Marguerite came down from Washington State for a wedding, with a return flight already booked. She never got on the plane. She has a line she uses to explain what happened next, delivered with the particular deadpan of someone who has told it many times and still finds it funny: she came for the wedding, got kidnapped, started a cult, and had a baby. The mountain kept her. She is still not entirely sure it was her decision.

She is the kind of person who describes herself as an elf, a fairy, and a feral gremlin, sometimes in the same sentence, and means all three equally. She is small and a little electric — the kind of person whose hair might be platinum this month and deep blue the next, whose energy fills a room even when she is clearly running on not quite enough sleep and too many things on her mind. There is something faintly otherworldly about her, a quality she leans into rather than away from. She grew up in the wet forests of Western Washington, spent summers camping in Oregon and hiking to the Canadian border with the Girl Scouts, and went to France every few years to visit family, sleeping in tents in the countryside, waking up to the smell of forest and rain. What she needed from a place was always the same: trees, water, something old and unmanicured that didn't require upkeep. Something that could just be left alone to do what it does.

Idyllwild, it turned out, understood exactly what she meant.

The Wedding, the Cult, and the Mountain

The wedding was real. So was the cult, sort of. Her friend's mother had warned her, half-joking, that if she went to the mountains of Southern California she would join Uncle Ted's cult and never be seen again. As it happened, there was in fact an Uncle Ted — Ted Wellman, the man her friend Laurie was marrying — and Marguerite thought this was too good to waste. She texted Laurie: what if we just make the cult a whole inside joke? They did. She still has the pictures from the birthday cake she made for their "cult leader."

But underneath the joke was something true. She had been living with PTSD, carrying anxiety she couldn't always name, and the mountains did something to her body that nothing else had. The air was different. The trees were there. She felt better. When the week ended and the return flight was waiting, she looked at the mountains and thought: not yet.

She stayed with Laurie and Ted in Pinyon Pines for about a month and a half. Then she came up to Idyllwild proper, found work at a pizza place, then the Village Market, then the hardware store at Forest Lumber, then the movie theater. She was eighteen when she had her daughter, Ariah — a bright, bouncy, emphatic child who corrected people's pronunciation of her name before she could fully say her R's, so it came out Awaya. No. Awaya! She learned the mountain the way you learn a language you already half-knew.

The Fire, the Flood, and the Pandemic

There is a thing that happens to people who stay in Idyllwild long enough. The mountain tests them. Marguerite got tested early and often. In 2018 there was a fire. In 2019 there was a flood that shut down both roads into town simultaneously. And then in early 2020, she was up in Washington State with two-year-old Ariah for her daughter's birthday when the first American COVID deaths started appearing in the news — a nursing home outbreak, twenty minutes from where she was staying. She watched Washington go from we're fine to shut everything down in the space of days, texting her partner back in Idyllwild, texting her boss, texting anyone who might know what was happening. The airports were still open. She got on a plane with her daughter, both of them masked, and flew back into Palm Springs, where people looked at her like she'd arrived from another world.

Back on the mountain, she threw herself into the chaos. She was working at Sugarloaf Café in Mountain Center, a little rest-stop-turned-restaurant that became, under the pandemic, something close to a lifeline for the aging communities in Pinyon, Mountain Center, and Idyllwild. The restaurant divided itself into zones with plastic drop-cloth sheeting. There were hazmat bootie procedures, zipper decontamination stations, pack-and-pick systems. Her coworker David would be out front with a bullhorn. She'd be at the packing station. They got the order-to-out-the-door time down to twenty minutes on a slow day.

David also made her briefly TikTok famous with a series called #HeyMarguerite, in which he would tell her terrible dad jokes and record her reaction. She talks about this with the same matter-of-fact warmth she uses to talk about everything else. "If we're evacuating from a fire, if we're flooded in, if we're stuck from a pandemic — making sure we keep laughing and have things to look forward to is really how we keep going."

She got fired Christmas Eve of 2020. She'll be the first to admit she was probably not easy to manage by then — frustrated, worn down, ready to be done.

Costumes, Crystals, and the Neurodivergent Witchy Commune

After 2020, Marguerite made a decision. She had spent years helping everybody else. She was going to get a tattoo, a piercing, do something wild with her hair, and invest in herself. She started getting serious about costumes, about makeup, about the Renaissance fairs and Celtic festivals and Steampunk events that Idyllwild used to host. People stopped asking if she was doing an event that weekend. They started asking what the occasion was, or just: is it Tuesday? Just Tuesday, she would say.

