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       LANDMARKS IN THE DESERT

         Return To Yaquitepec

           by Kent Winslow


    READERS of South's columns were
both attracted and repelled by
various aspects of life at
Yaquitepec. Some hated the nudism,
others the life without electricity.
Some worried about snakes (Marshal
wrote: "Yes, we know about the
snakes. No one who has several times
come within an ace of stepping
barefoot upon a rattlesnake -- as we
have -- can fail to think a lot about
snakes. To stop suddenly abort in
one's tracks and freeze motionless
while a startled red diamond whirls
itself into a buzzing figure-eight a
few inches from one's bare leg is an
experience. But in the main, the
snakes mind their own business.")
Some readers wanted to find
Yaquitepec and visit there, but, at
least in the early years of the
Desert Magazine column, the location
was kept secret. Later others went
there but were offended at a sign
down below the mountain that Marshal
and Tanya posted on the trail:

    NO CLOTHING IS WORN HERE.

  Therefore, if you cannot accept and
conform to, in clean-minded
simplicity, this natural condition of
life, WE ASK, in all friendship, that
you come no further...

    One irate letter-writer to Desert
stated that the Souths had just re-
created the kind of rules that they
had pretended to escape from, by
posting this sign; and that he, in
being denied the right to visit with
them because he refused to shed his
clothes, had now lost respect for
their entire system of living. This,
of course, is the logic of Mr.
Typical American speaking, and the
Souths and their editor gave it the
response it deserved: silence.

    But a more thoughtful and
profound objection to Marshal and
Tanya's living arrangement focused on
the matter of their two, and later
three, children. What about their
education? Were they being prepared
for life in any environment other
than the specialized and rarefied air
of Yaquitepec? Marshal directed a
number of columns toward replying,
and "Desert" published photos of
Tanya giving reading lessons to young
Rider and Rudyard, so that without
seeming too partisan here, I hope, I
can say that I honestly came away
from the columns with the sense that
the South children probably got a
better education than the
overwhelming majority of American
youngsters. At early ages they were
building things, writing stories,
exploring, making pottery, setting up
a sun-dial. Marshal writes of how
they all got interested in printing
after seeing a postage stamp that
showed a tiny picture of an old-style
Gutenberg press, so they made one of
their own after the model shown. They
carved out their own type,
experimented with paper-making by
hand, and on remote Ghost Mountain
had taken the first halting steps
toward publishing the children's
writing. This is far in advance of
the mental opportunity afforded most
kids.

    Philosophical questions, however,
were by no means the main content of
the South columns. He had the eye of
a photographer, the soul of a poet,
and an Englishman's command of the
language, so that when he recounted
his afternoon's impressions of the
shadows in the valley below Ghost
Mountain stirring to life again the
outlines of the vanished sea that
once lapped there (and whose shells
and watermarks still abound on parts
of the desert floor), the writing had
the life and force of real
literature. Over and over again I
consulted references in the library
to make sure of the almost
unbelievable reality, that not one
word of Marshal South's prose was
still in print today, anyplace.
Standing now as a major loss to two
generations of readers hungry for
thoughtful, original insights into
wild lands and non-obtrusive living,
the absence of South from any volume
of his own, or even anthology, is
fairly tragic. Early in the days of
the Desert column, editor Randal
Henderson assured readers that an
amplified version of Marshal South's
Saturday Evening Post article would
shortly be available in book form,
but this seems never to have
happened. Meanwhile, the only other
writing of any kind that the author
got into print during the 1940s, was
apparently a series of lurid-sounding
Western novels, issued by a publisher
in England who had no U.S.
distribution. I've been unable to
find even a single one of these
books.

    Over and over the author
recommends independence, counsels
respect for all life, deplores the
rat-race mentality and shows how any
person of normal intelligence and
ability -- at least in the 1930s and
'40s -- could drop out of the hectic,
irresponsible, killing grind of
modern urban civilization; could
escape from its wars, its police, its
laws, taxes, its lunatic form of
technology that has come to hinder
life instead of aiding it, its
million jostling frustrations. Aside
from debating some details (such as
the alleged beneficial aspects of
ultraviolet), the only place where
I'd get into a cordial disagreement
with Marshal South would be in the
area of mysticism, as he posited the
operation of some kind of unknowable
agency or Fate behind events. Even
here, since he is about as far as
it's possible to be from imposing his
philosophy on anyone, my objection
would be purely theoretical, the sort
of debate you'd have with an equal in
a totally free society. Who knows? He
may even be right -- when I finally
located one of his columns in one of
the old magazines, the very first
sentence that struck my eye was:
"There is no such thing as chance." A
rather arresting remark, considering
the circumstances. But I still
disagree.


