Penelope Green

The listing for the properties — four 5-acre parcels of desert scrub near Pioneertown, California — landed in Dave McAdam’s inbox one morning before dawn. By 10 a.m., he was in contract to buy all the lots, sight unseen, for $320,000. One of the parcels had been planted with a cabin, a low-slung, concrete-block one-bedroom structure clad in swirly patterned pink stone. At 1,000 square feet, it was just right, McAdam said, for a single man.

McAdam, now 69, had a long career as a journalist, editing a portfolio of 23 community newspapers in Orange County, and then as a public relations executive, handling crisis management for various industries, before he bought his first desert property in Yucca Valley in 2003.

After he sobered up, as he put it, he researched the best ways to build there without wrecking the xeriscape of native plants and boulders — leave the land alone, take out the junk — and developed, with others, a system for making prefabricated light-gauge steel-frame houses. He built a lovely steel-and-glass prototype on that property in 2009 and continued to investigate the folkways and particularities of his habitat, for what would be his new career as a developer of modernist houses with a small footprint.

He called that company Homestead Modern — acknowledging the area’s history as a DIY homesteader’s paradise and nodding to the architectural movement that had spread so many glass-and-steel structures throughout the stark lunar landscape at midcentury. He built his second prototype in Pioneertown four years ago.

McAdam never planned to live in those prototypes, however — he called them “proof of concept.” At first, he was based in an “awful” stucco house in Palm Springs, after having obscured its awfulness with a thicket of native plants. He tackled his new concrete cabin by stripping away just about everything. The place was filled with refuse, as were the six sheds that peppered the property, and encircled by tons of colored gravel. The weird pink stone cladding came off first — it had to be hand-chipped — after which he sandblasted the concrete twice for good measure. What was left was something sturdy and beautiful.

“Not for one minute did I consider pulling it down,” he said.

McAdam’s new home was an unusual example of a jackrabbit homestead, so named because they provided shade for the jackrabbits and other small animals in areas that mostly had none. It was built in 1954 under the Small Tract Act of 1938, when nearly half a million acres of public land in the deserts of Southern California were leased to eager homesteaders, often for as little as $5 to $20 an acre, before the practice was discontinued in 1976.

The act caused a land rush that took off after World War II, as DIYers and desert pioneers, many of whom were weekenders from Los Angeles, received up to 5 acres of “useless” land once they “proved up” the property with a structure initially required to be no smaller than 12 by 16 feet, said Kim Stringfellow, an artist whose Jackrabbit Homestead project, and book of the same name, has mapped the odd and endearing vernacular structures that resulted.

Most homestead cabins were built out of wood, not concrete. But the harsh environment is not kind to wood, as McAdam pointed out, and many jackrabbit homesteads have disintegrated. “Finding a concrete cabin,” he said, “was such a rush for me. Not only was it sitting on one of the most beautiful parcels of land, but it was intact and just needed some updating.”

It was as solid, he said, as the rocks that surrounded it.

Records note that the house was originally built at 800 square feet, about twice the size of most homesteads. At some point, another 200 square feet were added to make a bedroom. The windows — barricaded behind iron bars — and doors were small; McAdam opened up the place by slicing through the concrete blocks, adding four large, aluminum-frame windows and sliding glass doors.

The kitchen was already open to the living area, so the place now reads like one of his modernist prototypes (the new kitchen is from Ikea). He got rid of the swamp cooler and the wood-burning stove, and added a forced-air unit for heating (with propane) and cooling (with electricity) through gutsy-looking galvanized steel ducts.

The ceiling was tongue-in-groove, made from Douglas fir. Because there was no insulation, he removed the asphalt shingle roof — which was not so beautiful — added rigid foam insulation and covered it with an elegant gray powder-coated steel roof. With the extra ceiling space, he was able to inset light fixtures. McAdam had hoped to polish the poured concrete floors, but they were too dinged up. He found a gray porcelain Italian tile that resembles polished concrete and laid it down instead.

McAdam spent about $340,000 on the renovation of the house and property. (He sold the remaining three lots for $150,000.) In keeping with desert practices, he built outdoor rooms and deployed outbuildings. These include a sleeping platform made from welded tube steel and redwood decking, which makes a shady living room underneath; two concrete pads set among the boulders with a Jacuzzi and a galvanized steel stock tank, otherwise known as a cowboy tub, as a cold water plunge pool; a 1973 Holiday Rambler trailer; a Tuff Shed; an outdoor kitchen; an outdoor dining room; an outdoor shower; a gym and two observation decks. Also, there is a “guzzler,” a shallow concrete pool that fills automatically with water for wildlife.

