Fear and Loathing in Slab City

Desolation row in the desert

Attila Adam for Getty Images via Canva

They come from everywhere to end up somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

They are “slabbers,” the vagrant inhabitants of Slab City, commonly referred to as “the last free place in America.”

The weirdest place in the United States lies 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles, 42 miles north of the U.S. / Mexican border, in the middle of Southern California’s Sonoran Desert.

Slab City, or “The Slabs,” as it’s known to residents, was originally a U.S. military base in the 1940s and early 1950s. By 1956, the military closed the base and demolished the buildings leaving behind only the foundational concrete slabs, hence the name.

In 1961, the Department of Defense conveyed the abandoned 631,345 acres to the state of California that, to this day, has done nothing with the land, leaving it to serve as a sort of squatter’s paradise.

This harsh desert environment can hardly be considered wonderland.

Badlands is more like it.

The first people to settle there were vetera…