Seven Years in the Wilderness
By Paul Martinez
All photography © Paul Martinez
Nine years ago, I did something many people dream about but few actually attempt: I handed quit my job, packed my car with what felt essential, and set out to explore. I was in my mid-20s, caught somewhere between ambition and burnout. I had spent years building a life that was outwardly stable, but inside I was restless, circling a sense of hollowness I couldn’t quite name.
I didn’t have a grand plan. I just knew I needed distance… from routines, from city streets and they traffic that accompanies them, from myself. I figured I’d travel a while, see if motion might jostle something loose, offer me a new perspective.
I didn’t expect the desert to become that perspective.
I grew up only ninety minutes from Joshua Tree, but like a lot of people who live near something remarkable, I had never bothered to visit. It took a freelance gig to finally pull me out: photographing a short-term rental. I drove in late afternoon with the windows down, warm air whipping in, landscape slowly unraveling from city to suburbs to wide, open nothing. By the time I passed Yucca Valley, I was startled by how the world seemed to have shed its clutter.
That evening, I finished shooting the property just as dusk settled in. I remember stepping outside, camera still in hand, and being in complete awe. Above me, the sky was littered with stars, more than I’d ever seen. The Milky Way left a trail across the dark night sky. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, and then there was only silence again.
And I had this thought, almost careless: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a home here?
It was the kind of idle wish you lob at the universe without expecting it to echo back. But two years later, in July of 2018, I found myself standing on a patch of desert holding a set of keys, looking at a house that somehow belonged to me.
Those first weeks were both exhilarating and disorienting. I’d wake up to rooms half-filled with boxes, unfamiliar light slanting across the floor. In the mornings, I’d step outside with coffee and watch jackrabbits dart between creosote, their long ears backlit like tiny lanterns. At night, I’d pull a chair into the yard and look up, letting the sky remind me how small… and how strangely at peace I could feel.
But the desert wasn’t always gentle. Summer days roared past 110 degrees. Windstorms slammed against the house with a force that made the windows groan. Sometimes it felt less like living in nature and more like being tested by it.
Now, in July of 2025, I mark seven years of living in this wilderness. Seven isn’t just another anniversary. Across myth, religion, even psychology, seven signifies a cycle of reckoning… a period of completion before whatever comes next.
In these years, the desert has become my crucible. It demanded a level of stillness I didn’t know I was capable of. It offered silence so profound it sometimes felt like a confrontation. With fewer distractions, I was left to sit with myself, my doubts, my old ambitions, the nagging fear that I might never figure it all out.
But slowly, the desert replaced those obsessions with subtler rewards. I learned to notice the almost imperceptible lean of a Joshua tree adjusting toward the sun over seasons, to savor the fleeting days when creosote bushes burst into tiny yellow blooms after rare rains. I began to measure time not by deadlines or quarters but by the long rhythms of wind, bloom, dormancy, return.
This chapter wasn’t only about my own quiet transformation. My partner, Grecia, took a gamble of her own here. She launched a private chef business, betting that visitors to this dusty outpost might want more than fast food and diners. It started with intimate dinners in vacation homes, thoughtful menus, beautiful plating, service that felt like a small ceremony.
Over time, word spread. What began as an idea has grown into the most sought-after culinary experience in the area. Watching her build something from sheer vision and grit has been its own education in patience, creativity, and faith… and in the power of trusting the value of what you uniquely bring to the table.
Of course, Joshua Tree hasn’t stayed the quiet, almost secret place it once was. The last seven years have seen a tidal wave of short-term rentals. Roads once traveled mostly by locals and park rangers now buzz with tourists searching for trailheads or Instagram landmarks. It’s common to see lines at Skull Rock, cars parked every which way for a perfect sunset shot.
Sometimes, I bristle at the crowds. It’s easy to feel protective of a place that’s given you so much, easy to slip into the illusion that it somehow belongs more to you than to anyone else. But I also understand the pull. People come here for the same reasons I did: to stand under an impossible sky, to let the starkness rearrange their priorities.
In many ways, my work has come to live at this intersection. Working professionally with Joshua Tree National Park has allowed me to merge creativity with stewardship, helping shape how others see and care for this land. It’s a rare convergence of personal passion and public purpose, and one I don’t take lightly.
Seven years in the wilderness has taught me that life rarely moves in straight lines. What once seemed like random choices… quitting my job, taking a freelance gig in a place I’d never been, buying a house on little more than intuition; reveals itself, with time and distance, as a kind of quiet choreography.
Living here has been, in many ways, a prolonged rite of passage. A spell I stepped into unwittingly, that continues to work on me, refining who I am and what I value. It’s taught me to be patient with process, to measure success in subtler ways, to respect cycles of growth and contraction.
I can’t predict what the next seven years will hold. If the past is any guide, there will be more challenges and more small, hard-won victories. More lessons I didn’t know I needed. And always, there will be this land: stark, demanding, impossibly alive.
A few nights ago, I stood outside as the full moon rose, painting the desert in shades of silver and blue. The silhouettes of Joshua trees reached up like twisted dancers. Somewhere in the dark, an owl called once, then again.
I thought of that first night nine years ago… a different phase of the moon, a younger version of myself, equally awed by this landscape. Some things have changed beyond recognition; some remain as constant as the stars.
If these seven years have taught me anything, it’s that sometimes you have to leave the known world, step into the wilderness, and allow yourself to be transformed by it.