Slab City 1: Ask The Dust

The Slabs are America's conscience, a living critique of a dream in decline. And, if we're not careful, a foreshadowing.

(Hi there - I’m told that it’s “good practice” to introduce the newsletter at the start of every post. So bear with me a sec… This is Minority Report, a newsletter about subcultures and the issues they raise. Because every society is defined by its edges. You’ll find original reporting here as well as think pieces and commentary.

Today, we’re going to visit Slab City, perhaps the epitome of an American subculture. This is the first of three pieces. If you’re enjoying Minority Report, please subscribe, share, and send oodles of money. Thank you as always for your support.)

🎵 Fist Fight At The Oa-sis 🎵

It was about 9am or so, when the fight broke out, on an ordinary Sunday morning in Slab City. Maybe you’ve heard of the Slabs. “The last free place in America” they call it, a self-governing encampment of squatters out in the brutal California desert near the Salton Sea.

I was at the Oasis Café with all the other desert rats scarfing eggs and sausage off a paper plate. Bleary from the night before. We’d been at the Range, the music venue, up the street, for open-mic night. Quite the spectacle for a newbie. And now this. A Star Wars Cantina for the castoffs of capitalism. Mad Max meets Burning Man meets Faces of Meth in the post-apocalypse. Dusty dogs squabbling for scraps at our feet. Leathery old timers and “dirty kids” wake-and-baking side by side. Hard lives, worse teeth and eruptions of coughing from about as deep in the tar pits as you can go.

And yet, tenderness, at least at our table. Hugs and even tears, a rawness you don’t find outside Slab City, a place Slabbers call “Babylon”. I was sat between Fleurish, a heavy set bearded lady in full tie dye, and an ex-junkie called Tomahawk who had so ravaged herself—I’m assuming meth—that she’d lost most of her teeth, and her voice had fallen to a low, Stephen Hawking buzz.

“You’re looking cute today,” Fleurish told Tomahawk. “If I wanted to sell that dress, I’d have you wear it.”

Tomahawk immediately reached into her bag and pulled out a red translucent stone she’d found. This is what she does, she finds stuff on the ground, in the strewn desert trash, little artifacts and shiny things, and she gifts them to people. “This is for you,” she rasped.

They’re sweet to each other here. The bruised caring for the broken. It reminded me of the barfly grace of Bukowski and Denis Johnson, only here in this far flung desert outpost on the edge of the world.

Then it all kicked off.

Tomahawk sharpens a pencil

A tall rangy woman stormed past our table, angry and snarling. “You fucking thief!” Her target was a woman in a white sun dress, one table over. “Don’t deny it, you bitch!”

Sun dress pled ignorance, calmly batting the allegation away like a fly on her eggs, which only riled up the tall woman even more. And, as per the primal order of these things, Sundress’s boyfriend rose to defend her which in turn summoned the tall woman’s male defender who was bigger. The dance continued, the men squared off, a square dance. They were shouting now, which set the dogs barking, a proper racket to announce the ruckus to come. And then the owner of the Oasis, a tiny bird-like lady named Beryl, darted into the fray, a joint on her lips and one shriveled arm in a sling. “Take it outside!” she commanded, which launched the entire cafe into a Coliseum roar. “Outside! Outside!” And with much scraping of chairs and tables—one of which was etched with the words “Real Slabbers don’t call the cops”—a ring of men formed around each of the combatants and maneuvered them out of the cafe into the dust and the glare.

Slab City fights can get nasty. With plenty of felons and mental illness and poverty, you have all the kindling, and sure enough, bodies have shown up in the canal from time to time, or face down in the dirt under a halo of flies. The Sheriffs are often the last to know. There’s an outlaw spirit here. Rather than call the authorities this community prefers to police itself. Posses form to drive out the undesirables by force, particularly sexual offenders whose trailers often get burned to the ground.

