Living in Slab City from Rabbitside camp perspective

there's rabbit side they made it a military base and I think the forties because it mimicked an area in Africa that they were considering going and messing up a little bit and so they're like all right well let's train here in the desert and so they turned it into a military base and used it for a decade or two and then World War two ended and they were like okay well let's get rid of it and I think that was in like the 50 late 50s they dismantled this whole area and left just the cement footings out there and that's why it's called Slab City and since then it has just been like a squatters then yeah over the years travellers hobos train hoppers hippies have been coming through and at least seasonally people that travel through America will come the population dwindles to a couple hundred in the summer and swells to potentially a couple thousand and the in the peak of winter you know that's people from all over the country and I should say all over the world there's a lot of international travelers will come here but mostly it's it's the transient population of the United States shifting around with the weather and the work so it's like you know in the summertime a lot of them go to Northern California and trim weed yeah so go up there and trim and work on the farms come back down here for the winter we can stay outside in the winter and smoke all that we eat and spend all that money that you got yeah we do not travel we're here full-time yeah we used to travel and and we decided we wanted some more plants in our lives and some more books and art and our lives and just living in a trailer full time didn't provide enough space for that the stability of having one spot to go back to like okay we gotta pack up our house move it to another spot set it back up yeah so having having the ability to be able to set up art and build things and have gardens and ponds that can get better and better year after year that's what we want yeah there is a trade-off I guess like living here is free and that's cool it needs to do whatever you want do whatever you want you can stay outside in the winter but it's it's at a cost and the cost is the the off-grid nature of this place and then the summer like a lot of people are here temporarily and then they go and for those of us that stay it's it's not the same place like if you visit slab city in this in the winter and your visit in the summer you've gone to two different places completely yeah like our lives change it's not like the same thing plus heat it's everything is different the way you live and like get up and what your goal is for the day it becomes like to survive it's almost that scary like it's but if you set yourself up like we did with a lot of shade and we have solar for electricity and yeah it gets better all the time yeah in the winter it can get pretty cold but don't ever really get to freezing yeah yeah and we have we have snuggly stuff and puppies in each other to stay warm and the summer it can hit like 125 130 degrees consistently for like there's at least a two three-week period right words like over 120 degrees yeah like it just hits that once and you're like wow that was crazy like you know it is that it sustains that yeah yeah we have to you know of course wash our own clothes which we heat all of our own water up on the stove so which is it to propane so and that you can get at the gas station so we have a few things that we have to purchase like and I guess and our middle tier of water we have the three kind of tiers so there's drinking water that you get in bottles from Walmart and that we just directly drink then there's the middle tier which is the closest town Niland we got a guy that knows another guy and he gets tap water off of them yeah and then delivers it in the three hundred gallon tank and so he fills our three hundred gallon tank which we use over the course of a month about a month yeah and so forty bucks we got that month's worth of water and that's for giving to the dogs to drink we make coffee with it wash the clothes clean ourselves or whatever metal chair and in the lowest tier of water that we use is for the pond and for the garden and for giving to the chickens I guess we'll do laundry and stuff with that too some kind of water yeah yeah and that's so slep cities situated between two canals there's the lower canal which is a farm canal it's farm runoff and that's where we pull our water from and then right next to us we are butted up against the top canal which this water is highlighted much nicer cleaner water we never take this water because they will find you $1,000 for touching that canal and that water goes yeah it's fast-moving yeah water that they're shipping straight to Palm Springs um to water golf courses yeah yeah so yeah there's that fence blocking the canal which the canal is then blocking a bombing range on the other side so this used to be a military base and then they closed it all down and kind of just moved down the road and opened up a smaller one and this whole mountain range here the Chocolate Mountains has been an active Air Force bombing range so there's drones and jets and helicopters flying around and just purling bombs at the mountain all day and then other branches of the US military use it as well for like training rounds they built a fake like whatever a little town like it's got a mosque in it there's little buildings and stuff and they shoot and blow the crap out of it until it just falls to pieces it's all built on the plywood and then trucks come in with more plywood and they rebuild it and then they do it again and they practice going into buildings and clearing them and although the ground-level stuff that you got to do but you can actually see it if you got on the hill you could see that all these little and looks just like a button looks like a town like a whole bunch of little structures they're just plain and white boring but it's there and there's a fake airstrip next to it and they blow that up as well yeah so there's regular explosions and gunfire and we have a lot of disabled veterans veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and