his porch each night. A local known as Harmonica Bob jams with a trio.

The cozy roadhouse serves as a bar, concert venue and community hub. Patrons can get stiff drinks, cheap homemade food or Twinkies to satisfy a sweet tooth. Rummage sale t-shirts and used DVDs cost $1. The television behind the bar almost always shows classic, black-and-white movies.

Here, residents can catch up on local news by picking up a copy of the Wonder Valley Sand Paper, published by a civic-minded couple. They catch up on each other’s days, discussing each other’s latest photos posted on Instagram.

They all seem to know Lindsey.

“She’s a tough lady,” Wonder Valley resident Wendy Stone says when her name comes up during brunch at the Palms on a recent Sunday morning.

Seven miles east of the Palms, Zena and Vandar Awesome live at the end of a sandy trail, in a cabin too small to contain the collected clutter of 30 years of marriage.

A computer table, tool chest and furniture spill into their side yard. Beyond the scattered houseware, their clothesline frames a sweeping desert vista.

They would like to stay there – but over the past few months, a minor issue has grown into something that threatens to cut short their future in Wonder Valley.

The two met in the U.S. Air Force, back when he was a welder named John Swestyn and she was an electronics specialist named Bonnie Watson. They became friends over rounds of Dungeons & Dragons, fell in love and were married on Aug. 8, 1988.

Bonnie became Zena. John became Vandar. And for their married surname, the couple decided on Awesome – memorable, easy to spell and near the top of any alphabetical list.

Since leaving the military, the couple has worked a smattering of odd jobs. They owned Awesome Computer Service, an IT business. They ran Awesome Farm, an animal boarding company. They sold zebra finches at swap meets, and even housed sex offenders.

“You can’t forget me,” they’d tell business associates. “I’m Awesome.”

Then, things took a tragic turn.

One day in 2016, Vandar had a case of aphasia. Worried he was having a stroke, Zena took him to the emergency room. He was later diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer. Today, he wears a medical device on the crown of his head.

Zena, who has a slight frame and close-cropped greying hair, with streaks of red and purple, wanted to make the most of the time she had with her husband. The pair decided to move to Wonder Valley, where they’d purchased a cabin on five acres for $20,000 some years earlier. Why worry about animal boarding, or work, or distractions, at a time when they could be spending quality time with one another instead?

On a street where the sight of a car kicking up dust is almost as rare as rain, the couple figured they would be left alone.

They had a retirement plan, too. Without home payments or much in the way of monthly expenses, Zena and Vandar Awesome could leave for a road trip at whim. They could dote on their chihuahuas. They could make crafts, build sculptures, do what they wanted. They didn’t have deep savings and they wouldn’t need much.

“Without a house payment, you actually have a lot of freedom to spend money on what you want to spend it on,” Zena recalled thinking.

Their new home is a dimly lit cabin with a bed and two easy chairs facing a large television in the main room, with a small kitchen in one corner. The floors are concrete. Two lamps and an electrical cord dangle from the ceiling.

They make $1,200 a month – his Social Security check and their disability payments – and put some expenses on credit cards. Their medical care is covered by the Veterans Administration.

Expenses, meanwhile, are minimal. They get water delivered about every three months and try to fill up water bottles whenever they’re out. They use meal preparation services like Blue Apron – and to supplement their pantry, they get free food distributions at the Wonder Valley Community Center.

Their plan was to enjoy their time together, in the solitude of the cabin, on road trips and inexpensive cruises. For a while, it worked.

What the Awesomes hadn’t bargained for is that even in isolated Wonder Valley, neighborly disputes still exist.

In August, barely three months after moving to Wonder Valley, the couple received an unexpected visitor. Disturbed by the distant yapping of the couple’s chihuahuas, a neighbor had reported them to animal control. An official from the county came to their house to check on the dogs.

Things spiraled from there. Animal control discovered the Awesomes lived in the cabin full-time and referred the case to code enforcement, Zena said. Code enforcement came to the property and took photos.

That’s when they learned their home, legally, could not be their home. The cabin was “not approved for permanent residence,” according to a violation notice that arrived around Valentine’s Day. It said the couple would also have to permit or remove a storage container and relocate their dogs. They faced a choice: Convert the cabin into a single-family residence, or leave.

Their situation is not unique in Wonder Valley, where there are 20 open code enforcement cases. In some cases, like Zena and Vandar, homeowners were notified that their homes were not approved for permanent occupancy or were told to remove debris. Other code violations in Wonder Valley include lack of heating, lack of hot and cold running water and building without permits.

