So Who's Crazy, Them Or Us?

By Steve Lopez/Slab City

It used to be much easier to tell which of us were nuts and which weren't. Take, for example, a recent trip to a California desert to check out a scrubby campsite in the middle of the sand trap that stretches from San Diego to Phoenix. The nowhere setting and psycho temperature, a relatively cool 112[degrees] on a recent afternoon, tells you right away that the 100 to 150 squatters parked there this summer--several thousand others always flee the heat and return in October--are whacked out of their gourd.

But let's not rush to judgment.

How much is your mortgage, and do you consider it sane?

The Slabbers, who live in motor homes, trailers, tents and vans, pay absolutely zip, staking claims on state property that's been available to all comers without hassle or regulation for 40 years.

When did you last make it through a day without wanting to choke one of the following: a cabbie, a telemarketer, the idiot driver in the next lane, the repairman who showed up three hours late, the people who control Internet access, all airline executives, a meter maid, some insipid bureaucrat, one of Larry King's guests or King himself?

Face it: your life is hell.

Meanwhile, the Slabbers may bake in the sun, but they fall asleep to the sound of coyotes and shower in a fresh spring not far from the banks of the Salton Sea.

But before you cancel the beach-house rental and pack the pup tent, you should know that Slab City--which got its name from the concrete remnants of a World War II training ground used by General Patton--isn't exactly Palm Springs minus ex-Presidents and bad pants.

There's still an aerial gunnery and a Navy SEALs' training ground nearby, and nothing makes those Joes happier than blowing things up day and night. There's no running water or sewage system; an Imperial County official calls Slab City an environmental nightmare. The county wants to regulate the 640 acres and charge squatters a fee, but the land belongs to the state, which would love to dump it but can't find a sucker.

So Slab City endures, with its misfits, coots, dropouts and loners, most of them pensioners and all of them celebrating freedom, the religion of the desert, and, best of all, free rent.

"A lot of people call it the last frontier," says Woody, 55, a retired truck driver, after a cooldown in his outdoor bathtub. While Woody dunked his derriere, fellow resident Linda Barnett, under a military camouflage net, delivered the nightly CB broadcast of camp doings and items for sale or barter.

"There's no information overload here, no crank calls, no Jehovah's Witnesses bugging you and no one trying to rip you off," says Barnett, a former X-ray technician who moved here nine years ago with a bad back and a disability check.

That may be true. But Slabbers have built a society somewhat like the one they fled, with good neighborhoods and bad, gentle souls and sociopaths, entrepreneurs and lazy Lebowskis. And Barnett's got a cell phone and color TV, for crying out loud.

Anita Parman, 59, is here with roughly 30 family members who look like a lost division of the convoy from The Grapes of Wrath. Dogs dive for shade under beat-up trailers, and dust-coated kids wear wet towels to beat the bastard sun. Last fall Anita got pulled over while living up north and had to cough up $1,500 for car insurance and a smog inspection, so she said the hell with that. "I'd rather get me a horse and a couple of burros and live here."

"Anybody who stays at the Slabs in summer's got to have a loose screw," insists Mike Aleksick, the fire marshal in nearby Niland (pop. 1,042). He's made friends among the 5,000 snowbirds who come in each winter, but there are outlaws among them too. "I've been shot at twice and been in fistfights."

Kamikaze Slabbers scurry onto the gunnery at night, hunting bomb remnants to sell as scrap, and a few have blown off limbs with live ammo. Aleksick resents that people sit up there tax free and then run him ragged with service calls, but he says 80% of the Slabbers are decent folk.

Leonard Knight, 66, has found heaven, picking Hank Williams tunes on his guitar, pumping his rickety bike into Niland and laying down coat after coat of paint on his hillside GOD IS LOVE shrine, a 14-year project at the entrance to Slab City.

"I couldn't be any happier," says Knight, a former snow shoveler from Vermont who has cash to spare from his monthly $200 Social Security check. Yeah, summer is miserable. "But I got 18 coats of paint on [the shrine] now, and you should see it shine when it really heats up. It's beautiful."

So who's crazier? Leonard, or the average Wall Street monkey in a suit, trudging to work in the 97[degree] soup New Yorkers call air?