I think some just retired veterans but I think a lot of them probably don't appreciate it but we actually kind of enjoy the it's nice the bombing leaves they're gonna do it anyway and it's an interesting experience yeah yeah and they drop like cluster bombs and really big powerful fiery bombs up in the mountain and at night you can see the flames and like the the people being lighting up but closer to us between us and the mountains is just like this big flat area and it's like they train the new guys there or whatever and so they're dropping bombs that are made out of cement and steel there's no explosive parts to them so all it's meant to do is just drop and it flies like a normal bomb would and it hits the ground you see like a of smoke or not smoke just dust from hitting the ground and so they make a pretty good bump but they're not explosive and we've had some of those land just on the other side of there now like if I took a golf ball hit it with a baseball bat I could hit where the bomb hit yeah so like we've had bombs fall that close to us but that's why they're out here they're practicing their mind I'm not perfect at it no and so if they missed by that much its theoretical that they could miss by a little bit more one day and blow up our outhouse or something or us we're not that worried about no but uh yeah when they drop that close it shakes the whole trailer it's like somebody's to retire at our trick one of the main challenges of living here especially in full time is we were told when we moved here that you're building your own prison so what do you want in your prison cell and then we've really taken that to heart and what they mean by that is I mean you're the three of us go to town all the time you're free to leave your camp and we've even I think gone out of town for like a week and had friend local friends comment you can even leave for the night and come back tomorrow we can go we did a hotel night over like that and then we come back the following day so you can go for 24 hours thoughts if you leave for any length of time and I mean and that's not fully agreed-upon experiment what yeah what what that length of time needs to be but your camp will be considered open game because most people do leave and never come back yeah there'll be a guy with a trailer and he's there and he's there and he's there and then all of a sudden one day you go and the trailers gone and there's pallets and other stuff that he had around it that's still there and you drive by the next day and the crap still there and then eventually somebody's gonna get it yeah so somebody finally like everybody's hovering around watching like is Bill gonna come back I don't think so man and then you go and you get it and as soon as somebody goes and gets that first item and then you pass by the next day and see that half of the stuff is gone you go home Dada yes he's coming to my game on it's game on yeah so like once a free-for-all kind of happens on a spot and some people will leave even and say like hey I'm leaving the slabs I've taken my trailer my karma this my that anything left it's yours go nuts yep free-for-all and we've participated in and scouring some of that stuff like when it's people die don't people die oh man when people die they'll they'll be carting a dead body out as people were going in and get their TV like you don't even wait for the body to go it's just like time is of the essence yeah and we don't we're not we've not been desperate enough to do that but that having been said I don't really think less of people for it I mean every man for himself out here it's not very difficult to live out here and they can't use it anymore I mean I hope that you know if in theory we stayed here forever and slowly one by one we went that when the last person went I hope our friends get here first yeah so they can have our really cool don't know make their lives easier cuz we're not gonna be using it at that point yeah I mean it's yeah it really is every man for himself out here so yeah when we go to the range where we go whatever we leave lights on and stuff and it's just always good to kind of like make your camp look obviously occupied to the point where I mean it's obvious that we live here because this thing is a 1,400 square foot structure before chicken coops and Gardens so like you'd be pretty pretty silly to think I wonder if somebody lives here but some people live in half of a tent with some rocks around it and it looks like a pile of garbage yeah and so a sign that says occupied is often the the standard here for marking like no this is a camp you know you take some garbage and you make a clear line around a spa and you put up a sign that says occupied you've met the requirements of slab City to to stake a claim yeah and there are also a lot of drug addicts and and D and thieves out here yeah um we have not had any problems with that though the only thing we've had go missing is a couple of hard-boiled eggs that were pretty sure a dog dog yeah so where you camp it depends on several factors how long you're staying I mean if you just stand for the week people will set up just pull over off the side right on the main road right next to the thing when Peter and I first got here that's where we were for a couple of weeks until someone invited us no that's actually how it's like you pull into like a staging area more or less and then start trying to find where where you could set your routes you know like yeah so having you know accessibility to it that you can tow your trailer in and out without getting stuck in the sand is difficult finding an area where the neighbors aren't crazy we live in an amazing neighborhood here we're gonna off to the side live in the outskirts yeah we have a lot of full timers the people in front of us and next to us stay all year and work really really hard on so we're lucky to be in that in that neighborhood but my advice for finding a spot in Slab City is a if you don't like your neighbors move um you don't own the land plenty of spots and a lot of these people are crazy so I mean it's not really worth potentially losing your life over or having your camp burned down or becoming an enemy of