December 17, 2004
Parked in Desert, Waiting Out the Winter of Life
By CHARLIE LeDUFF
SLAB CITY, Calif. - Directions to purgatory are as follows: from Los Angeles drive east past Palm Springs into the bowels of the Mojave Desert. Turn south at the stench of the Salton Sea. Proceed down Highway 111 to the town of Niland, a broken-down place of limited possibilities.
Turn left on Main Street and head down the road to the railroad tracks where the law sometimes waits, as though the tracks were an international boundary.
"Where you going?" asked the deputy, Frank Lopez, on a recent night, even though the road leads to just one place. The Slabs.
Bored stiff, the deputy spun a ghost story about drugged-out crazies, a cult in a blue bus, a child molester, a man who sleeps with rattlesnakes, a mobster on the lam, and old people, flocks of old people who have traded in their picket fences for a mobile home and a life on the drift.
"The best thing to do," he said, "is to turn around."
Five miles down is the sign, "Welcome to Slab City," marking the entrance of this former World War II military base. The only suggestion of life this night was the flickering of campfires. At a makeshift mission, some men stood around a fire, casting silhouettes with a vaguely sinister feel.
Among them was the pastor, Phil Hyatt, who shared some coffee and a few paraphrased biblical passages. The Pentecostal preacher excused himself and shambled back to his trailer. First the shoes came off, then the coins went on the nightstand. The bedsprings creaked and then he cried.
Pastor Hyatt, at 69, has inherited the burden of living. His wife, Audrey, died this year after suffering a stroke here in the desert wasteland. The memory of her scent is everywhere.
"Ah, he's lonely, and it's tough to see it," said Rusty, 73, who sat at the pastor's fire, warming himself. Rusty looked and smelled like a bum - the price paid, he said, for freedom. "Nobody particularly wants to die out here in the desert, but the living's free."
Slab City is not so sinister as it is a strange, forlorn quarter of America. It is a town that is not really a town, a former training grounds with nothing left but the concrete slabs where the barracks stood. Gen. George S. Patton trained troops here. Pilots of the Enola Gay practiced their atomic mission, dropping dummy bombs into the sea.
The land belongs to the state, but the state, like the law, does not bother, and so the Slabs have become a place to park free. More than 3,000 elderly people settle in for the winter, in a pattern that dates back at least 20 years. They are mostly single, divorced or widowed - a whole generation on the road, independent, alone. In this place, to be 55 years old is to be young.
There are no amenities; no potable water, no electricity, no sewerage. Groceries can be picked up in town at the grubby market whose managers do not seem to mind that hundreds of people fill their jugs from the water tap. Mail is routed to a post office box - Niland, CA 92257. Gasoline is bought in distant towns like Brawley; prescriptions and liquor are bought in Mexico. Sewage is held in storage tanks or holes in the ground.
The north side of Main Street is Poverty Flats. The south side, the suburbs, where the relatively well-to-do motorhomies have their dinner dances and clubhouse trailers.
Cole Robertson lives in the Flats with his wife, Mabel. Mr. Robertson, 72, is a retired construction worker from East Texas who cuts an intimidating figure, sitting shirtless, with one rheumy eye, a watermelon physique and a cotton fields vocabulary. An argument with a neighbor last year ended with one of the Robertsons' trailers in flames. That is how law is dispensed in the Flats, vigilante style. One man was dragged to death a few years ago, another shot in the kneecap last year. Occasionally, the deputies do come around, usually in the day to exercise a warrant or to remove children who have not been seen in school for months. But normally, justice comes at the end of a matchstick in the Flats.
"There ain't no rules," Mr. Robertson said. He told of his neighbors, an aging man who lives with his voices in the rundown bus, a geriatric transvestite, a no-good who strapped his kid to a tree and left him in the sun.
A few years ago, a man tried making scrap metal from an unexploded aluminum shell he found at the bombing range in the nearby Chocolate Mountains. He succeeded but at the cost of his own life. His legs had to be picked from a tree. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/17/national/17slab.html>
Carl