She tried Missouri for a while — her partner's family was there, land was cheaper, the plan was property and open space and a fresh start. She even got a job at Bass Pro Shops, which she describes with great affection as "conservative outdoor sports R Us." It didn't work. She came back to Idyllwild in late 2023, carrying a camper, her daughter, and the particular exhaustion of someone who has been trying very hard for a very long time.

In December she found a lump. By March of 2024 she had a diagnosis: breast cancer, aggressive, spreading fast. She was thirty-one years old.

She had already enrolled in massage therapy school before the diagnosis, drawn to the work by a long interest in healing — her own and other people's. She kept going. Through the surgeries and the chemo and the radiation, she kept showing up to class, becoming the person her instructors pointed to when other students made excuses. She is now Reiki 2 certified and a trained massage therapist, and she works with a boss she describes as the best she has ever had — someone who checks in, accommodates, and has never once made her feel guilty for the unpredictability of her own schedule. Her herbs, her crystals, her tarot cards, her relationship to the moon: these are not decorations. They are how she moves through the world.

Her daughter Ariah, seven and nearly eight, has started noticing the pink cancer ribbon everywhere — on storefronts, on stickers, on people's cars — and calls it the sign of mommy's disease. She points to it and says: look, mommy, it's for your disease. Marguerite lets her say it. She understands that's how her daughter is processing it.

She lives now in a pink house — a genuinely, cheerfully, outrageously pink house — with her brother, who needed her and she went to get him. He is autistic, level two, and she is figuring out how to help him find work in a town that already has few jobs. The house has a bobcat on the security camera footage, investigating the barbecue. She considers this a fine arrangement.

This Mountain Picks Its People

Marguerite has a theory about Idyllwild. She says the mountain picks and chooses who its people are. You can come for a week, fall in love, and go home — and you'll talk about that week for the rest of your life, but that's the end of it. Or you can be someone the mountain decides to keep. Those people, she says, come from everywhere: places that make no sense, paths that don't add up on paper, a wedding invitation and a missed flight.

She didn't call herself a local for a long time. She still isn't sure she does. But she knows that when she is down in the desert, driving between appointments, she looks up at the mountain and something in her settles. Not another mountain. This one.

There is a line Marguerite says when people ask why she needs Idyllwild, why the mountain specifically, why not somewhere easier or more convenient or closer to the doctors she needs. She says: give me the trees. Put me in the trees.

She will tell you she is a druid ranger. That her preferred biome is mountainous forest. That she prefers rocks over people most of the time — and dogs, always dogs. She grew up going barefoot along creeks, camping wherever she could, and she carries that orientation in her body like a compass. When she was living in the desert during a difficult stretch in 2024, she got depressed in a way she recognized immediately: no trees. The emptiness of it. The sky with nothing in it. She kept looking up at the San Jacinto mountains from below and saying, under her breath, hello.

She talks about this mountain the way other people talk about a person. Not the shops or the politics or the community, though she has thoughts about all of those — she means the mountain itself. The way it feels old and wise and unhurried. She says Idyllwild is basically a giant quartz rock, and that when she tells people this, they always say: oh, that's why. She believes the trails have stories in them, that the creek has things to say. She knows where the ferns are, where the moss grows, which plants can be harvested and how to do it with respect. She has foraging books. She has books on medicinal herbalism. She uses them.

The Grotto at Sunset

Sunset and sunrise are her favorite times on the mountain, when the nocturnal animals are switching with the diurnal ones and everything is either just waking up or just beginning to quiet. The most beautiful thing she has ever seen, she says, was the sunset and moonrise from the top of Taquitz Peak when she was three months pregnant. Her partner lost the trail on the way back and they were up there until 3 a.m., branches hitting her in the face in the dark. She did not break up with him for that, but did give him a great deal of grief about it for years afterward.

Ask Marguerite what keeps her here — really keeps her, past the doctors and the daughter and the difficulty of leaving — and she doesn't talk about convenience or community or any of the practical things. She goes to the end of the grotto behind the school, she says, and she sits on the rocks above the cliff — small and still, whatever color her hair happens to be that season — and she listens to the water below and watches the light change at sunset. As long as she's warm enough. As long as her body lets her.

"This is where I found more of myself," she says. "And understood myself. And changed." She pauses. "This would be another home base. It's a choice. It's like your adopted home — the home of choice."

She is, barefoot in spirit if not always in body, exactly where she is supposed to be.