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.
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 a million people had visited his blog — more recently, the number was well over four 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.”
Mr. Wells died on 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 résumé, 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.
In 2001, he left New York City for Spencertown, N.Y., where he bought a Greek Revival farmhouse and worked as a contractor. Within a few years, his property taxes had doubled, to $12,000, and he was carrying nearly $70,000 in debt. So he rented out the house, moved into a trailer on the property and began experimenting with solar power.
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 for $600,000 to a family of five, 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 D.S.L. line and phone service (it cost $10 to bury the cables and run them to his property from the highway two and a half miles away).
His biggest expense was the $500 annual donation he made to the Marfa public radio station, a lifeline in the months before he had internet. When he received his first phone bill, he drove to the nearby city of Alpine to pay it in person, and gave the women in the office a bottle of Champagne.
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 Mr. 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 on 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 at Greensboro before dropping out. Later, he wrote that his life in the West Texas desert could be described as “continuing education.”
In 1986, he moved to New York City to work as a photographer, assisting the well-known fashion photographer Bruce Weber for a year, and another photographer, Chris Callas, on and off for the next 15.
Even then, Mr. Wells was solitary. Mr. Callas recalled hearing him say that he dreamed of being hermit. He did embark on a few dates, however, and had a habit of bringing a woman a pineapple instead of flowers.
“I’ve been single for so long,” he told The New York Times in 2011. “I can’t imagine not being single. The thought of compromising my day doesn’t appeal to me; I don’t care what the benefits are.”
Benita vanished in 2012; Mr. Wells found her remains a few months later. He soon adopted a motherless calf he named Ben, which he found wandering a quarter mile from the Field Lab, and learned to bottle feed him. Ben grew into a sturdy steer, and Mr. Wells kept him close, building him a pen, roughhousing with him before Ben’s horns grew in and chronicling his milestones on the blog.
After he was 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.
“He accomplished what he set out to do,” Mr. Callas said.
Mr. Wells made a will using a form he found online, leaving the Field Lab to a friend’s son, his cash to the UPS driver who had delivered his supplies for the last few decades or so, and Ben to a neighbor. Ben died a few months after Mr. Wells.
“He had been hand-raised by John and hadn’t been around other cows,” said Kerri Blackman, a local real estate broker who served as Mr. Wells’s executor. “At the neighbor’s, he was living in a pasture with other animals. He quit eating. Maybe he got a virus, but I think he missed John.”
Mr. Wells is survived by a brother, James.
The will Mr. Wells made had a space at the end for a personal statement. He dutifully filled it in.
“It was fun while it lasted …,” he wrote.
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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