I think I was 11 or 12 when I asked my mother if I could transfer to a British boarding school. She laughed, assuming, fairly, that I was joking. I laughed, too, immediately embarrassed at having asked, and that fall I returned to the sweltering concrete halls of my Coachella Valley middle school, so different from the ivy-smocked, stone-walled academies I’d read about in books.
The desert I lived in was utterly boring to me, raised only slightly in esteem when I was allowed to go to Coachella Music Fest four or five years later. Dreams of a posh education at a school called something like Watertonshire Abbey aside, I’d have settled for LA, land of actors and American Apparels (it was 2013!), or, yes, San Diego, where I assumed teenagers must have movie-like summers—surfing and loitering at diners and kissing each other on boardwalks, instead of sitting in pools the temperature of bathwater after the sun had gone down.
For this, our Desert Travel issue, I returned to the place I’d wanted to escape so badly, and, to my surprise, I found myself a little reluctant to leave. Part of it, of course, was that I could see now the beauty I’d willfully ignored as a teenager—the way the surrounding mountains, some of them snow-capped, bite into the enormous blue sky like a puppy’s craggy molars; the way the wind blows the sand into oceanic ripples. But the other part was that I could feel the culture growing all around me.
Teenagers roamed through cafés and shops owned by people only a little older than they were. In contrast to my classmates and I, my younger brother and his group of artist friends not only have things to do but access to a creative scene that proves big dreams aren’t solely for other cities. While the valley still has the quiet gravity that probably drew my grandparents there in the first place, a bud—one that I had sensed forming for years on my regular trips back home—is blooming.
“So many people that had second homes here stayed full-time [during Covid],” Indio resident Nicole Massoth told me, “and it changed the context of opportunity and success. But, also, for a lot of young people [who grew up here], it became a Renaissance moment, where people were dreaming about starting businesses and then executing them.” Massoth owns The Place, a massive collective of SoCal small businesses in downtown Indio, where locals are revitalizing the neighborhood with their own hands.
“I want every single young person to take over all of these empty buildings and opportunities and really breathe life into their own futures,” she added.
My 12-year-old self would be shocked, but it’s an exciting time to be from the Coachella Valley. That also makes it a wonderful time to visit, with so much new to explore and that palpable energy of possibility in the air. I write about the way Massoth and other valley residents are revolutionizing the area on page 66. And I’m not the only one seeing the desert in a new light—on page 71, Director of Creative Projects Nicolle Monico heads to Sedona, hoping to tap into the transformative forces said to swirl around the Arizona city’s soaring red rocks.
Speaking of rocks, on page 44, we step into an Escondido home that coexists with the giant boulders that pepper its site—by inviting the stones inside. Designed by Drew Hubbell (the equally sustainably-minded son of artist and green building legend James Hubbell), it shows the same innovative spirit in architecture that the audacious chefs at tasting-menu-only La Jolla restaurant Lucien show in food. Content Chief Troy Johnson reviews Lucien and its extraordinary egg dish on page 26.
We’ve also got a roundup of some of the county’s best sweet treats on page 24, a look inside the psyche of a local thriller writer willing to get himself kidnapped for research (it’s paid off—he got a Netflix deal) on page 40, and a behind-the-scenes peek at how the San Diego Museum of Art curated its centennial exhibition on page 36. Page 80 offers the latest trends and hot tips in the world of weddings, including—my favorite, as someone currently engaged—expert advice for how to best distribute that budget.
Closing out the issue, on page 96, is the story of San Diego DJ and cultural pioneer Makeda “Dread” Cheatom, who, much like the young entrepreneurs changing the game in the Coachella Valley, saw that something was missing here (in her case, Bob Marley’s music and a universal cultural center) and set out to bring it to life herself.
Finally, if you’ll allow me to quote something already very overquoted, I’ll briefly tell you the story of Gertrude Stein’s return to her hometown of East Oakland. She had been away for three decades, and when she arrived to find the house and trees and garden of her memories gone, she wrote, sadly, “there is no there, there.” I learned the real, despairing emotion behind that quote later; when I first read it, divorced from context, I assumed (like many others before me) that she was disparaging her native city as identityless, dull.
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“I get it, Gertrude,” I thought.
I’m grateful now to realize I don’t relate to either interpretation. The valley always had something special (Palm Springs wouldn’t summon millions of visitors a year if it didn’t!). Even better, the best of the “there” I remember is still there, and its residents—people I grew up with, people who arrived later—are adding to it all the time, fueling its growth with the renegade spirit that seems to possess all desert cities. I hope this issue inspires you to go discover “there,” wherever there might be.
