Travels in San Diego

Few of us have had as flamboyantly romantic a vision as Marshal South. Around 1930, with the US sinking ever deeper into Depression, South and his young wife Tanya packed their few possessions into their Model T Ford, drove to the desert east of San Diego, found a mountaintop that appealed to them, and decided to live on it, as simply and naturally as the native Americans who once preceded them. They called the place Ghost Mountain and within five years they’d constructed a compact adobe home that they christened Yaquitepec (after the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, Mexico.)

In the years that followed, the couple had three children who grew up naked, home-schooled by their parents and playing with lizards and packrats instead of conventional toys. Amidst the backbreaking work of trying to maintain a household in the absence of any modern conveniences (or even water), Tanya wrote poetry, and in 1939 Marshall chronicled the family’s grand experiment in the Saturday Evening Post. He later launched a series of articles in Desert Magazine that throbbed with enthusiasm for the primitive lifestyle, and he delighted the magazine’s readers with tales of the family’s ingenious adaptations to their harsh environment. But the adventures came to an end in 1946 when Tanya filed for divorce and moved the children back to the city. Two years later Marshall died of heart disease at the age of 59.

Today Ghost Mountain is a part of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and although most of Yaquitepec has melted back into the earth, traces of the family’s peculiar domicile remain in the site. It’s a popular hiking destination, and for anyone interested in learning about the man who put it on the map, a rich new resource has just become available in the form of a website, www.marshalsouth.com.

The site was created by Diana Lindsay. A co-founder of the El Cajon-based Sunbelt Publications, Lindsay has long been transfixed by the saga of the South family. She mentioned it in her 1973 history of the desert state park (published by Copley Books). Eighteen years later, I myself wrote a much more extensive account of the story for the Reader, “The Hermits of Ghost Mountain.”  But Lindsay felt there was still more to be unearthed, and in 2001 she plunged into several years of serious sleuthing that culminated in her 2005 book, Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles: An Experiment in Primitive Living.

Hardcore Southophiles can pay a $9.95 annual membership, available through the site, that gives them unlimited access to published and unpublished articles, novels, poems, artwork, and photographs by and pertaining to the sage of the desert. But the site also offers a lot of excellent free material, including two rare film clips of the South family, directions to and maps of the area, and extensive information about the family’s experience.

I have to chuckle at the thought of Marshal, who heaped so much scorn on the trappings of modernity, having his own little homestead in cyberpace. At the same time, I’m pretty sure he would have loved it.