Slab City: Creative Homesteading in a Desert of Extremes
High & Dry surveys the legacy of human enterprise in the California desert and beyond. Together, environmental writer Jack Eidt and photographer Osceola Refetoff document human activity, past and present, in the context of future development. This Dispatch focuses on the off-Salton-Sea community known as Slab City.
"Nobody owns anything, but everyone is rich — for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?"
— Sir Thomas More who coined the word "utopia” for his 1516 book of the same name
Life in the desert is not for the unserious. When temperatures reach over 120 degrees Fahrenheit, Slab City resident Caddy stated: “The environment is actively trying to kill you.” Not an easy place for a community of unhoused nomadic artists and destitute ramblers to call home.
Some call Slab City the Last Free Place, attracted by no-cost camping and supposed self-government. But life here is not free. Long-term residents (called Slabbers) must confront the ever-hotter-and-drier desert climate without standard electricity, running water, nor sewage system. Despite a trend toward climate aridification, tropical monsoon storms in summer pose major dangers like the aftermath of Hurricane Hillary in 2023. If you want to survive, it takes work and compromise.
Photographer Osceola Refetoff and I visited Slab City in late summer to separate the hype and drama whipped up by the outsider-made Freedom-YouTube-click-generators. We sought out these Slabbers living counter to the rest of the U.S. — which they deem advisedly as "Babylon."
This was once home of the Cahuilla People, who fished and harvested clams from the ancient Lake Cahuilla (Salton Sea). These 640 acres (one square mile) of public grid-laid-streets lined with cement slabs originated as Camp Dunlap, a former World War II Marine Corps training base that opened in 1942. By the 1950s, squatters began to stake their claim on the slabs, and a new type of desert utopia formed around an elusive concept of freedom.
Shaded from the unrelenting sun of the desert by cloth tarps and splaying palo verde branches, life in a recreational vehicle, remodeled bus, or even a tent can start to feel like home. Sometimes folks escape the midday swelter by digging into the sandy gravel to fashion a human-body-and-their-dog-sized relaxation place camouflaged by palm fronds.
Trailers and RVs can shift locations when the seasonal inspiration flows, an improvised home where freewill meets necessity. The freedom of self-expression begins with wooden framing and technicolor paint. What isn’t free? Solar electricity to run the fans, a 300-gallon water tank, propane for cooking/refrigeration, and pit toilets.
This squatter's paradise has distinguished itself by dedicating the community to conceptual art of the Waste Age. Slabbers and new or seasonal arrivals (Snowbirds) employ repurposed knickknacks as public art. Sculptures deconstructing industrial dystopia are arranged as exquisite cautionary redeployments. Graffiti proffered as updated cave paintings mark the territory as inhabited, a beloved community of refugees from landlords and insurance agents, who set their own societal path.
Two consequential art projects in Slab City raise the Anthropocene Art to the next level. The late Leonard Knight, who lived out of the back of his truck, created Salvation Mountain here in the 1980s. It is a cavalcade of pastoral designs and religious messages illuminated with a sea of toxic paint continually reapplied to a hillside of cob (clay-sand-straw composite) and found materials.
Charlie Russell (called Container Charlie because of his living quarters) quit his tech job in 2007 to work with Leonard and ended up starting his own found art project. Dubbed East Jesus, the name signifies 'out there in the wild' as opposed to anything religious. In addition to parties, art cars were Charlie's thing, as his daily driver and Burning Man vehicle was the Cinnabar Charm Volkswagen van, now memorialized in the 30-acre Art Garden dedicated to large-scale art using reclaimed materials.
After Charlie's untimely death in 2011, married couple Admiral (Jenn Nelson) and Caddy (Matt Cadwallader) came to Slab City first as weekenders and later as curators of the Chasterus Foundation, a nonprofit to continue Charlie's vision. They expanded the Art Garden through short- and long-term artist residencies. The works display fantastically repurposed stuff decrying, celebrating, lampooning commodification and consumerism.
They also dedicate the organization to performance spaces, community art education, and sustainable practices. They grow food, use composting toilets, and generate power through repurposed solar panels that started out with 16-years-past-their-prime telecom batteries. Their response to the Last Free Place ethic was to purchase their land to protect their vision, which was not free.
Uh, we’ve been here since 2013. The hottest I've ever seen is 129. But early on here we had just one AC going and then we had an AC going for a battery bank. At the time we had about 24 used telecom batteries that were, they were, what is it? Two-volt, 4000-amp-hour batteries. They were about 600 pounds a piece. They're filled with, I think, six gallons of sulfuric acid. and they're 16 years past end of life, but they're just so big that they could still hold some charge. And we kept those, we resuscitated them.
Well, you need to cool them. We need to cool them, yeah, because once they get over a certain temperature, they get damaged, but also they won't hold a charge. So most of the energy during the summer was actually just cooling off the batteries. East Jesus is run by a 501c3 that I created. And we actually own the land that we're on. We did. We purchased the land because the state of California is trying to get rid of this one square mile, that is Slab City.
Salvation Mountain and East Jesus, located on opposite ends of the Slabs, act as anchors to attract massive numbers of international tourists. As Jenn noted, during high season on a winter weekend, it is not uncommon for two thousand people to visit East Jesus.
The bricolage art, a random fusion of novelty junk, involves collecting, known as gleaning, that has become a Slab City obsession. The freeform dump called Slab Mart offers reusable discards for all but has become a sprawling blight of refuse that blows about in the oft-fierce winds. What about public services like trash collection? Or for that matter, police, fire, mental and physical health, and social welfare? The answer is the public or nonprofit sector provides stopgap services for all, but Slabbers come together as community first responders. Self-government nevertheless falls short when it comes to maintaining the commons.
