Self-Governing Off the Grid Squatters Paradise - Slab City's Story

so this was a military base in preparation for that invasion um in the 50s they're in a cold war they decommissioned the base everybody's here for their own reason we ain't gonna bust your balls about it but we are going to investigate to a point because if you're a child molester well we'll sneak up on you we'll bury you i live this life so long if someone takes me to san diego i freak out when i see grass or like a burger king the first thing on the list is don't die the second thing is make sure your friends don't die the first season i was here i was stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver 10 of those on average died so we have 15 deaths this year in 60 days as long as you're not smoking dope and stealing at three in the morning you'll be drinking smoke every day you are twice as safe being a combatant in afghanistan that you are here i think this is a place where people come to say no you know because it ain't right out there once you become a true slabber you hold value here and and that changes the day you become a true slavery it's the weirdest thing i've ever seen but there is some people that have been here 15 20 years i listen to anything they got to say you know because they earned it when people end up coming out here it's because they have something that they're trying to run away from or something that they need to heal from and they don't know how to and then there's people that show up here that'll help them in that way that'll show them what they need to know or what they need to learn to help them grow and it's magical in a way it really is this is the first place that i came where you can just do whatever you want to i get up in the morning drink coffee smoke some weed and i'll either read a book hang out with friends create art work on my camp plan my garden do a little bit of all of it or do nothing and go back to bed you do what you want no timetables no commitments no calendars no watches everybody out here came from a broken home or is broken in their own sort of way so we all found family in each other my cousin said i will pay for you to come back to the west or the east coast and you can stay with me for free and my thought was that's not home that's that's literally blood family related to me and i love them but that doesn't feel like home to me this feels like home the slabs is actually a really good place we give it a bad name so people will stay the out but in all actuality if you're a kind-hearted person you're good about yourself and about others and you're kind to others like this is a great place and it will be a great place to you but if you're mean you're ugly and you're evil well you get what you put out and this place will give that to you real quick [Music] this is los angeles population 3.9 million and this less than 200 miles away is slab city a summer population of a few hundred and a winter population a few thousand to say slab city is different wouldn't quite do it justice in 2012 a journalist from time magazine summed it up as follows if the burning man festival were a permanent settlement instead of a week-long escape remixed with a hard dose of reality this might be it the slabs is not for the faint of heart it's a place where you earn your stripes people respect your tenure slab city is a squatters encampment and has been for decades there are no public services such as electricity running water or waste pickup but there's also no rent because the barter system isn't uncommon and trash tends to pile up repurposing is a part of the lifestyle until i moved to slab city i always looked at something for the purpose it was made and when i lived in the city i would never thought this is nothing but a bed spring this makes a really sturdy fence or it can make a wall you can line them up like this so this would be the inside of your house and stack them up then staple screen to the back so the bugs don't fly through then you sit inside and the breeze comes through people can live here for years on less than 100 a month that's partly because they look out for one another love thy neighbor is more than just a mantra and if you don't play nice in the sandbox this is what happens to your camp some befriend neighbors out of necessity and others they're simply longing for human connection some have been rejected by society and others they reject society nonetheless people tend to come here for a hard reset a new identity we have people have nowhere else to go we have felons who serve time for murder on the community board no one cares what you do here greater society identified as babylon in the eyes of local residents known as slabbers is not for them first three months i was here i had 36 cents in my pocket you know nobody cared nobody asked them it wasn't enough you know it wasn't even a thing it wasn't an issue nobody asked me what i did they still don't ask me what i did there's a lot more i can say about the community history social hierarchy topography resident initiatives and culture and i will in the next several minutes for now let's wrap this up and talk to some slabbers i went on a mission to discover the truth about slab city the good the bad the beautiful and the ugly and like any slabber will tell you there's a mix of all four this is without a doubt a very very special place so without further ado i present to you slap city [Music] slab city is self-proclaimed as the last free place on earth in the words of a true slabber as long as you're not pissing off your neighbors you can do whatever you want and perhaps there is no better illustration of that than dot for years dot had a career in computer programming she has a family and talks to her daughter every day dot doesn't reject society she just craves freedom in its most literal form and now she owns one of 37 1951 greyhounds collects animal carcasses and makes tie-dye shirts with bleach this is what we do with skeletons and stuff around here got a cat and a goose and when i found that i literally thought it was a football and i flipped it over and now it's a cat see there's the face see the most of the world i guess this is very very different but once you're here for like more than a minute it doesn't seem different anymore it starts to feel normal and you start to get i guess jaded a little bit and start to feel like this is how everybody lives so this is where the roadside carnage will go inside this glass case it's a glass bottom table i still go to san diego i still get out of the slabs there are a lot of people that never leave and i can see how you would get stuck here living the way we live it's like going to camp and never leaving so i stay cool this summer oh yes this was amazing it saved my life for real i get very sad when i find out that somebody's like oh yeah you know i don't keep in touch with my son or i you know have never met my daughter or whatever i'm just like man i can't even imagine that you know i want to know