This time, though, a schoolboy dust-up. I went to watch, with about half the café, and Beryl out front, formidable. Like most fights, it was over in a blink. A flurry of fists and a bloody nose. To complete the ritual, the loser—the smaller man of course—protested as he was pulled away. And it was done.

As Beryl passed me on the way back to the cafe, her joint still wedged in the corner of her mouth, she shook her head and muttered: “Welcome to Slab City.”

The truck Leonard Knight lived in while he created Salvation Mountain.

Experiments In Freedom

I first visited the Slabs for the Observer in 2003, back when California was still strange and new. It left its mark, its dusty footprints. No one who visits the Slabs leaves unchanged. I knew at once that it represented something essential about this country, an inherent and uncomfortable truth. And ever since it has lingered like a reminder of where I am and what could be if things go south in this new country I was trying to call home. It seems, lately, we may be headed in that direction. At a time when America is unraveling, it felt apt to return to a place where America has already unraveled and yet somehow persists in the punishing Sonoran desert.

“The Last Free Place In America” is an experiment in freedom, accidental but enduring, for over 70 years at this point. The story begins with a military base—because of course it does, this is America—Camp Dunlap, which was established in 1942 for the Marine Corps, deep in the hinterland of the Golden State, between the Salton Sea and the Chocolate Mountains. General Patton used it for desert maneuvers and bombing raids and the Enola Gay pilots trained there, setting an apocalyptic theme that continues today. When Dunlap was dismantled after the war, leaving a few pot-holed tracks and a series of concrete slabs around the perimeter (hence the name), squatters began to trickle in. Itinerant fruit-pickers from the north, back-to-the-land hippies, rebels, dropouts and many a veteran from all the campaigns—Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Desert Storm and on and on. All of them drawn to the clement winters and, yes, the freedom. Because, though there was no water, sewage or electricity—which is why Slab City is officially recognized as a homeless encampment—the rent couldn’t be better. It was state land and the state wasn’t charging. So a settlement sprouted from the dust, like a daisy in the rubble in a cheesy stock photo.

The Slabs offered not only freedom from rent, but also from the usual rules of modern life, like zoning or building codes or no music after 11pm. Freedom too from society’s expectations. You can be who you want here, leave your past behind and reinvent. Which is why, for all the unfortunates who wash up here, there are also the dreamers, the visionaries, the desert homesteaders and artists, who speak of the Slabs as a Utopia stripped bare, a prototype for the idea that people can self-govern, barter, make art and create community. To the believers, Slab City isn’t just a desperate refuge of last resort, but a sandbox of creativity, self-expression and child-like play.

Take Salvation Mountain, the defining art piece of the Slabs, whose splendid hosanna —God Is Love—greets you at the outskirts. It’s childishly rendered in primary school colors, like a blankie draped lovingly over a hill.

Salvation Mountain

But climb to the top of the mountain and what you’ll see is not a place for children (though some live here), but a scree of dilapidated trailers, makeshift homes and charred carcasses of cars. Freedom in the Bobby McGee sense of nothing left to lose. Driving through, I could see that some of the structures were sturdier and more ingenious, but still the first impression is one of anarchy and ruin. It’s a lot of scattered tires and stray dogs, violent warnings to pedophiles and many a fuck-you to the cops. And so much jagged trash that Slabbers have made art from, a wild and sometimes disturbing bricolage of all that we discard.

Meet The Slabbers

I met a couple of Utopians on my visit. Smart folks, eccentric but sane, who could leave if they wanted but instead choose the Slabs for the off-grid lifestyle, and that tenderness I saw at the Oasis. But they seemed far outnumbered by the sadder stories, the reminders of how swiftly in America the dice can roll you right into the dirt, but equally, how resilient we can be once we get there.