    MARSHAL SOUTH and I will,
however, not get a chance to discuss
such ideas, not in this lifetime
anyway. And if it does turn out that
there's another lifetime, we won't
have to discuss anything; I'll be too
busy conceding defeat. For he died in
1948, and thus a wall of Time
irrevocably separates two neighbors
who lived a mere four miles from each
other. I may have almost met him
once; a dim, elusive memory right at
the dawn of my consciousness conjures
up a static, photograph-like scene in
which a man and woman and some
children passed by on the dirt road
in front of our property in an even-
then ancient black car in the style
of the mid-1920s, and somehow I've
long had the notion that these were
the same people who'd inhabited the
inaccessible home on the mountain.
Perhaps it never happened, but in one
issue of one of the old magazines
there is a picture of the South
family on the road, during a period
in which they were traveling around
the Southwest looking for another
homestead where there was more
available water. In the picture they
are standing by an old relic of a
battered automobile with the high
carriage and spoke wheels of the
'20s.

    The South family did abandon
Yaquitepec, but only in 1948, a short
time before Marshal died, and their
reason for abandoning their desert
home had nothing to do with water or
even Marshal's health, but I'll get
to that in a minute. Back during 1941
and '42, when they searched in vain
for another place to settle, Marshal
continued to write his monthly
columns for Desert Magazine; some
warmly human documents -- one of them
his very best essay, in my opinion --
still wait there in the yellowing
pages of the old copies of the
magazine for the rare, infrequent
reader who will stumble across them.

    When the family realized, at
length, that their true home was
still on Ghost Mountain, they
returned and found that even after a
year of their absence, the hikers and
visitors from their now wide and
well-wishing magazine audience who
had made their way to Yaquitepec had
treated the house and grounds with
respect and love. None of the
possessions they'd been forced to
leave behind had been stolen or
destroyed. Nothing had been
vandalized, and indeed the artist
Thomas Crocker, who had gone to
Yaquitepec to paint a landscape
there, had set up a logbook in the
Souths' front room, where visitors to
the lonely spot could sign in.

    Following their return to
Yaquitepec, Marshal redoubled his
efforts to solve the water problem by
setting up more catch basins and
cisterns to capture rainwater, more
barrels and more efficient ways to
make use of the run-off from the
brief, violent storms that lash the
dry region and turn the dry riverbeds
for half an hour into real rivers. In
this he enjoyed a great deal of
success, and he continued to work on
his home, his self-sufficiency, and
his writing, right up to the end.

    *         *         *

    FORTY-THREE YEARS after my
strange early visit, I too returned
to Yaquitepec, which is still not an
easy place to find. Long, long
unlived in, the house is in ruins,
but not through any agency of man. I
saw a name or two written on a broken
section of wall, but weather -- a
natural element -- has ironically
been more unkind than Marshal South's
fellow man.

    The poles and the sheet-metal
ramada have blown away with the roof,
and much else has been torn from its
moorings by the violent breezes, or
pounded into the earth by the rare
but lashing rains.

    A doorway remains, with wires
still crimped into place to hold
upright posts together, even as the
adobe that covered them washes back
into the ground. Enough window
frameworks are still there to give
the old house a recognizable
characteristic shape to anyone who
has seen the old photos. Inside, some
flaked and corroded water-cans sit
neatly beside the ruined fireplace,
and two badly rusted bed frames with
springs sit exposed to the sky.

    Marshal's water-catchment system
is still there, though largely in
ruins. Even so, there was a little
water down in one of the barrels, and
at times one of the large concrete
basins he devised must fill after
rains, providing a place for wildlife
to drink for days or weeks after.

    Out among the boulders and desert
growth, I found the sundial, still
set up in place, along with a section
of wall that must have made a cave
against two vertical rocks.
Fortunately for us, words and ideas
have more permanence, and on the two
afternoons when I poked around
Yaquitepec, there were other visitors
who proved to me that his thoughts
have not been completely forgotten.


    WHAT, THEN, finally happened at
Yaquitepec? One day, according to
newspaper reports, Tanya, for reasons
that as far as I know nobody has ever
reported in print, took the children
and left for San Diego, where she
filed for divorce. This ended the
experiment in family desert-living,
and it ended, too, Marshal's columns
on that topic. There was a gap of
some months when, for the first time
in over a decade, nothing from him
appeared in the magazine. Then,
slowly and shudderingly, like a ship
emerging from a near-capsizing wave,
he began to write once more. Once,
years before, he'd written an
occasional profile of desert
characters such as the Campbells of
Campbell Ranch, who were just a few
miles down the dirt road from our
place. Now he wrote a profile of Bill
and Adeline Mushet, of the Banner
Queen Ranch. He seems to have roamed
the desert alone, camping out at this
or that spring, or at the then-
deserted Vallecitos Stage Station
where he pitched his blanket next to
one of the crumbling adobe pillars.
He mentions Rider once, calmly; the
last time he'd gone to Yaqui Wells,
Rider had been with him. He is still
poetic, a beautiful writer, perhaps
not quite so profuse now. Still a
die-hard individualist and proud
dweller in the desert. But the mantle
of a lonely man is upon him, and he
seems to have stayed far from
Yaquitepec, venturing more often into
Banner and Julian in the months
before his death from a heart
attack.

    There's a rumor, which I suspect
is true because it came from someone
who knew Marshal, that he had an
affair with a woman who lived around
that area someplace, and at this
distance and with a slight flight of
fancy, it pleases me to speculate on
who that woman might have been. I may
be right.

    I hope so.

             THE END