everything that's going on with my kids like you know honestly as soon as one of my kids has a kid i'm gonna go be a granny nanny i'm like looking forward to being a granny nanny be the best nanny they could have my mom's like really dying to come visit i can't wait to see so this is a cabinet it's supposed to remind you of narnia right going through the cabinet watch your head and you come into this room we'll have more artwork most of the artwork has been is inside that trailer with the books but yeah that's where the chicken heather sleeps princess castle this is the first place that i came where you can just do whatever you want to i've lived in a lot of towns i've thought about doing like a tourist attraction kind of thing other places and um i i just this is the first place that you can do it there's no there's no county or government organization that's like wait a minute you can't set up this whole where are your building permits and all that all those things that stop you before you even get started in there is the skeletor area which is full of all the bones and weird things that i have collected since i've been here so it's basically a trailer full of bones i don't consider myself stuck at all i like what i'm doing and i'll do it until i don't enjoy it anymore and then i'll do something else so what happens is like things die out here and often the ants will eat the carcass so quickly that it preserves it like that's how that ringneck snake is like perfect and i found it just like that i like to reuse anything that has any other use whatsoever a 1951 greyhound bus they only made 37 of them i don't know which one this one is it says the serial number up here and that's the number of it like number 14 or something they were too heavy they were called the queen mary so they took them out of production they've like stopped production on them at number 37. there's only like four or five of them left and this one still runs step on up inside and get a good view with the camera where did the clothes come from again all sorts of places i have um i think five collections of like people who've passed away where literally they just didn't know what to do with this hoarder's stuff so they brought it to me there were a bunch of thrift stores that went out of business uh during the pandemic and they just dumped all of their stuff over on the free slap so everybody just took as much as they could because of the amount of clothes that i have when people see the clothes then they're like oh right so the next time i go to goodwill just bring it to you i'm like yes so a lot of it comes that way too [Music] hi my name is peter pasalaqua this is the rainbow camp in slab city i am the artist and i'm gonna take a dab dot has a knack for repurposing objects of course in slab city this is common practice and perhaps one of the best examples is pete a man who has made repurposing an art form i like to take things that people are going to throw away and upcycle them that's this is the wi-fi center over here it's just a big joke yeah it's so interesting the way that my success has happened in slab city over portland oregon in portland oregon i was just another one of the 150 people that have a booth at saturday market down in here in slab city i'm a god i also make and sell miniature salvation mountains out of adobe this is a big mock-up and this is actually a working pizza oven if you notice the beer bottles instead of bricks down below in the base instead of uh buying bricks we use beer bottles out here to build with it's a lot cheaper i grew up with a whole generation of kids that were raised by single moms we were kind of like invisible to our families so if it was your birthday and you were in our group we would go out of our way to make it your most special day in the world and make you feel like the most special person on your birthday moving to slab city is so lateral everybody out here came from a broken home or is broken in their own sort of way so we all found family in each other this is my kitchen i made this whole kitchen out of adobe and things that i salvaged for example somebody dropped me off the tiles this black tile is an element of design another way that we can heat things up without using any energy at all just the energy from the sun we're fed up with rules we're fed up with being looked down upon we're fed up with working minimum wage jobs and not being able to afford rent we have a saying out in slab city no matter how little you have there's always somebody with less instead of an air conditioner we just go in here in the summer time to stay cool so basically every dog in the neighborhood comes over here and hangs out at my pond i built the whole waterfall system out of sandstone i went up the road in my car and quarried all the sandstone by hand thousands of birds use my pond every day this is heaven built it all by hand and all these tapestries and stuff this is just all garbage you know if you look through some deer antlers some costume jewelry necklaces i'm 51 years old i have a 50 years left on this planet but i have over 100 years worth of art ideas in my head touring pete's campet was very obvious he put an enormous amount of time energy and other resources into his camp his quote on quote property but he didn't actually buy the land because this is a squatter's encampment it begs the question how do you claim your steak in the land if it's got occupied on there you don't mess with it at all that's right placing an occupied sign and marking your property line are two of the first steps traveling throughout the slabs that became abundantly clear people will use anything and everything to mark a perimeter most commonly tires and some can be a bit more aggressive the majority of slabbers are seasonal so what happens to camps if left unattended for the summer you can either have someone watch it which may or may not be successful or you stay the larger camps like this and other lots of others you know generally one or two people agree to stay for the whole summer you know to hold the place down because if you leave it back in you can come up and take it when a camp develops over time it develops a sort of equity in the community and some will attempt to sell like this listing that is online right now [Music] now we understand how one claims land here but how does the outside world otherwise known as babylon recognize slabbers and their property local schools do and pick up kids every day this is jurisdiction of the county sheriff and for the most part they stay out of the slabs but they will patrol and respond to calls the postal service does not recognize the slabs ups and fedex though they've been delivering here for years people simply make up an address and as long as the signage is clear they'll deliver it that's right every day like much of the us amazon prime packages are delivered throughout slab city there was a couple people in the internet out here and started ordering stuff and convinced these ups and