In the 1960s, a counter-culture sprung up that preached self-sufficiency, living off the land, doing your own thing, flaunting convention and running around as naked and natural as the land around you.
Before the counter-culture was cool, there was Marshal South.
In 1932, at the height of the depression, South decided he had had enough of civilization. He packed his wife and their few belongings into his Model-T and from San Diego began driving east, into the desert. When the South's reached the foot of Ghost Mountain, they stopped. Ghost Mountain is in the middle of the Anza-Borrego Desert. Spanish explorers didn't call the road from Arizona through the California desert El Camino de Diablo because it is a land of milk and honey. It is harsh, rugged and unrelenting in its hostility to a soft life.
This is where South decided to settle and raise a family. No electricity. No running water. No shelter, in the beginning. South dubbed the top of Ghost Mountain "Yacquitepec." He built a home from mud and wood, shaped cisterns to capture rain drops, and with his wife Tanya (a Russian immigrant) created three babies on top of that mountain — Rider, Rudyard and Victoria.
The family lived on Ghost Mountain for 14 years. Marshal wrote about their adventures for Desert Magazine. In 1990, I spent a couple dozen hours in the SDSU library reading all of South's columns and Tanya's poems. By this time, Tanya was living in La Mesa and I was living in La Mesa. I tried to get an interview with her and she curtly dismissed my request and hung up the phone.
Who could blame her? Those of us who knew the legend of Ghost Mountain had romanticized the hell out of the "experiment." But for Tanya and her children, it was a hard, bitter life that they did not necessarily want. Rider has rarely given interviews about his experiences in the desert with his father, and the other two children changed their names to escape their notoriety.
South, reportedly an adulterer, died in 1948 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Julian. I tried to find that grave once, but couldn't. There is a real estate office in Julian with a mural along the top of the wall that South painted. I was introduced to Ghost Mountain in 1987 by M. Rose Anderson, a fellow journalist in San Diego. I made three solo trips to Yacquitepec over the next five years. In 1991, I wrote a poem, "At Yacquitepec." It ignores Marshal's ego and cruelty, of course, but romanticized versions of history have their place, too. Please read it. If you like it, feel free to show your appreciation by dropping a buck or two in the tip jar (howardowens.com).
UPDATE: In researching my links for this post, I found to a book being written about South by Garrett Soden I wrote to Soden and sent him a link to this post. He responds in part:
Article comments
1 - Neil Bezaire
I am interested in the poems of Tanya South. Anyone, that knows where they can be found, would you please contact me at neil@bezaire.com. Thank you for your help.
2 - Howard Owens
The only thing I know to do is round up old copies of Desert Magazine and copy them from there. The SDSU Library has a complete collection of issues from the era.