In the late ‘70s, San Bernardino, California - the birthplace of McDonald’s - began its transformation from a bucolic suburban village to what felt like one continuous strip mall. The local corner stores where customers could sign their name on a house charge account were being replaced with formulaic chains, and for some, the town became as impersonal as the concrete covering it.
All the new progress didn’t sit well with young Garth Bowles. He wanted out of the asphalt jungle. So - like any self-respecting free-spirited aspiring hippie - he started walking, barefoot.
He kept it simple and walked wearing only a white robe and carrying only a spoon and a bowl. Food would find him, he thought - the universe would provide. His mission was to create a place that was the opposite of what his hometown was becoming, a place where man could experience heaven on earth. First though, he needed to find the place. So he walked.
He made it to Missouri, then he walked to Idaho, then to Utah, then to Arizona, but he didn’t find the place - a beautiful piece of land to call his own, one that he could mold into heaven on earth.
He spread intention every way he could - through silent meditation, through cheerful conversations, and so that no one would, as another real estate hustler, Sam Zell might say, accuse him of being too subtle - he made pamphlets. Lots of pamphlets, spelling out in exacting detail what he was looking for.
He shared his homemade pamphlets with the world - posting them on telephone poles and bulletin boards and handing them out to strangers - planting his seeds of intention wherever seemed fertile.
He kept walking and pamphleting and made it back to California where he learned the universe had responded to his intentions. A lawyer contacted Garth, informing him a client, part of the Ford family, was looking to part with some desert land - 640 acres just north of Yucca Valley, near the Joshua Tree National Park. His client obtained the land through foreclosure to settle a debt and had no interest in the property other than selling it to recoup lost money.
Garth visited the property, a desert oasis filled with tan boulders the size of VW buses, later that week and knew he had found what he was looking for. The property occupied some high ground and the temperatures held a bit cooler than the surrounding desert. The hills were organized in a way that provided afternoon shade, and there was water. Rare and wondrous springs created a trickle of life running through the boulders.
He had to have it.
Like any real estate developer rife with deal fever, Garth scrambled to arrange the required capital. Tapping into the only source he knew, Garth made more pamphlets - this time letting readers know he had, at last, found the place to create heaven on earth and they should both send money and send it fast.
And the money responded to his intention, trickling in by mail. Letters arrived from around the country, one of the larger ones was a $12 check from an unknown New Yorker. And better than the terms most real estate developers obtain, this capital was a donation, no strings attached, no repayment required. No debt service coverage ratios, no personal guarantees, no environmental indemnity. Just money.
With time, Garth collected enough donations to purchase his future heaven on earth.
The land had no utilities, no buildings, no nothing. What it had was boulders. Big beautiful boulders piled like giant golden Easter eggs dumped from a cosmic basket onto a nest of twisted pinyon pine, teddy bear cholla cactus, ocotillo, and ironwood trees.
Phase I of the development began in 1979 when he set about building a teepee. Once he had some shelter, he started cleaning up the property. He picked up sun-faded beer cans, broken glass, shell casings, and rusted car parts. He took those throw-away parts and pieces and, tiny step by tiny step, he started building. And over the next 40 years he built, by hand with found materials, saunas and swimming pools and chicken coops and peacock coops and shelters of all sorts.
He built ponds and outdoor living rooms and Zen gardens. Now called Garth’s Boulder Garden, he built shelters, some on top of the boulders and some from repurposed children’s play sets. But in everything, he kept a respect for the land, disrupting it as little as possible.
We overestimate what can be accomplished in a year and we underestimate what can be accomplished in a decade. We damn sure underestimate what can be accomplished in four decades. Day by day, week by week, year by year, Garth Bowles has worked by hand with a 640-acre patch of desert to create his heaven on earth.
He’s taken on tiny projects that compound over time, “the smaller becomes the greater” as he says – adding a small permaculture garden in the shade of a hillside gulley catches the very occasional rainwater and returns it to the soil, eventually creating an underground catch basin that supports even more vegetation that eventually grows to a scale that creates enough water capture to create a spring which supports a small pool that then supports larger shade trees, and the cycle continues.
Garth is most proud of his property’s effect on visitors: he believes the number of babies conceived - as a percentage of guest visits - rivals any hospitality destination.
You can find Garth, often sitting with friends and visitors outside his teepee talking and playing dice games, tossing seed from a Folgers coffee can onto the ground where Gambel’s quail, cactus wrens, and Black-throated sparrows sift around the unbothered dogs lying in the sun.
These days Garth wears a Burger King crown wrapped around his wide-brimmed gardener’s hat. He’s got a toothy smile and a Santa belly and the long thick beard of a forest troll.
Garth laughs, opines, and listens awake and undistracted. The Burger King crown reveals his true nature - a real estate king, a developer with no cost of capital.
When I started reading this I thought the ended was going to be something like "...and that's how Pebble Beach was built." lol