the neighborhood because now someone's spreading rumors about you because you've made enemy just so yeah if you're not getting along with the people around you go somewhere else I very strongly advise that here and then also don't cordon off more than you feel comfortable defending right um yeah if you can't see all corners of your camp and you can't feasibly like you know yeah keep that safe or whatever it's it's hard to do that yeah yeah yeah you don't bite off more than you can chew but then setting up like say you show up to slap city and you find a seemingly vacant area there's an open spot so you pull up with your trailer or whatever you have you get out you stretch you look around and you'll see some camps nearby and so if one of those camps as a guy out there looking at you like you're doing something very wrong like maybe they don't want you to camp there so go talk to that guy know hey man I'm thinking a stand in Slab City for like a month is it cool if I camp over in this spot and he's like no that's my buddy's spot he just went to Walmart for the day and you go alright cool dude is there anywhere you know and just ask around mostly because people in the area are gonna know what's vacant and what isn't and a lot of these people come out here to be secluded and you don't want someone you're right here and someone posted up right next to you some complete stranger and he's got five dogs and they're savage and yeah yeah again none of us own the land and we don't really have a right to tell people where they can and can't be but as a general courtesy out here we try to if you want to set up somewhere ask all the all the people around you how they feel about it let them know what your intentions for the area are yeah and more often than not they'll be thrilled to have you yeah but yeah just as a courtesy yeah make sure you're not infringing on on their space the way we look at it here too is like somebody is going to move in next to you like if there's an open spot someone will occupy it and you're not gonna know them so if somebody comes up to you and says hey I'm thinking of occupying that spot over there and you kind of like up and down and you're like hey you seem kind of cool and normal alright yeah do it you know cuz now BAM that spot is occupied and and you don't have to worry about who's gonna suddenly move in there the next day or something that's actually exactly why we're in this spot because they asked us if we would move over here we're basically their guard dogs yeah we're their wall yeah and then cuz we're slightly more menacing than they will be often and then like yeah we try to put our more menacing friends even further on on the other side of us yeah so it's like a triple triple layer of defense yeah so yeah at our camp we call ourselves rabbits side cuz when Peter and I first showed up just to help people remember our names we introduced ourselves is Jessica Rabbit and Peter Rabbit and then just kind of colloquially would say you know hey if I go annoy me over whatever like once you come chill rabbit side yeah yeah and and then ended up deciding to kind of brand it that way people are out here to see how little they can live with or I have you know how minimal they can make their lives yeah and we actually are almost here for the opposite reason like I said we were tired of only having what we could have in a trailer Peter and I had our whole lives in storage in Illinois and we missed our stuff and so we decided to kind of combine the worlds and stay homeless but bring all of our worldly possessions out to the desert yeah and so around that we're just trying to build kind of a we call it our like botanical art palace yes we have acquired how many chickens we have 18 chickens for daughter talks we're breeding crickets we're raising bees now raising ladybugs ladybugs the chickens are all rescues from other places in the slabs people were already owning chickens out here just not necessarily very well in some cases so we built coops and and bit by a bit can you guys rescue these chicken can you take these chickens and so we just kept expanding that capability and now we're up to 18 I think for duckies yeah our Birds have an automated mister system so it's hard to keep birds alive out here in the summer because of the heat but but ours do okay because they get missed it yeah exactly but yeah I like to think of it as like as if this place were slob cities kind of like post-apocalyptic or whatever it looks like everything just burned down and this is all that's left and we're just pulling in the trash and trying to make lives real again and so I feel like our house was at some point an art gallery or something or like this really weird eclectic oddities shop that had a small greenhouse growing in the corner but since it had been abandoned the glass had fallen out of the greenhouse and all the plants so just like exploded out with growth and they're covering every single corner and so we want to have books and art and all this awesome stuff everywhere but then you just reach through here and pull out a tomato and you to buy it out of it and there's dragon fruit hanging from the ceiling and like yeah you see a book you want to check out and you potentially have to pull back vines to ax yeah get some bugs off of it and stuff and like yeah so like you got to push back the leaves to come into our house cuz every single leaf is an air conditioner and it's cooling the air just directly around itself so if we have 400,000 of those it just makes sense that that's gonna keep us cooler yeah and that's quite ambitious here in the desert but we do it here because it's the only place we know of where we can do it for free and build it out of whatever the hell we want to no permits yeah no permits no building code as of yet nobody's gonna tell us not to so yeah I mean Peter works at Walmart we're doing this on one income we were doing it on no income no income for quite a while we're selling art and eggs at the road and that was okay for a bit and then we had to ask for help getting dog food and when we were not able to feed our own animals okay that's not good that yeah that was not acceptable to us that was so