Despite its oft-haggard appearance, nomad-drifters, inspired artists, adventure-seeking tourists (Normies), neo- and retro-hippies, destitute eccentrics (Bush Bunnies), agricultural workers, veterans, and a few tweakers come together/internally-clash in a community intent to stand out as a place of vivid self-expression. You might consider these folks as homesteaders, living without what Babylon considers a house, but despite Imperial County's official classifications, they are NOT homeless.
The land has always been owned by the State of California. Attempts have not yet succeeded to sell it off for development or solar fields or just to reduce the liability of illegal squatters. That said, the roughly 800 year-round Slabbers (that swells to 5,000 when Snowbirds return for the cooler months) have other ideas.
According to a 2019 report, over 12.8% of the nation's supply of low-income housing has been permanently lost since 2001. While some face desperate poverty exacerbated by drug addiction or mental disorders, most of the unhoused today face temporary problems like job loss, rent increase, medical debt, or home foreclosure. Using often marginal and vacant public land for last-resort housing can reduce public investment, while providing people with a free place to live, despite in this case dangers from desert heat, flash floods, and minimal services.
I do not own this land. I was a property owner in the past, and there's a lot of misconceptions about owning property … here we're just squatting. I'm living on somebody else's land. Who knows why they own it? I have no idea. Because there's nothing here. It's just been hanging out here. And if nobody's going to use it, I'm going to use it until somebody comes and tells me I can't but, I mean, I know we don't own this land … We could be thrown out at any time.Dot, Artist and Creator of House of Dots in Slab City
So, when I got here, and being an artist, I tried selling stuff on the road, too, like, just doing little fairs and whatnot. Half the time, you wouldn't sell enough stuff to make the vendor fee, right. You'd watch the person selling cotton candy or pulled pork down the road making bank, and you're trying to sell art, and art sells, but only in the right place. And so when I got here, it's a captive audience. Hundreds of people come here every day, especially from October till March. And if you want to be an artist and you want to be seen, this is definitely a place to do it. So when I got here, I just saw it as a grand opportunity. The land of opportunity is what I used to call it. And everybody thought I was insane, but I made it happen. Well, my idea of making it happen, I want to make a tourist attraction, and that's what I've done.
Trailer Fire – Slab City, California – 2024 | © Osceola Refetoff - www.ospix.com
After talking with Caddy about what happens when someone accidentally lights their camp on fire, one broke out just across the way. Black smoke billowed, followed by explosions from propane tanks, with people rushing at great danger to protect their camps. Aquaman Rich handed me a fire extinguisher and we ran toward the flames spreading to nearby brush. The fire department arrived and waved us off. Aquaman earned his name for his role as a water provider to this blaze-prone community, with no easy access to potable or non-potable water.
Aquaman Rich proved handy later when we visited the Skate Park, the former Marine Base pool, when feral dogs came growling. Wearing only shorts and a belt, Rich had pepper spray ready. A couple of squirts and the dogs retreated. When it comes to Animal Control, you need to come prepared in the Slabs.
Osceola and I went for morning coffee at a place called Oasis Club, where folks traded jokes, stories, and cannabis. We met Waterboy (aka Anthony Stull), a gregarious bearded fellow in his 30s, also formerly in the water business. Waterboy took us around and introduced us to the folks at California Ponderosa (AirBnB camp and lounge) and Mojo's Slab Camp (a campground with amenities) and we just blended into the world, meeting Slabbers and tourists who pass the days seeming without a care.
Mojo hosts campers with comfortable facilities, food, and the only flush toilet in town. She told us, "The Slabs aren't lawless; 99% of the people are amazing, even the drug addicts. People come together when there is trouble. It is a community, and people of different opinions have a meal and get along, then go to our own rooms. We take care of each other." Mojo planned to stay two weeks and has been here now for nine years.
We saw police vehicles drive by every day. Waterboy called the Slabs the Bermuda Triangle of Drugs: once you fly in you might never come out. Dot told us about artists who got dragged into the hole by the dragon, meaning heroin. Waterboy had his own struggles with heroin but is now clean and running the Slab City Soup Kitchen. Another one of his roles is to keep the peace, a first responder to whatever might come up. There have been around 12 deaths including three murders this year, but they do their best to handle things internally.
What hasn't evolved [in the Slabs] like it has in Babylon is the not caring, the not knowing your neighbor. They're not giving a f… what's going on next door to you, only caring what's in your house and your house alone. We're not like that. I want to know what the f…'s going on around me and who's living next to me. If my neighbor's hungry... Even somebody that lives a couple blocks away is hungry, they can come and ask me for a plate of food. Can't do that in Babylon. you know, I'm saying, like, it's the not caring.– Waterboy, Soup Kitchen Co-Founder and Unofficial Community Sheriff
The unhoused homesteaders of Slab City are committed to protect and advance this place despite the real challenges. Mojo said it best: "People here have options, but they choose to live here. Whatever you've imagined, make it come to fruition. It's the hardest life I've ever lived, but it's the best life."
Aristotle said that freedom is obedience to self-formulated rules. Slabbers have self-formulated architectural and climate moderating solutions that redefine what Babylon considers housing. That same creative spirit could collaborate on a Slab Mart Dump cleanup and a community-serviced-vision for their desert ecosystem to ensure freedom for all, Snowbirds, Bush Bunnies, Normie Tourists, Canal Critters, and of course the wildlife.
In Thomas More's words about the island he called utopia, what greater wealth can come, despite not owning anything? For Slab City, their abundance is cheerfulness, a relative peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety — with a little pepper spray for protection. What more could you ask for?
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