In the Wonder Valley area, about one out of every three housing units lack hot and cold running water, a flush toilet, a bathtub or shower or some combination of the three, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Even on the low end of the estimate, Wonder Valley homes lack plumbing at a rate more than 10 times that of San Bernardino as a whole.

So when Zena used the social media website Nextdoor to seek help responding to code enforcement, she was not surprised to find others wondering if they had similar problems. Four people responded, fearing code enforcement might take issue with their cabins, next.

“I know I’m not alone, but that doesn’t exactly help me,” Zena said. “My frustration is I don’t know what to do and nobody can tell me.”

In the past few months, Zena has found herself spending much of her time just trying to figure out what to do, and how to raise money to fix up the cabin.

She tried Craigslist first, seeking to sell many of the couple’s belongings.

“Lots of stuff. Do not want to give away,” she wrote. “Need money. Husband is sick and we have tools he won’t use.”

Later, she considered a different tactic: Asking for help directly. She set up a GoFundMe page in mid-March, aiming to raise $30,000.

“We are happy with what we have, but the government says it is not good enough,” she wrote.

But that was a dead end. Zena published the page online, but didn’t share it with a large social network. She’s connected with some old business acquaintances but doesn’t have hundreds of friends. She’s also uncomfortable relying on people, especially when she’s unsure what kind of help she needs.

And even now, after Zena has made noticeable progress cleaning her property, she still isn’t sure which parts of her home are up to code, which aren’t, and which will be the most expensive to fix. She’s consulted architects, engineers and loan officers. She’s discussed the problem with the county’s local representative at the Wonder Valley Community Center. But she remains confused. If only she could go back to August, when she and Vandar thought they could live quietly, undiscovered and undisturbed.

“The first part is, leave me alone,” Zena said. “But the second part is, not only are you not leaving me alone, you are actually sucking resources, sucking time and for me, with my husband, time is important.”

Fed up, Zena has decided it would be easiest to clean up the property, pack up Vandar and their 7 dogs and hit the road.

“It sounds like I’m putting my head in the sand, but I’ve decided the best strategy is at least to try to be gone,” she said.

The Awesomes left this past Monday. Their first stop was Death Valley. They hope to still be traveling when code enforcement returns.

By 10 a.m. on a recent Sunday morning, the Palms was full of happy customers drinking Americanos ($1) and digging into pancakes ($3.50) and hearty steak and eggs ($6.50).

Laura Sibley opened the bar in 1996 with her brother James and her mother, after a vision came to her in a dream.

“There was this roadhouse and people were happy and there was food and music and it was wonderful,” Sibley recalled of her dream.

Back then, she said, the customers were “a little more wild.” Sibley smiles shyly when she tell stories about rambunctious drunks and criminals on the lam.

Today, the group at the Palms is a bit tamer. Wendy Stone, a military nurse who has lived in Wonder Valley for two years, had the vegetable omelette. She said the community is divided into three segments: People who don’t want community, people who do want community and criminals.

“The first two, we have to constantly be aware of the criminals,” she said.

Stone counts herself among those who seek out community. She and her husband recently painted a new “Welcome to Wonder Valley” sign; they planted it along Amboy Road, where the city of Twentynine Palms ends and their unincorporated community begins.

They often invite neighbors to their home for an activity they’ve created called “bong ball.” It’s a lawn game, but for the desert, named for the sound the softball makes when it hits a barrel.

“Out here, it’s so windy there’s not a lot of outdoor sports activities that you can do,” she said. “We can’t play tennis or badminton or any of that out here in Wonder Valley.”

Lindsey sat next to Stone and sipped a Bloody Maria (a Bloody Mary made with tequila). The criminals aren’t her enemies, she said.

“The meth heads and the squatters, they’re not my enemy,” she said. “They’re victims of the system in the same way that I am, they’re just further down the line.”

Lindsey knows she can survive without running water on her property or a car. To her, the bigger threat is the possibility that unwanted attention – from authorities or the media – could jeopardize a way of life in Wonder Valley.

But she worries the secret is getting out.

At brunch, Stone and Lindsey talked about recent articles that purport to “discover” Wonder Valley, spurring visitors to rent cabins that have been converted into vacation rentals.

The tourists wander into the Palms, squinting as their eyes adjust from the bright sunlight to the dark bar. Some casually talk about scooping up a few cabins for themselves as investment properties, but the locals doubt the city folk could hack it in the harsh desert.