Most Slabber stories start with calamity. As Beryl puts it, “a lot of people come here because Babylon crushed them.” There’s Marty, the biker who went broke after the 2008 crash. Beryl herself who lost her job at Fedex after chemo, a loss that makes her cry to this day: “I just loved that route.” And farther down the tunnel, much farther, are the tweakers like Alice, who was named after the Wonderland character, but found herself somewhere else entirely, after a cascade of terrible choices. She ended up living under a tree in Slab City, in a blanket fort, with a horrendously violent ex-boyfriend. “I was never much good at adulting,” she told me, with a rueful laugh.

Clockwise from top left: Beryl, Fleurish, Alice and Marty

One thing that struck me, even on my first visit, was just how freely Slabbers volunteered their stories, however harrowing. We all want to be heard, I think, especially if you feel forgotten or left behind. Perhaps when you’re hand to mouth and the day is long, a curious stranger is a respite.

This time around, folks were even friendlier. In 2025, it seems tourists are as critical to Slab City as they are to the Maldives, and for the same reasons. In 2003, the internet was young and most people I knew hadn’t even heard of the place. But today, it’s a tourist destination and a well of content for edgy influencer types: “I stayed in the most lawless place in America!” Amateur billboards herald the turn-off on the 111. Film crews show up from Germany and Australia. And certain Slabbers have become minor YouTube celebrities. Like Dot, for instance, who seems made for TV, a sunny and garrulous fifty-something mother of two.

She was once a financial analyst in Columbus, Ohio, but they fired her out of the blue, and the cruelty of it inspired her to reject the corporate world entirely. In a full blown mid-life crisis, she sold everything, her house included, and took to the road, coming to the Slabs and opening The House of Dots, a bizarre museum/store of taxidermy, vintage clothes and other madcap bric-a-brac. And she works it. With her marketing savvy and commercial instincts, Dot brings gentrification energy to the Slabs. She greets every visitor with a smile, cracks jokes, takes pictures, and chats to anyone who passes by, selling Slab City like an old-time booster.

“It's safe, it's friendly, it’s free for you to come and live here,” she says. “It’s a land of opportunity to live the life that you want!”

In a single morning I went from hearing how Alice’s ex-boyfriend attacked her with a machete to Dot’s glowing sales patter. How she’s seen tweakers get sober here and move out. And what about that single dad who brings his boys each year, to teach them how to build a camp? Wonderful things happen here all the time.

“No one would have anything here if it weren't for tourism,” she says. “All these donations, all the food and clothes, it’s because we’re not just a bunch of poor people, we’re poor people doing cool shit. People feel good about helping an art scene. But nobody wants to help a bunch of tweaker thieves. So we're trying to get that reputation wiped.” She laughs. “I’m just trying to to prove that not everyone out here rolled out from underneath a dumpster!”

Clockwise from top left: Dot, Sanctuary Val, Lurp and Agent Karibe

🎵 It’s A Cruel (Cruel) Summer 🎵

It’s easy to forget, listening to Dot, just how difficult life can be here.

Water is a constant struggle. Slabbers store it in meter cubes and ration it ruthlessly. They used to fill up at a gas station in Niland, the nearest town, but the city caught wind and put an end to it. So now, some make deals with Niland residents. There’s a Slabber named Jerry who, for about $50 a cube, will fill up at a commercial water station, and deliver it to your camp, but he’s getting old now and his truck’s having issues. Which means many end up getting water from the canal that irrigates the vast agricultural operations nearby. It’s a felony but who’s counting at this point? The real risk is falling in because of the steep banks. Every year, animals go down for a drink but can’t climb out afterwards and drown. People too.

“It’s best to pump from the Upper Canal where the water’s cleaner,” says Val, a veteran Slabber of 20 years. She’s sixty now, a rugged eco-hippy and Slab City Utopian, who calls her camp the Sanctuary. “It’s tricky. You’re practically hanging off the side of this cement canal to reach the water.”

Getting around is another challenge. So many Slabbers don’t have wheels, and are essentially stuck there. Like Tomahawk who came out here with a boyfriend who abandoned her, so she had no way of leaving—that was nine years ago. Others came with a car which broke down and they can’t afford to fix it. They all rely on those who do have cars, and either pay them for rides into Babylon—for water, medicine or groceries—or they barter somehow. The so-called Slab Cab system.