yeah Peter's the best candidate for it Walmart every day until they were like fine just work here stop it sure he's like the only one that doesn't speak Spanish in that entire wall right yeah they actually use the radios and talk in Spanish on the radios that's because every single person there just speaks Spanish mostly says but that's now he's also they're also paying for him to learn Spanish yeah a lot of the gardens here we planted last year when we started this so most of what you see actually survived the summer which is good to know 75% of what we had died and that was how we learned what plants survived and which ones don't and it's pretty obvious it's like aloe and cactus like it everything else hates it we managed to keep a vegetable garden alive all summer as well and I've kept shaded and so we have tomatoes and sugarcane and herbs and peppers and the pomegranate tree a couple chickens over there that eat the bugs that come out of the garden and then the garden part kind of continues through the whole thing the idea is that we're trying to just build this wooden skeleton over top of our trailer or actual house it's kind of like a secondary house to take the heat on the outside of it but on the inside to be completely filled with plants and art and so the art part is to make us happy and the plants part is actually to keep us cool so we're currently not focusing on growing food crops necessarily we're focusing on growing climate crops so we have vines that are growing all over the place and we started to get some really big broad-leafed plants that can just act as little tiny air conditioners so like this thing here is a twenty dollar vine but it's going to cover this whole section of this house so like 20 dollars to completely shade and cool ourselves sounds like a pretty good a pretty good investment you know it does take water but the more we plant and the more we grow the less that's going to evaporate the less will actually need to water so at some point you meet a tipping point where you keep increasing the plants and you keep increasing the water and then all of a sudden things start to get easier for you and the plants do a really good job of holding on to that water and delegating it to who gets it and everything it's currently not running right now I turn it off because it's a cloudy day but we have a pond and there's goldfish in here and duckweed and all the filtration for the pond is natural so it's just we keep adding things like snails and clams and plants to clean the water that we get from the canal and then this water here gets cycled around it's plumbed all the way up so the entire structure has plumbing and valves and they're all operated by a micro controller so we're trying to automate the watering and the misting and the climate control of this so that we don't have to be depended on to remember you know like if if the chickens needed misting every hour but I fell asleep you know and you wake up three hours later and you go oh okay the chickens are all dead whoops from having a nap you know so it seems a little overkill to like oh we got this little tiny computer and valves and it's all automated and and stuff and but it's it's actually not overkill because it's it's like less kill you know it's it's it's something else it's keeping track of that for us and we have so much to keep track of in the summer it's the whole thing was just staying alive and this thing this painting was probably like one of our best purchases this in the middle of the summer it's like two percent humidity and you just stare at this thing and it doesn't makes you feel damp this is where we put all the birds it's it kind of doesn't make sense you would think to put and multiply 20 chickens and ducks right next to your trailer it's only eight feet between the two but we do everything we can to keep it very clean and to clean up the poop every day and stuff sorry I didn't do it today yeah and so the chicken coops don't really produce much of a smell they produce a lot of noise but this is the coolest place and so to keep them alive it makes sense to share all the effort that we're putting into keeping ourselves cool and to also spread that to the chickens so they have a misting system that's automated like I was saying and there's a wooden roof above us here instead of shade cloth on the other side and the solid wood created a much cooler environment back here this is kind of our utility space so it's not very pretty and every single spot in this place is actually under construction the summer time we just lay there and try to stay alive in the winter time it's just constant go go go go go bill bill bill because well the time is ticking and you can't do it anywhere you have like an hour in the morning when the Sun just comes up and an hour or so as if going down and you can do stuff in the summer otherwise nothing gets done it's just all these chickens and we got them we're almost completely naked they had no feathers it's like this one here my name David Copperfield yeah but that one there was attacked by a dog so my gosh big white eggs like I love the color variant and all the eggs that we have here and then we don't we'll wash them a bit like this hey and any poop and stuff will get off but just lightly in the pond I just use my thumb and all the goldfish will actually eat all this stuff that falls off of the eggs so they love it and I just sit there and hand clean each one so that they maintain their outer protective coating so these eggs at room temperature good for a month it's not like store-bought eggs where you have to replace them often fixes so yeah because of that I got one two three four dozen down here a dozen duck eggs there's probably another three in there I have a dog he's got this one and all that stuff we now take those plus vegetables dried dates we've been baking fresh bread since we take all that stuff and then I put it on my bike and then I biked around slide city with a little ballon I try to get people to buy eggs and bread garbage not included but this is my delivery bicycle there was a camp in Slab City that again like like most people did they left for the season they said hey I have