One such story ran in The New York Times in December. It said there’s an “unsettling sort of beauty in the challenges Wonder Valley presents, especially after dark.” At night, the author wrote, “it wasn’t only O.K. to be lost, it was somehow necessary.”

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A couple from New York who’d read the Times article showed up at the Palms about a month ago. Stone said she chatted with them. She learned that the wife, an opera singer preparing to retire, hoped to make perfume.

“This is the problem: They came out here and bought two properties, but they have no idea what they’re doing,” Stone said. “They had this dream of living out here six months at a time. Your property can’t even go a weekend without being vandalized.”

Some residents didn’t want Wonder Valley named in this article. Some didn’t want the Palms named. They worry the bar will lose its locals-only feel and become a hip destination like Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown, 40 miles west.

The Palm’s customers are already evolving from who they were when the Sibleys opened the bar more than two decades ago. Laura Sibley recalled her mom looking down the bar recently and realizing nobody had ever been arrested or jailed.

“That was sort of a new thing,” she said. “So when there are musicians and artists and creative types moving in who haven’t been to jail…it’s refreshing.”

Sibley and her brother used to perform country music classics at the bar. This year, the Palms hosted the 10th Wonder Valley Experimental Music Festival. The same weekend, 15 artists – including Lindsey – created sound installations across Wonder Valley, as part of an event called Incantations.

These types of changes are welcome – as long as they attract the right people.

“We don’t want the world finding out about us,” said the Palms bartender Kevin Bone.

While customers at the Palms pondered their changing community over pancakes, churchgoers six miles away at Godwin Christian Fellowship were hugging one another hello while they waited for the 10:40 am service to begin.

The church is led by Pastor Max and Olympia Rossi, but this week Pastor Max was traveling, and attendance was low. Olympia took the stage, joined by a choir of two and a guest preacher from a nearby church.

The 15 or so attendees stood for much of the service, swaying gently and raising their arms as they sang church hymns. When it ended, a few members lingered to help Olympia tidy up.

There are certain things she’s learned from her years in the desert.

Olympia's learned to prepare for cold winters and “excruciatingly hot” summers. She’s learned, from experience, to expect the nearest sheriff’s deputy to be 20 minutes away. She’s learned to set aside more water than she needs, in the event of a blaze too remote for the fire department to reach.

And Olympia has seen all kinds of people in Wonder Valley. She’s seen young visitors from Los Angeles buy “old kitschy stuff” from the now-defunct thrift store, “the things that most people would say, ‘oh, that’s my mother’s.’” She’s seen wanderers trudging down state Route 62, headed toward Las Vegas. She’s seen neighbors rely on neighbors when they don’t have a car to ride into town.

So when she saw Daniel Panico and Mona Kirk, they looked familiar to her, too. They reminded her of some of the folks in the vicinity of the church, she said, families living without power or water.

“We came to find out very quickly that there are people that live like that, and they’re okay living like that,” she said. “They have water hauled in when they can afford it and they either have a generator, or somehow they can make it work.”

“It’s not a crime to be poor,” she added, but she also thinks social services is doing the right thing when it checks to make sure children are living in safe homes.

In a place like Wonder Valley, those county resources can be remote. Neighbors are closer. They’re the ones you call when there’s a trespasser on your property or a coyote in your yard.

“Being out in the wild wild east,” she said in reference to the town’s location east of LA, east of San Bernardino, east of Yucca Valley, east of Twentynine Palms, “you have to do things a little bit differently. You have to be aware that you’re going to be needed, and you may need to call on your neighbor.”

And that’s how it happened with Daniel Panico and Mona Kirk. After they were arrested, when their lives were in freefall, it was neighbors that caught them.

One friend set up a GoFundMe page for the family, and people responded by donating tens of thousands of dollars to help them buy a home. Volunteers cleaned and refurbished it. Panico and Kirk moved in.

Then last week, nearly three months after they were separated, a San Bernardino County judge said the parents could bring their three children home. Kirk can’t imagine how long it would have taken if not for the support of their neighbors.

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“There’s no possible way we could have gotten them back this quickly without all of that help,” she said.

The key to understanding what happened to this family might lie in Wonder Valley: It’s the paradox that even in a place where people go to get lost, it’s important to find your community.

Amy DiPierro covers business and real estate at The Desert Sun. Reach her at amy.dipierro@desertsun.com. Rebecca Plevin covers immigration at The Desert Sun. Reach her at rebecca.plevin@desert