There’s a love-hate relationship with cars out here. It’s an auto graveyard full of rusted out carcasses, vulture picked and destroyed. The symbolism is stark—an end to mobility, the last stop. It has become a pastime here, to destroy what you covet. At the Slab City skate park, I met a bunch of “dirty kids”—travelers who stay at the Slabs for part of the year. They were getting high and whooshing up and down the slopes. And I got talking to a guy called Lurp, thin as a bean, who showed me the trashed car he sleeps in. “Kind of minimalist”, he said, clambering in through the side window. He told me about Car-Henge down the 111, where they wreck cars for kicks, donut them to death and tip them over on their ends. “And just last week, dude, we took a car out there, it was pretty much done anyway. And we stuffed it with fireworks and propane and we blew that shit up. Boom!”

Explosions are a thing here. The military legacy of the Slabs continues. The Marines still use the Chocolate Mountains for bombing practice, and at night, Slabbers get the full show—the fireworks are free too. Sonic booms from the Top Gun pilots overhead. Random detonations whose shock waves rattle the shelters. The bombing range is cordoned off—all around the Slabs are wire fences with warning signs not to trespass. But they do, of course. Brassing is a way of life for many. They collect the shells that are left after an exercise, and sell them on, as jewelry, artifacts, trinkets. The Marines are wise to it now, and send men out the next morning to guard the perimeter, so the most intrepid brassers will sneak in before the bombing even begins. They hunker down somewhere, so as to avoid getting killed, and as soon it’s over, they run out to salvage what they can.

The fact that some of these brassers are veterans themselves may be the most poetic and savage indictment of America that I’ve ever come across. The moral failure. The bitter irony. For shame.

Then there’s the heat, the brutal heat. Winters are bearable. That’s when the Snowbirds descend in their gleaming RVs, swelling the population from 200 or so to 4000, like a Campervan Coachella. Like tourists, Snowbirds are embraced—they spend money, they’re a blessing. But when the mercury rises, they leave, and the hardcore are left to endure the 120 degree summers. The key to survival is to stay wet, to lie in a bath or pool, or failing that, to burrow into the ground (mind the rattlesnakes). And watch out for the occasional whipping winds that dust storm the camps and hurl the trash about.

Every summer, Slabbers die. For all the joy here, the art and resistance, there is a pall of death too. Though it’s not spoken of so much, some people even come here to die, because they don’t want to be found by their families.

“I tell you, those trailers are like ovens,” says Marty. A mellow ex-biker in his 70s, he’s been here nearly 17 years now, and has a camp on one of the actual slabs, where the Dunlap chow hall used to be. Now he runs the Slab City karaoke night.

“A lot of people here are old with health conditions, so they’re already vulnerable. And when you’re looking at 100 degree nights, it cooks your organs. People don’t wake up. And if no one checks on them, their bodies expand and… go pop.” These are the other explosions at the Slabs. “Yeah, it’s rough. Those Airstreams are the worst.”

In The Shadow Of The Golden State

Psychogeography may not be the word. It sounds like a map of psychopaths. Maybe what I mean is mythogeography, the way that certain places embody mythic and psychological meaning. Just as Wall Street represents greed and Hollywood represents fantasy, Slab City is something like America’s conscience, a living critique of a dream in decline.

In the American psyche, California represents the final frontier of that dream, the brink of possibility and transformation. It offers a dichotomy—either paradise or apocalypse, Eden or the Fall. And driving from LA to Slab City, is like going from one to the other.

