John Wells, who fled New York for the solitude of the desert, dies at 64

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. He noted, too, the predawn 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.

Slowly, he attracted followers, like-minded individuals interested in living sustainably, outside traditional supports, who were captivated by his thrifty ways and homesteading solutions, and by the lovely short videos he posted: of desert cottontails eating off his mother’s Limoges plates; of dung beetles rolling a cow patty like a stone; of bees drinking from a pan of water.

Within a few years, nearly 1 million people had visited his blog -- more recently, the number was well over 4 million -- and he had a core group of 1,000 or so regulars who followed his daily struggles and small triumphs as the Field Lab grew and evolved.

How hard is it to mix cement by hand? (Very hard, and boring.) How much water can you catch in a half-hour of rain? (A fair amount.) What’s the best Spam flavor? (Hickory-smoked, in Mr. Wells’s estimation.)

Early on, he wrote, sometimes “it’s hard to tell if I’m walking on some distant planet, or just lost in the desert.”

Wells died Jan. 10, 2024, at a hospice facility in Fort Stockton, Texas. He was 64. His death, from pancreatic cancer, was announced by his friends at the time, but The New York Times, which profiled him in 2011, learned of it only recently. Mr. Wells had written about his illness on his blog, noting that his cancer was inoperable and that he had decided to enter hospice care.

Despite his fashion resume, Mr. Wells was not living out some “Green Acres” fantasy in dusty Texas. It was not a stunt in search of a book deal or a reality show.

Mr. Wells was mechanically minded, a skilled set-and-prop builder who also made intriguing sculptures out of television sets. A “televisionary,” he called himself.

He had read about a couple who were using wind turbines to power their adobe house in Terlingua, a former Texas mining town (pop. 138) not far from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, and asked to come investigate. He liked what he saw.

A month later, he sold his house, winnowed his possessions down to what he could fit in a rented truck and set off to build a new life.

He paid $8,000 in cash for his 40-acre parcel. His property taxes that first year were $86. Later, he added 20 more acres for $5,000 and set about building himself a compound.

He started with a tiny shack, where he could live, and equipped it with a bunk bed, a galley kitchen, and a desk. He built a front porch and arranged a quartet of shipping containers to create an interior courtyard. He laid down pavers and covered the space with a tin-and-polycarbonate roof supported by elegant arched-metal trusses; this would become the greenhouse, where he grew, with uneven success, vegetables and, for a time, a banana tree.

He built a catchment system to collect water, and a chicken coop. When he realized that solar power was more reliable and less fidgety than wind, he mounted an array of solar panels on the ground. He eventually arranged for a DSL line and phone service (it cost $10 to bury the cables and run them to his property from the highway 2 1/2 miles away).

Mr. Wells was a natural. He grew an impressive ZZ Top beard, sported a battered cowboy hat, and wrote a cowboy poem, an ode to desert living called “The West Is Best.”

Friends and would-be-off-the-gridders made pilgrimages to see what he was up to, and he was a welcoming host, offering olive-and-beer bread cooked in his solar oven, topped with tangy homemade cheese.

But his most sustaining companions were the opportunistic desert critters that began to gather around the Field Lab. There were comedic burros, including one charismatic fellow he named Floppy. There were skittish rabbits. There was an elderly longhorn cow that lingered around the perimeter of the compound until Mr. Wells won her over with snacks and scratches. He named her Benita, and fretted if she went walkabout for too long. On his 51st birthday, in 2010, the rancher she belonged to presented Mr. Wells with a deed of ownership to the speckled roan, age 22.

“Benita came back for a dinner snack, then wandered off to graze some more,” he wrote in a typical post. “Will see her in the morning no doubt. Life is good.”

John Niles Wells was born April 8, 1959, in Oak Park, Ill., to Marcia (Niles) Wells and Richard Wells, a civil engineer.

John spent five years at the University of North Carolina Greensboro before dropping out. Later, he wrote that his life in the West Texas desert could be described as “continuing education.”

After he learned he had pancreatic cancer in the fall of 2023 and decided against treatment, he left the Field Lab for good, writing his final blog post in early December. “Last trip south…,” it reads, above a photo of the highway out of Terlingua.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.