Blame Owens Corning. Twelve rolls of that company’s fluffy pink insulation, Grade R-19, to be exact, brought me to the brink. The supplier had promised to deliver a shipment the day before to the dream retreat I was building in the Chihuahuan Desert, in the Big Bend of Texas. By midafternoon it hadn’t arrived. Work couldn’t continue until it did.

The thermometer hit 94. The plumber wanted to know the diameter of a sink I didn’t have yet; the electrician gave me his bill, showing our credit line to be as thin as Lara Flynn Boyle. Next, I watched as a colony of Africanized bees invaded Sixth Street—my street—swarming the overhang directly across from my building.

My cell phone trilled. A gust of wind had blown the insulation off the flatbed. Delivery would be delayed. Again. I picked up a two-by-four and swung at a nearby wheelbarrow. Sometimes you just need to whomp the crap out of a wheelbarrow to regain control.

Why, I asked myself, had I come from San Francisco to this scrubby Texas town, two and a half hours from the nearest caramel macchiato? Blame Mohammed Atta, coastal housing prices, the dot-com implosion, and the feeling that there was an entirely different and, perhaps, better way to live.

Laid off from my tech job in 2001, I arrived in New York on September 10 of that year for a vacation. I was already tired of conversations about the merits of designer cheese; tired of one-note, self-centered politics—bumper stickers that read I HAVE A DOG AND I VOTE; and, most importantly, I was tired of burning $1,600 a month for a cramped one-bedroom = apartment that I’d never own. The real estate prices in both cities defied gravity: “600-square-foot condo charmer. Sleep alcove. Priced to move at $400,000.” Even if I could afford one, what charm did such a studio hold when, to meet the mortgage payments, I’d have to live on ramen noodles for the next 30 years?

No, I wanted to rewind Tom Joad’s journey. I wanted distance from 9/11. I wanted to find a community small enough to be manageable, large enough to be sophisticated, and set in a part of the country undiscovered by Condé Nast or Coldwell Banker. So it came to pass, in January 2003, that I picked up and moved to Alpine, Texas (pop.: 5,786).

What first brought me here was a writing assignment on traveling America by rail after the terrorist attacks. It was love at first site. Alpine is as remote as any town in the contiguous United States, located 87 miles north of the Rio Grande in Brewster County, a jurisdiction the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. No interstates pass nearby. No scheduled commercial flights land at the small airport. There’s no Pellegrino. No unagi. No Crate. No Barrel. No cultural irony. And real estate prices omit a couple of zeroes. “Adobe house. $25,000. Firm.”

Alpine has the kind of classic looks that make it an ideal setting for a spaghetti Western. It sits on an east-west axis, with enough room on the main street to turn a team of horses. Its downtown, which once supplied the surrounding ranches, was largely abandoned by the early 1990s, when drought and low-fat diets devastated the cattle market. The only life was Iveys’ Emporium and the Holland Hotel, a chocolate-colored 1920s Spanish revival pile known as “the Ritz of the sagebrush.”

But Alpine and its surrounding mountains possess great natural beauty. It’s the closest town to Big Bend National Park’s rugged mountains, deep canyons, and vast skies. At night, tip your porch chair back and look up—the stars look like a diamond cache scattered on a jeweler’s blue velvet. Equally important: Alpine locals exude an iconoclastic, adventurous spirit accompanied by a belief in miracles. With rents as low as $400, I could afford to live here on a freelance writer’s wages. The day after I arrived, I applied for, and was issued, a Lone Star State driver’s license. I was the only person in line at the DMV. It took five minutes. A year later and I’m attacking a wheelbarrow. What happened?

Here’s the backstory: On one of my stays here, Tom Michael, an editor I worked with at Britannica.com, and his wife Katherine Shaughnessy, an artist, stopped to see me on a cross-country drive. They saw the same things to love about Alpine and ended up staying. Tom, Katherine, and I decided Alpine would be the ideal place to be entrepreneurs. Thanks to the national park and the proximity to the town of Marfa—that wadi of minimalist art set 26 miles west of Alpine—a steady stream of tourists was now pouring into Big Bend. Wouldn’t they all need a place to stay? Together we formed a business partnership with local hotelier Carla McFarland and on December 31, 2003, we purchased two adjoining buildings on Sixth Street—in downtown Alpine’s business district.

Our idea was to transform these shells of bird shit and crumbling masonry into two retail spaces in front and four lofts on a private courtyard in back. I’d live in one of the lofts. Carla would rent out the other three as guest accommodations— called the Holland Guest Lofts—on a short- or long-term basis. When traveling, I’d stash my personal belongings in a storage room and rent my space for extra revenue. Tom and Katherine would live on a ranchette they bought on Cripple Creek, at the outskirts of town.The commercial spaces would attract galleries or some other retail concerns. Peace, tranquility, and cash flow. All this, we calculated, would be ours for the low, low price of $135,000.

"You think we can really do it for this much?" Tom asked, looking at the spreadsheet.

"Cake," I said.

I was wrong. Our costs are up. Significantly? Well, yes. When you have to pay extra to ship in materials and furnishings, or fill your gas tank to make the 100-plus mile trip to the nearest hardware store, it adds up. “Low, low" is now $100,000 more than our purchase price. We’ve shed blood, sweat, and tears. We’ve pulled muscles and raised one another’s ire. Then there are the adjustments that no one could ever have predicted.

Gus Mergins, our carpenter, salvaged a load of vintage pine planks. For two weeks he planed and sanded them into beautiful countertops, vanities, and mattress frames. At dusk one day, the four partners met to consider a mocked-up bed. Three of us fawned over it. These would be our signatures, we agreed: pieces that would speak of our commitment to craft, integrity, and clean, modern lines. Carla, however, the hospitality expert, had just one word.

“Porking,” she said, lighting a filtered Pal Mall. “People do a lot of it in hotel rooms. The bed’s nice, Gus, but it’s got to stand up to a lot of porking.”

“And no wall-mounted sinks,”she added. “You’ll just never believe what people do on those." Gus reinforced the joints.

We're still in construction, picking our pockets to finish by autumn. I could blame Owens Corning, but the pink fluff is behind me now—or rather, sealed up, along with my innocence, behind Sheetrock. Am I more relaxed? Not entirely, but the wheelbarrow has not suffered any more dents. And owning a slice of far West Texas is very, very gratifying. To say we’re wiser for the experience would be too obvious, but if our story has you pining for an escape of your own, take heed: There are a few things you can learn from our mistakes—besides staying clear of wallmounted sinks.

Get a real estimate of your costs.
Hire an engineer or contractor to evaluate any structure before you shell out your life’s savings. We paid $78,000 for a little less than 6,000 square feet. Our 10-year mortgage sets us back $750 per month, but we knew before we signed on that we’d need a new roof. Our contractor estimated its cost at $46,000. The line of credit needed for our roof plus what we're spending on building materials added another $100,000 to our cost. Now, $178,000 is not exactly a steal, but it’s doable—especially considering that our two retail spaces should bring in a monthly income of $1,800.