Of all the iconic Californian drives—the PCH, Big Sur etc.—this stands apart. Dreamlike but not dreamy, unpretty and strange, it’s like a journey into the subconscious. As you pass through Joshua Tree and Coachella to the 111, the skyline shrinks and recedes all around, until you’re a lone speck bisecting a vast plain on a straight and vanishing road. A scroll of sky and desert streams over you, blue and brown, heaven and earth. It’s cleansing and meditative. And you end up on a side of the Golden State you never see. Back of house, behind the facade. The whole area around the Salton Sea feels like a Jungian shadow.

This is the forgotten California where the bill comes due. Steinbeck country which provides all our food but keeps its workers hungry. The flyspeck farm towns here are pictures of neglect. The only jobs are seasonal and grueling, or if you’re lucky, at the prisons at Calipatria and Centinela. Because in the hinterland, poor folk are either grinding for Big Ag or locked up behind electric fences, like the cattle in the horrific feed lots that emerge from the earth like nightmares by the freeway—a million cows bent and still in the glowering sun. Cowschwitz.

The Salton Sea itself is a parable. Not a sea, but a lake, it was once a holiday resort in the 60s, known for water sports and the occasional concert by Frank Sinatra or The Beach Boys. Now all that’s left is tattered signage. The water’s unfit and much of the marine life has died, owing to years of agricultural runoff and a spike in salinity because of climate change. Come the summer, instead of Good Vibrations, the lake gives off a thick sulfide stench that carries for miles.

In this landscape Slab City becomes a symbol of defiance. Surrounded by Babylon’s ugly reality, here is a community of exiles holding up a mirror and a middle finger. Look at your system, they say. Look at your values. It abandoned us because that’s what it does. But what will happen when Babylon abandons you too? Can’t you see, it’s already happening…

All the apocalyptic metrics are rising—inequality, homelessness, fascism, the rampaging rise of AI that might impoverish us all by the millions, no one knows. So you have to wonder: is Slab City what awaits us all?

Night Moves

The military operations kicked off around midnight. Some kind of Black Hawk Down scenario that sounded like it was more or less directly overhead. I was in bed by then, not a real bed but a skinny box in a wooden shack at Val’s camp. She’d painted a quote from Thoreau on the side. “Fitting for a writer,” she said. “Leave your door open and sleep under the stars!” But I couldn’t do it. I’m just not that guy, the Wendell Berry type, at home in nature and moved to poetry. I’ve never been the off-grid type. Back home it’s all goosedown and cappuccinos. I’m soft. So when the choppers got going, I was already up, coughing from all the dust and fretting about rattlesnakes, given the stories I’d heard, like the one about the guy who got bit above his eye in the middle of the night. That one.

I couldn’t rest anyway, there was too much to think about. So many people in such a short time. In just a couple of days I’d met Fleurish and Beryl and Alice the tweaker, and Valkyrie and her kids who came all the way from Appalachia. And Sanctuary Val and Marty the biker and Agent Karibe and Dot. Everywhere I went, people let me in and filled me with stories. (The opposite to my experience with the Sneeze Fetishists.) It’s true, there’s something about this place. A genuine warmth towards outsiders. And yet, all this wonderful human connection was bookended by violence—a fistfight in the morning and war games at night. So Slab City!

(I’ll share these stories with you in the next post. It’s about to get real.)

As I lay awake that night, however, there was another story was tugging at me. I kept returning to what Dot had said about how “tourism brings revenue”, which seems such a simple and uncontroversial statement. And yet, surely at the Slabs this presents a profound conflict—that here, of all places, in a living indictment of capitalism, Babylon had planted a seed nevertheless? It was that word ‘revenue’, the language of balance sheets. There’s no surer way to ruin Utopia than with money. Dot saw it as a sign of a maturing community, but might it also be a death knell for The Last Free Place In America?

And I thought of Val, the same Val whose hut I was staying in. A Slab City Utopian to her core, she told me a story from her own life about the ugly side of encroaching commerce. How it threatened her camp and her life at one time. It’s a dramatic story of greed and violence, of gangster capitalism Slab City style. A story that reminds me of Deadwood.

There’s more to come. Stay tuned….