McAdam is a meticulous guy, and he’s decorated the place in a rigorous modernist style. When he was nearly finished, a friend phoned and asked if he had room for one more piece of art, but wouldn’t say why. When the friend arrived later that night, he had a painting under his arm: It was a portrait of Clint Eastwood from “High Plains Drifter,” painted in earnest homage and found at a Yucca Valley swap meet. “My friend had figured out what I had not,” McAdam said. “Everything was so precious here, and it needed something not precious.”

These days, if you visit McAdam, you will have your photo taken in front of Clint’s portrait. “People are like, ‘Really, do I have to?’ ” McAdam said. “We find our traditions wherever we can.”

This article originally appeared in

(Homestead)

In the Desert With Jackrabbits

<h1>Roz Chast, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and Patricia Marx, a humorist and staff writer at that magazine, have been friends ever since Marx’s mother forced them together in the late 1970s. When Marx, one of the first female members of The Harvard Lampoon, had her first humor piece published (in The Atlantic) Chast illustrated the story. Marx’s mother, now 92 and according to her daughter still a woman of strong opinions, thought Marx should call the person who had illustrated her work.</h1>

“It was stupid, but I always do what my mother tells me,” Marx said.

“It was like a play date,” said Chast.

Chast’s mother, who died in 2009, was perhaps even more formidable than Marx’s mother, as readers learned from “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant,” Chast’s harrowing memoir of her parents’ final years. And she certainly did not believe in play dates, as we will discover. Marx grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, one of three children; Chast, an only child, grew up in Brooklyn.

Over the years, the two have collaborated on four children’s books, and this past year, on a collection of edicts from Marx’s mother titled, “Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy So I Can Correct It? A Mother’s Suggestions,” out April 1.

They have also formed a two-woman ukulele band.

The other day, Chast and Marx were nesting on the sofa in Marx’s East Side apartment. They played through their (short) repertoire of uke songs — rewritten classics, like “Park, park, park your car, somewhere near the curb ...” sung to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” — and talked about their singular mothers.

Chast (Looking up at Marx): I am so short-waisted, when I sit down, I am shorter than you.

Marx: But I am sitting better than you. Sitting is my strength.

Chast: I like to sit. I sit all day. And into the night. This is like the world’s two laziest people.

Though your childhoods were very different, your moms were similar in many ways. Can you introduce them?

Chast: My mother was an assistant principal in an elementary school in Brooklyn. You would not want to make an enemy of her. She very much believed in herself and in her judgment. She was very smart. She had wanted to be a classical pianist, but she grew up very poor and she graduated from college during the Depression and her career took a different turn.

Marx: My mother is not musical at all. She probably doesn’t know when to clap at the end of a performance. She was anti-music. My father was very musical and played the piano all night long, which she said was anti-social, which it was. My mom, like Roz’s mother, is decisive and an absolutist. She has a very good eye.

Chast: My mother had no eye. Not even one.

Speaking of music, how did the band come about?

Marx: I went to a wedding and the guests were asked to bring an instrument and I can’t play a musical instrument, but I thought, “How hard can it be to play a ukulele?” So I bought one on Amazon and played “Here Comes the Sun” to serenade the couple, and I showed it to Roz.

Chast: I fell in love with it because it’s the parakeet of instruments: It’s so cute and so turquoise and so cheap. (Chast has lived with generations of parakeets, and two parrots.)

Marx: And we started goofing around on email, coming up with our musical history just to make each other laugh. We were a sensation. We call our band the Ukulear Meltdown. We started as the Daily Ukuleles. Then we became the Weekly Ukuleles, then the Monthly Ukuleles, and then the Never Ukuleles. That was when Meg Wolitzer and Lorrie Moore were in the group, but we fired them because they had talent and knew how to play, which we consider pandering to the audience.

(Editor’s note: This is a fabrication. Wolitzer and Moore were never in the band.)

Chast: Maybe we forgot our history, with all the drugs we were doing.

(General discussion of the drugs of yore, though Marx swore up and down that back in the day, drugs “never had any effect on me.”)

Marx: My mother does not like to admit that anything is ever sad or wrong, so if my father would say something like, “During the Depression ...” She’d say, “Oh, Dick, there was no Depression.” She was like a Depression denier.

Chast: My mother was more like a personal depression denier. Her whole thing was if you were sad, she would say, “Stop staring at your navel.” When I grew up, I didn’t know what other people talked to each other about, because there were so many things we didn’t talk about.

Marx: My mother was very can-do. She told me, “Nobody needs more than four hours of sleep.” I hate sleeping. Guilt gets me up.

Chast: I like to sleep because I’m interested in dreaming, but it’s more like profound laziness or momentum. Once I’m awake, going to sleep just seems so annoying, and once I’m sleeping, waking up seems so annoying.

