At Home at the Other End of the Rainbow: Going Off the Grid (and Into the Desert) to Live the American Dream

Happy hour at Slab City, southeastern California.

It was nine thirty on a Saturday night in Slab City, and Insane Wayne was onstage at the Range, leaning hard on the microphone stand. He looked like a biker who’d been forced to sell his Hog for drug money: salt-and-pepper hair spilling out from under a Harley-Davidson bandanna, down over a Harley-Davidson T-shirt caked with equal parts grease and dust. A low, rasping sound came from the old PA speakers, loud enough to cut through the noise of the diesel generators that powered them. Wayne was having a coughing fit. It went on for a long time and he held the microphone to his mouth throughout. When he recovered, there was scattered applause. The band—a couple of speed-freak kids on guitar and a drummer—lurched into a shambling cover of “How Much Tequila?” “How much tequila did I drink last night,” Wayne sang in a voice that sounded like a combination of Tom Waits and Merle Haggard. “It’s really anybody’s guess. I poured ’em so fast, I couldn’t keep ’em in the glass, but this morning I sure am a mess.”

There were about eighty people in the audience that night—retirees looking for someplace warm to spend the winter, a few younger people, and a large contingent of full-time residents, mostly men who, either because of economic necessity or choice, endured the 120-degree summers at the Slabs, as most residents call it. They didn’t have all that much in common except for the reason they were there. Slab City is one of America’s only anarchist trailer parks—not in an ideological sense (residents don’t devote themselves to reading Mikhail Bakunin) but in a practical one. The Slabs occupy an abandoned Army base in the California desert about an hour south of Palm Springs. When the soldiers left, they stripped the place bare until the only thing that remained was the grid of roads and the concrete foundation slabs that give the place its name. There is no water, no electricity, and certainly no cable. But it is, as one longtime resident told me, one of the last places in America “without some squirrel telling you how to live.”

The Range, a bar and elevated outdoor stagemade of scavenged plywood, sits just off the main road. The stage is lit by makeshift spotlights mounted on towers of two-by-fours, with more lights strung across the top of a wooden backdrop. Everything, including the sound system, is powered by a combination of solar panels and gas-powered generators. It is a masterpiece of jerry-rigging, though not exactly robust, so the two gutted school buses parked nearby are filled with spare parts—mic stands, more PA speakers, wire, and batteries. There’s at least one show a week, and more if there are holidays or celebrations. The talent is mostly local, like Wayne and the band, although occasionally someone more professional has turned up to play. When I first visited Slab City, in the summer of 2003, the Range was the only stage around. In recent years, other people have built other performance spaces. But the Range still has the best setup, and on a good night almost everyone comes out for shows there.

Saturday night at the Range. Pets welcome.

Which doesn’t mean that everyone mixes easily. Early in the night, before Wayne and the band came on, people split up more or less along class lines. Slab City’s upper crust, mostly RVers who belonged to various social clubs—like the Oasis Club or Loners On Wheels—sat on one side of the stage in what passed for luxury seating: paired, velour-covered seats with recliner buttons built into the arms, or in a couple of rows of old movie-house chairs...