John Wells, 64, Who Fled New York for the Solitude of the Desert, Dies
Early in 2007, John Wells, a former fashion and catalog photographer, sold the farmhouse he'd renovated in Columbia County, N.Y., paid off his debts, canceled his credit cards and headed to the West Texas desert. There, he settled on a 40-acre plot near a ghost town called Terlingua, 30 miles from the Mexican border — a raw and rocky terrain of mesquite and desert juniper known locally as the Moonscape.
There were no paved roads, no electricity and no water. Mr. Wells, who was then 48, chose the property because he could see no other dwellings.
He was there to hash out life on his own terms, off the grid, to tame the rough environment to suit his own minimal needs, like a modern-day Thoreau.
He called his new home the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Field Laboratory, or the Field Lab for short, and began to chronicle his adventures on a blog.
He noted the long days spent mixing concrete by hand to set the foundations for the wind turbines that supplied much of his power early on. And the pre-dawn morning that he encountered a scorpion on the seat of his composting toilet. (Happily, he had brought a flashlight with him.) And the pleasures of a long, hot shower, the water warmed by the sun.
'Do I stink now there is no one here to smell me?' he wrote.
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