Both of you had parents who were deeply bonded to each other. Patty, your father thought your mother looked like Jacqueline Bisset. And your mother thought he should change his shirt. Roz, your parents were born the same year and proclaimed they were soul mates. Let’s hear more about their couplehoods.

Marx: My mom did everything herself because it was easier and she liked things done a certain way. Once she went away for a week and my father relied so much on her that she put name tags on my father’s clothes that said things like “Wear with khaki pants Thursday.”

Chast: My mother was the one who made all the decisions and ran the show. My father never learned how to drive because it made him profoundly anxious, so she did all the driving, even though she was an anxious driver, but it was a different sort of anxiety. My father didn’t want to do anything. I think he would have been happy staying in the apartment, puttering around and reading The Times.

Marx: My mother was very blunt. We grew up before they invented psychology. So my mother felt free to criticize without thinking there would be horrible consequences. She called it constructive criticism, and I valued it because I knew she was telling the truth. She once read a piece of mine in Time magazine and said, “Guess what? I hate it! But if enough people like it, I’ll change my mind,” which I completely understood.

Chast: My mother never offered that many opinions about my work, though sometimes she would get mad and say, “You’re using me and Daddy to make fun of.” I’d say, “This is a general statement about, um ...”

Marx: And she bought that?

Would you both say that your childhoods were the gift that keeps on giving, workwise?

Marx: Unlike Roz, I had a really good childhood. I learned the word bourgeois so I could say, “You are so bourgeois!” to my parents, because I was a communist. A communist in the suburbs. I envy you your worst childhood.

Chast: My parents didn’t try and make it bad. They were working all the time. My mother had this idea that if I ever socialized with other kids, at the very best I would come home with impetigo and at the worst I would be learning things I shouldn’t be learning. So my childhood was about avoiding other children. It was like being locked in a Skinner box.

I hated being a kid. Once I got out of college and started my life in New York, it was a profound reset. At art school it was still about making friends and learning how to present yourself. Learning who you are. In some ways that’s still a huge mystery to me. But I do like to work. It was such a relief to not have to think about any of that stuff anymore. It was very clean: You like the work, you give me money.

Marx: I am ashamed to admit I liked childhood. I enjoyed that somebody was handling the logistics. I knew you weren’t supposed to like childhood, so one day I told my mother I was running away. She said, “That’s OK, I’ll pack you a lunch and you can go wherever you want as long as you don’t cross the street.”

Patty’s mother had such specific ideas about fashion: no sleeves with names, no plaids on white backgrounds. Roz, did your mother have opinions about what people wore?

Chast: My mother thought being concerned about appearance was demeaning and if you were a woman and cared about things, you got what you deserved.

Marx: Growing up with someone who believed there was a right or a wrong is ultimately dangerous because you believed you could make a wrong decision, and the truth is, you can’t make that much of a wrong decision about a plaid.

Chast: When I was younger, I had this dress Bill [Chast’s husband, Bill Franzen] liked. It was blue and white stripes, and I would wear it with a little red belt. My mother saw me in it one day and said, “Va-va-voom!” And I never wore it again. Because the idea that anybody could look at me and go, “Va-va-voom!” was, you know, a nightmare.

What is your most important legacy from your mothers?

Chast: Both of my parents thought that whatever you did for a living, you should love it. My mother loved being an assistant principal. Even though I identified more with my father, the fact that she didn’t apologize to anybody for who she was or what she wanted to do, I think filtered down. I never felt like I had to apologize for being a female cartoonist. I never even thought about the fact that I was a female cartoonist.

Marx: When I was growing up, my parents wanted me to be a doctor, marry a doctor and have a doctor. That was just a given. Then, when I wasn’t a doctor or even a lawyer, my parents adjusted and being a writer was the best thing to do. The legacy my mother impressed upon me is that you have to work hard and you don’t give up and you don’t whine and that’s the deal.

Chast: Nobody’s going to hand you anything and hopefully you like what you’re doing. It’s like us with the band. We’ve made our millions and still we keep playing.

Marx: We just wish we were normal people, who could go to the grocery store without being mobbed.

This interview has been edited and condensed, overworked and upended. The editors trust the subjects will understand the process was in their best interests.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c2466e95-3423-41d1-94e9-af5a5b05d383" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/books/roz-chast-and-patricia-marx-mine-the-mother-lode.html">The New York Times</a>.

Roz Chast and Patricia Marx mine the Mother lode

Over the years, the two have collaborated on four children’s books, and this past year, on a collection of edicts from Marx’s mother titled, “Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy So I Can Correct It? A Mother’s Suggestions,” out April 1.

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Penelope Green

Articles written by the author

In the Desert With Jackrabbits

Roz Chast and Patricia Marx mine the Mother lode