Slab City

Let's start with Salvation Mountain. The story, or at least how it's told out at the slabs, is that a man in a hot air balloon landed at Salvation Mountain-- at this point a piece of nondescript and hostile looking desert-- and built a painted spectacle with straw bales and lots of free time. Fast forward and Salvation Mountain is designated a National Monument. Fast forward a little more and you have a thousand people wintering at Slab City, what used to be part of an airforce base and now neatly protected by the Mountain's monument status.

Full of hippes (the original, about the expire type) and dropouts, the Slab is "the last free place". Free to camp or park your RV year round, free to be away from cops and society and do whatever freedom means to you. I was lucky enough to be brought into a circle of people known as the Oasis Club; membership lets you use the library and check out videos. Nonmembers can still get the $3 all-you-can-eat Sunday breakfast, something to look forward to after a night at the Range-- an open air talent show that may have been in "Into the Wild." It's an amazing place, but also a sad place. Full of faux intelligence and set-in-their-ways freedomists. Full of people who wouldn't belong anywhere else, and have found a community of each other. A place of quiet desperation-- old men offering you a hit, just to have someone to talk to-- and a place of great inspiration-- sitting around a campfire singing Beatles songs to an acoustic guitar.

A place both obvious and replete with mystery; after breakfast a woman arrived with a skinny well dressed 14 year old-- not her son, but whom she was in the process of adopting-- who could recite the periodic tables and totally upturn the social hierarchy. Mike Bright, the smart guy who rides an electric beer cooler around the Slab, was left dumbfounded and defeated. Who was this kid? Was he kidnapped? His guardian said "We'll just call him Kailin for now"-- an usual name, and also a street across from Slab City-- but in the end it didn't matter. "We don't have to compete," he tells Mike Bright, "we can work cooperatively." Wherever he's from, he's now where he belongs.