The Way of the Wanderers (Part Four)

In further tales of high plains drifters, it’s hard to discuss the varied aspects of Californian drifting souls without touching on the Salton Sea and its surrounding desert outposts of few people and even fewer means.

The Salton Sea was created in the early 1900’s when the Colorado River breached and flooded into the Salton Sink valley. Opportunists of the time tried to take advantage of the new lake and began seeding its waters with fish, developing marinas and hotels around its borders as a destination getaway for Angelenos looking for outdoor fun away from Pacific beaches.

Then the nearby Alamo River carried toxic runoff from surrounding agricultural efforts full of pesticides, DDT, and fertilizer nitrates into its waters, spiking the lake's salinity to levels far higher than that of the Pacific Ocean, which resulted in not only the marine life tanking, it made the water unsuitable for swimming. The whole place pretty much became inhospitable, what with the newly acidic sea, as well as the outside temperatures of the Sonora Desert ranking among the highest in eastern California, rivaling those of Death Valley.

The stank coming from the Salton Sea is one you won’t forget. Alkaline, salt-cake, rotting fish, and ancient chemical dust. You don’t wanna be out there on a windy day. It’s a testament to long term effects of poorly handled industrial hazards. A hundred different initiatives to clean up the lake have been proposed by desert ecological activists for years. Nothing much has ever come of it. Skeletal fish heads still wash up on its shores as souvenirs for doomsday tourists looking to slum.

One of its main shoreline hubs is a place called Bombay Beach, the leftover remains of a housing district for a resort complex constructed in the development heyday of the Salton Sea. It delivers a dystopian experience in outstanding style. A handful of homesteader desert folk live there, some slight few in neat and small homes, others in dilapidated trailer park mobile homes or RVs, all nesting among derelict vehicles and graffiti-splashed construction rubble and wreckage, and yes, even an occasional lonely barrel fire or a mangy dog tied to a desperate tree.

There is a county sanctioned fire station, a thinly stocked convenience store, and a small drive-in movie theater, complete with a somewhat spooky, working neon marquee, set up in an automobile boneyard, its outdoor seating situated in rusted chassis shells of long defunct Pintos and Gremlins. There’s one bar called The Ski Inn, supposedly the ‘lowest bar in the western hemisphere’ at 237 feet below sea level, wallpapered in decades of pinned dollar bills from visiting snowbirds.

I’ve visited Bombay Beach several times. I usually have my dogs in tow.

Regarding Bombay Beach, a closer depiction of a post-apocalyptic outpost you won’t find in California.

Desolate ghost town oasis in a desert wasteland, check.

Odd grubby townsfolk both amiable and hostile, check.

Nearby radioactive lake, check.

Ruins and leftovers of a former civilization, check.

It’s literally one of the hardscrabble towns in Fallout come to life. Take a drive out there sometime and see for yourself. When, or if, the apocalypse ramps up from semi to full, Bombay Beach will be way ahead of the curve. The only reason it’s not a full blown mutant biker enclave yet is because grid utilities like running water and electricity are still serviced and functioning.

Down the highway a bit there’s the town of Niland, which has a couple of seedy motels, a laundromat, a threadbare mini mart, the Buckshot Deli and Diner (decent breakfast burritos), an elementary school for children, and a residency numbering about a thousand desert souls, many of whom are Hispanic agricultural workers who commute to the nearby fields and farms in the Coachella and Morongo Valleys. Average annual salaries tend to be less than $20,000. Locals are accustomed to homeless drifters and vision questing desert rats coming through en route to the more sensational draw of the area, because Niland is the gateway to Slab City, often colloquially dubbed the Last Free City in America.

The Slabs are another unique Salton Sea community, its name derived from the concrete slabs littered across the landscape left over from an artillery range of an abandoned World War II Marine Corp barracks. The Department of Defense deeded the lands to the State of California after the war.

It’s called the last free city because its residents crash there with no requirements for rent or camping fees. It’s essentially a settlement for squatters. The state tolerates it because it’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s hotter than hell much of the year, and it relegates a small segment of drifters out of sight and out of mind. There’s no running water or electricity, most folks live on gas-powered generators, and the nearest supply depot is the mini mart in Niland. Otherwise, it’s an hour drive north to Indio’s box stores or a half hour drive south to Calipatria’s Circle K.

Slab City became a mecca of drifter legend because of two men, Leonard Knight and Charlie Russell. Knight settled out there to spread and promote his preferred gospel messages via an art installation called Salvation Mountain. It’s his homage to scripture, a few stories tall, built from adobe and paint, a wildly colorful hillside at the entrance to Slab City. Many holy rolling tourists drive out there to see it.

Russell reportedly quit his tech career and set up what he calls a sustainable art installation known as East Jesus, wherein he advocates the need of humanity to recycle, and crafts exhibitions constructed from repurposed garbage. Slab City residents, who affectionately call themselves slabbies, are among the most eclectic drifter folk you’ll ever meet. Many of them are retired RV culture gadabouts and snowbirds who’ve made their annual freebie stays at the Slabs a longer-term commitment.

A good number of slabbies are what polite society often likes to call delinquents. A greater number are among those who are hiding for a reason, and that was the reason for my first foray out there, though I’ve visited several times since. I was looking for someone who didn’t want to be found. They remained undiscovered, though I daresay they were probably there while I was searching and inquiring and eventually redirected elsewhere by natives sympathetic to her cause. There’s a code out there in the Slabs and I didn’t expect any locals to break it. I just hoped I’d come across her in person. It’s an unfound kind of place.

It takes fair effort to get all the way out there, more so to stay and survive. Petty crimes and drug use run rampant among their ranks. Rapes and arson happen routinely as well. Imperial County police often have their hands full when they patrol out there on weekend nights. Slab City is mostly lawless, but like Skid Row in LA or the Tenderloin in San Francisco, it’s a draw hub for a notable portion of California’s drifting unhoused. You’d think 120 degree temps would deter the most determined, liberty lovin’ vagabonds, but free is free and for people looking to disappear, the more remote and inaccessible, the better.

The desert in California is a razor’s edge, full of meth labs and buried bodies, Native magics and frontier ghosts. Spend any significant time out there, it’ll change you, for better or for worse, depending on how you internalize things. Myself, I highly recommend heading out there and taking the Mojave-Sonora nations in with an open yet fortified mind, whether you meditate amongst the boulders and lizards, or drink yourself silly in a roadside, podunk dive bar. Either way, a week of drifting in the high desert will make your brain feel like it’s been scrubbed with steel wool.

Anyhoo…I segued there a bit. Apologies, but not mentioning the Salton Sea wastelands in a chronicle of Californian apocalypse would be remiss.

Continued…

*Compiled from June 17, 2020