February 2020 | Slab City. Where the outhouses stink but the stars shine. A trip that drove home the following point: There’s lots of ways to live your life.
We stayed in Ponderosa, which is a neighborhood – if you will – within the Slabs. Ponderosa is led by a tall, slender, wispy white beard man nicknamed Spyder and is made up of a makeshift kitchen / bar / outdoor living room, all made out of plywood, sheet metal, wooden pallets, tarps, and other found materials.
On Slab City:
Dubbed the last free place on earth, is home to a community of outcasts, squatters, artists, and desert dwellers. The isolated desert community was created by transient, freedom-seeking people like these, all living off the grid in trailers, tents, lean-tos, and broken-down school buses in a remote patch of the Sonoran Desert, on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea.
Here, the word “city” is a bit of a misnomer. The Slabs, as the community is known, has no connection to the main power grid, no trash or water services, and a general lack of basic amenities. The encampment is as bare bones as it gets. Streets are made of hardened dirt, most structures are built from salvaged materials, and packs of dogs roam the area.
Slab City boasts its own skatepark, bar, library, and so on.
Adjacent to the Slabs, but it’s own entity in it’s own right is the East Jesus community of artists.
On East Jesus:
The camp may look fairly similar to other parts of the Slabs, with eccentric art installations made of repurposed garbage and provisional trailer accommodations for a small group of residents, but the area is private property. Local non-profit the Chasterus Foundation bought the 30-acre plot in 2016.
East Jesus’ main attraction is an elaborate outdoor “art museum” that’s open to the public year-round, featuring a wall of broken TVs covered with pithy messages, a car adorned with baby doll heads, and other oddities. Behind the museum is where East Jesus residents actually live, in an intricate maze of trailers surrounding a communal living area.
You can read more by clicking here.