some junk at the camp anybody wants it go crazy and so we went and grabbed some pallets and some whatever else and there was some bicycle parts like the frame and some wheels and we just gonna grab the whole pile and brought it and for months it's not out there and one day I was like I mean how much of a working bike do we have those so I started assembling the parts there's a whole bike and we just had to put tubes in it and the damn thing works so I started taking some little pieces of angled aluminum and some other other pieces of metal and copper wire and rivets and and banding and nails and just kind of junked together this bicycle and from there I'm out of the basket and so this is what I put actually it's dried Dylan so this is what we put all of our produce and the eggs in I got the foam to keep them from bouncing around and I just drive this thing around I try to do it every three days or so I want to bail so that I can kind of like Pavlovian condition all of slab city to know like that you hear that sound like oh that's the egg guy you know and so the fresh bread actually gets a lot more sales than the eggs now people once they hear like oh wait fresh bread and you just break off a small piece and kind of give it to people and like you'll be back yeah like a drug dealer with bread but we were also given a bunch of dried dates all right not dried days because we're getting just dates and they'll pin it all of those put them in a solar dryer that we made and then packages of dried dates so I like trying to make the packaging kind of cute I feel like if somebody just hands through a handful of dates or they hand you a nice little paper bag with our piece of twine on it like one one has a little more appeal than the other but yeah you can do just about anything with garbage you know this whole entire place is just like how can we use this I have 10 of these things like what can I do with that and we try to find ways to utilize everything and every drop of water that before it hits the ground ultimately we try to make it bounce off as many things before it hits the ground and then when it hits the ground we put hay on top of that to try to stop it from evaporating so you just do every possible thing to stretch every possible thing even the seashells that are in the ground here in the stones and we sweep the ground the sand and seashells and stones that we take out of here I dumped in the driveway to fill the ruts so over time there was a couple ruts with roots sticking out of them and it was just awful and I just keep taking sand and pouring them into the spots and Peter drives in and out every day with the car and compacts it and the driveways perfect now it was just from the d'être 'test the removal of garbage essentially dirt from in here and there's still a purpose for it so I like that part seriously collecting thrift store art for about 20 years I have significantly more than is actually out I basically got one of these storage crates full full I like colorful tacky kitschy I like vintage animal things I just I find all sorts of fascinating so this for example it's an award for selling makeup Avon lady award I got it for two dollars and eighty-eight cents it's amazing like a golden Mary Poppins who doesn't want this two dollars and eighty-eight cents so yeah when Peter and I went on the road that was my one stipulation is I'm not getting rid of my collection it means the world to me and then when we decided to stay I immediately said okay well my life is full of this stuff so let's go get it and we did and I've been slowly but surely finding places for it on the walls and in the nooks and crannies and it it brings me a lot of joy nothing makes me more uncomfortable than a blank room it absolutely makes my skin crawl so I like to express Who I am through silly and very cheap very cheap things from thrift stores so yeah that's my aesthetic I comes in and I it's all thrift art but I again take take the collection very seriously that's all I think of it really truly is a curated collection yeah and some some of its one-of-a-kind you want to see my favorite piece I had this for years it's very a symmetrical my head it for a very long time before I notice this this out right how cool is that so John Corona is what it says I think down here has a very cool grandmother and yet this is one of my favorite pieces like I said I had it for years before I noticed that and that to me is that's the magic of collecting drift art cuz you're collecting things from other people's lives without context and and yeah sometimes there's there's hidden treasures okay so you can find us at rabbits I'd camp rabbits I'd camp on Instagram which I manage that's true and then YouTube is this is youtube.com slash rabbit side you could also just look up rabbit side and you'd find us we do videos about a lot of the projects that we do here and I'll just kind of set up the camera and start building something and then edit it together so it's it gives you kind of an insight into how some of the stuff is done ya ever come to slab city we got a sign out by the road stop by and see us we love to have visitors yeah it's actually one of the main reasons that we're here because we could do this other places maybe but we wouldn't meet the people that we're meeting here exactly yeah it puts you out there and and it just it forces you into opportunities you now we build this thing we let people then we're gonna meet so many people and you just have so many opportunities and it's it's interesting so yeah come meet us you

Channel: Darinka Montico

Views: 195,497

Rating: 4.8117833 out of 5

Keywords: Slab City, Rabbitside camp, Rabbitside, Darinka Montico, Warmshowers, Warmshowers host, Off the grid, how to live off the grid, how to survive in the desert, places to live for free, squatting, anarchy, The last free place, salvation mountain, east jesus, recycling, how to make a house, how to build a house with recycle material, recycling architecture, alternative living, alternative lifestyle, sustainable living, the last free place, free places in america

Id: 31vG4vXD6Ks

Length: 33min 22sec (2002 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019