The Last Free Place?

Slab City resists linear narrative. Just from the last time I was there, a little before the old man died, to now — a mere four years — it’s changed in as many different and opposing ways as went into its coming into being in the first place.

Here are some, not nearly enough, of the things that Slab City is and is not right now.

Leonard Knight’s quixotically pre-Pauline version of Christianity: no rules, just love.

No one disputes that Slab City started mattering to tourists because of Leonard Knight, but he wasn’t the first to set up shop after the Marines pulled out in 1956, marking their fourteen years of occupation with the giant concrete slabs they left behind.

The first slabbers were harvesting creosote for a chemical company, but were followed shortly after by hippies fleeing the Man: from Mecca, CA, on the north end of the Salton Sea, to Slab City, on its southeast side.

One version of Slab City is still centered on Knight’s exceptional monument, Salvation Mountain. The differences between Knight’s original work and the mainstream Christian branding of the group maintaining the site are striking.

Salvation Mountain was an unfinished project, raised up from the desert with sticks and mud and paint and bales of hay, all scrounged or donated over the decades Knight devoted to realizing this vision.

Knight’s vision of Christianity was militantly simple: “God is love.”

Over and over: “God is love.”

The simplicity of his materials matched the message.

Though his tangled, three-story structure is not wholly confidence-inducing.

The group that maintains the mountain now has offered its own gaudy framing of what becomes in the process more a religious attraction and less an injunction to faith. Still, do not all maintainers have their say?

From another angle, Slab City was never really about Knight’s religious vision at all.

Slabbers have been coming here for decades, in search of not so much something as nothing, a space less governed. From hippies to survivalists, snowbirds in 150-thousand-dollar RVS to tweakers in blown-out tents, people have long found in Slab City such haven as anarchy affords.

Some encampments are positively military, if guerrilla, in their structure.

Others are scarcely there at all: a chair, a tarp, and a way to come and go.

What would seem like extreme poverty anywhere else abounds here.

As do an endless succession of incongruous flags.

Like anywhere that people make their home, Slab City holds an accumulation of losses. It is as much the record of these losses as anything that makes this place — without water or sewer or electrical grid or cable lines, and without lords and mayors and policemen — a place at all.

Everywhere we go we mark a loss.

Like all pet cemeteries, Slab City’s is both deeply important and spine-tinglingly creepy.

A desert holds on to what’s lost far longer, making memorials from the stripped-down remnants of full lives.

And Slab City’s composition has shifted these past years, perhaps in response to losses. I see more and more roads proclaiming themselves private, and the occasional sign threatening violence to all who trespass its boundaries. Too, there are more permanent fences and sheds.

All this land is only as much private, and only as much property, as custom allows and violence defends.

So, same as it ever was, though it’s strange to see this mania overtake Slab City.

After all, this barricade — looking for the world like a cash-strapped militia’s — is built on squatted land.

Several people told me that the Slab City Hostel, a business built in trailers on squatted land, had been sold to an investor; I spoke with a Montanan who rents space in his encampment to tourists on AirBnB; but then, I was welcomed into an internet cafe where the wind blew hard through the walls and the dilapidated couches alike, and people in ragged clothes and rangy bodies offered coffee.

There’s free, and then there’s free.

A donation’s appreciated, but the internet and coffee alike are free.

There are plenty of ways of being free.

It’s hard to have nice things without a fence, when others near you do not.

Still, plenty of folks are living well without fences.

Other times, it’s only the kickstand down on a bicycle that tells you anyone lives there at all.

And not everyone appreciates the shifting winds defining freedom in Slab City today.

Slab City was threatened a couple years back with sale of the land on which it rests. Slabbers split along fierce definitional lines. You’re either out, all the way out, or you’re in — in which case, why be there at all? Or, conversely, there’s nowhere outside the world (nearby Niland, after all, serves most food needs of members of the community, many of whom have retired on pensions or receive EBT). The land was not sold and, for now, Slab City remains free.

The truest and finest form of piracy has always been a public library.

You’re welcome at the library, any time of day or night.

Poetry slams are Thursday nights, and you can sit anywhere you like.

If you’re lucky, the bombers will be bombing and the strafers strafing at the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range next door.

If flags are any measure, many slabbers are committed to their versions of patriotism.

Far from any ocean, the flag of the Coast Guard flies free.

The trouble with freedom is that it aggregates waste. Each year, Slab City draws up to a couple-odd thousand residents in the winter months, and drops back down to a couple-odd hundred in the piercing summer heat. Structures are abandoned and reoccupied like hermit crab shells, but consumer waste just builds up.

The desert wind scours any structure left unoccupied for any length of time.

Lines of debris adorn most every little wash.

But pile together enough debris, and you’ve made a home.

Pile it up in order and make it stick together and you’ve got art.

Electrify and amplify it and you’ve got a party, down at the Range.

Without East Jesus, there’s no Slab City: just slabs and campers in search of something like freedom.

As a community, Slab City coalesces far more around Builder Bill’s open-air bar the Range, or Radio Mike’s shows and parties (though he was not broadcasting this year or last, as I hear). As a place, without East Jesus it just doesn’t exist.

Perched at the northwestern edge of the slabs, East Jesus is the back end of nowhere.

The ongoing work of multiple artists over many years, East Jesus, like Slab City itself, is no one thing.

Certainly, it’s scathing critique of consumer society and property regimes.

But it’s also the real elephant man.

Or the dream of living in a tree (even if you have to make it yourself).

A window onto the sublime.

Graphic rebellion against its own self.

Tongue-in-cheek satanism.

An absolute sincere glimpse of the end of the road.

And a mishmash of so much more besides.

Like Salvation Mountain, East Jesus is integral to Slab City, but not precisely of it. The one is the beautiful dogmatism of a profoundly sincere monomaniac, the other the ongoing blossoming of artistic heterodoxy, an anti-Burning Man of sorts. What makes Slab City a place is that these poles have and make meanings all their own. What makes it the anarchic space it still is is that neither pole defines it.

Outside someone’s trailer, across from the makeshift church at the relative center of Slab City.

No one story defines Slab City; therein consists its freedom, and ours.