Migrants by choice, residents by desire

Slab City, Calif. — A MINUTE AGO THE DESERT WAS AGLOW, THE SKY crowded full of cotton-candy clouds, the whole stark scene bathed in post-sunset pink. But now the sky's gone inky, the stars are stifled and it's just half a dozen of us sitting around a campfire in a 60-degree breeze, listening to a crotchety 73-year-old serve up his best left-handed compliment.

"I'd much rather be in a campground along a mountain stream in mountain air, but I'm not able to do that anymore," Rusty is saying. "This is it."

This is Slab City, a half-forgotten 640-acre corner of Imperial County desert -- just east of the Salton Sea, just west of the Chocolate Mountains Gunnery Range -- where snowbirds and itinerants hunker down by the hundreds each winter. Sixty years ago, these bare concrete foundations held a Marine training facility. Forty years ago, the snowbirds started coming -- for plenty of reasons, but mostly because it's free, because there's no snow, because there's nobody in charge.

"America's supposed to be based on living free, and this is the last place where you do that," says Rusty, a 12-year veteran here.

There are complications, of course. No electricity. No water. No sewage system. And among the neighbors, there's a handful -- mostly the younger ones, whom oldsters suspect of drug abuse, theft and the most amoral behavior you can imagine. For at least a decade, Slabbers have whispered that the government is about to shut down the place.

Yet here we sit around the campfire, with RVs, trailers, campers and hitchhikers trickling in daily. By January, 2,000 people may set up here, some in tents, some in Mercedes sedans and gleaming Airstreams, some hauling their waste out, some not.

Tonight, half a dozen attend the fire. Sullen Judd has brought marshmallows. Chipper James, a white-bearded musician just down from Eureka, pulls out a mandolin and strums "This Little Light of Mine." Phil the Preacher, a 68-year-old widower from Oregon who's been ministering here for seven winters, tosses on more logs.

"You wake up at 2 in the morning, look out, and you've got the whole desert just glowing in the moonlight. Just a little bit of beautiful," says Phil. "But we all know that at any time, they could come and kick everybody out."

It's abject liberty. It's Brigadoon, with sets by Samuel Beckett and casting by Tom Waits. And it's something to remember, the next time you're admiring desert scenery in a book or on a screen.