fedex guys to deliver out here and they just made up an address and it kind of took off and then the more people that moved here and the more people had internet more people ordered online so i stopped the ups guy one day and he said hey just uh make up a sign make up a number whatever your favorite number is write it on a board and put it out there we'll deliver to you i've been getting packages for 10 years and this brings us to jack i've become a cliched guy you see in the movies living in an rv off-grid talking about the end of the world i was living in san francisco and lost my main job i was in property management i worked part-time as a florist and i worked part-time for two jewelry makers christmas eve i was house sitting i went to google and just for fun i mean i just joking around i typed how to live for free i'd never heard of this place never heard this place in my life and when i enter there's all this links free this free that but i seen slab city didn't sound appealing so i didn't click on it but as i was going through them there's all these claps that he slapped city slapstick slap city free living last free place in america my last replacement when i click on it it was amazed and so i came down here i told everybody here i said oh i'm just here for a year and i'm gonna i'm just taking a break from the scene i'll regroup clean myself up and get my resume together i'll go back to the city and go back to work so i come here and i'm sitting around drinking my coffee thinking how am i allowed to get away with this how are these people how come someone's not showing up and telling us no like you can't do this and i was looking all these people building these structures like no one owns this problem what are you guys doing out here there'll be a roof over this and then this will be the entry and that's a wine bottle floor shade cloth will be over this area so you make these and hang them up oh my friends make them this is all scrap wood i find that when they come through to stay with me in the season they paint on my walls that was a wall board and um you can see i got a stack of them here this is not like being in the real world there's no pressure right so out there every 30 days i gotta have x amount of dollars to live here that amount is so small if i told you exactly how much money i lit just to scrape by thirty dollars a month how do you eat card 30 a month you can live on if need be if i need be 2012 13 and 14 barely 30 a month my water tank is 100 gallons and it costs 25 to fill it up that lasts 30 days my stove is propane and for 15 bucks i can get a tank for three months there's no rent and once you get your solar system up the sun never sends you a power bill my rv is paid for the motor was blown at it only paid a thousand dollars everything inside of it worked all the plugs fridge lights everything worked so now i got this tiny house for only a grand like i own the paper it's sitting on land that i have to pay property tax on and i got my solar system up and i got air conditioning i got a refrigerator i got a swamp cooler i got lights charged cell phone i got the internet and i got all this i got everything i had in my apartment in san francisco but this is not costing me nothing it's free this allows me to run my ac 10 hours a day have my refrigerator on 24 hours a day 24 batteries and up on top for my solar panels i have six 280 watt panels then i've got this charge controller here i've got it broke down i've got a a 60 amp and a 30 amp charge controller and then this bad boy here is my power inverter and this is my whole system i get up in the morning drink coffee smoke some weed and i'll either read a book hang out with friends create art work on my camp plan my garden do a little bit of all of it or do nothing and go back to bed like as you do what you want no timetables no commitments no calendars no watches so each one had a zen quote with a paint pins i'm going to redo these so you find all this wood throughout slab city and junk piles mostly and box springs i use mattresses i've made fences out of this stuff but these things are really art in their cells you know and when you get them with the box springs with the wood this makes a really sturdy fence there's a lot of garbage on the ground here and a lot of people with free time on their hands if you have any kind of creative bit at all about you these garbage piles are just basically art supplies just got to pull them out jack is spot on after arriving in slab city you realize quite quickly there's trash everywhere at the same time it's remarkable how creative people are with the trash to be fair some of this is out of necessity and the fact that there's no trash pickup it drives many to repurposing but for others it's just plain fun despite the creativity there were times i saw so much trash i couldn't help but ask how could this many people produce this much waste well it turns out a lot of it didn't come from slabbers these little towns around here there's no garbage service so they have to take their garbage to a dump if you're going to the dump why pay a fee when you just go two miles further and dump in slab city for free so a lot of garbage on the ground here is not really from people that lived here there's from outside they don't do it no more now because there's so many people living here we see them and yell at them [Music] [Music] so this is a solar over the solar oven i cook anything that i cook in a regular conventional oven pops open like this and then it has a tray inside a thermometer i swing it around and point it at the sun even in the winter time it'll heat up to 450 heat up frozen pizzas frozen burritos i don't even go buy groceries anymore i order online i hardly ever leave my camp how often what's hardly never uh once a week there's a little market four miles away i may go in there to get a couple of adult beverages so once a week for for a couple drinks and then outside of that i don't go nowhere for months months what's the longest you've ever not left you know right now i'm coming up on one year without leaving i will uh take a few of these bales go get that adobe bring it up in a wheel barrel mix it up a little bit of straw water and that adobe pick it up and pack it and then paint it and that's exactly what salvation mountain is adobe wall it's thermal mass that's two feet thick once it's covered in adobe and paint the heat will not penetrate it so and it's only around the back half because that's where i live in the summertime is in my bedroom so the sun won't touch this when i'm done my air conditioning all the dogs on the street can hear that thing turn on they're all at my door within five minutes how many do you get in there how many cats um i get between four and six cats and i get one two three four five dogs [Music] virtually every camp you visit has cats and dogs and just like the people rules for the pets are numbered most cats and dogs roam freely walking running playing and even sleeping for days at other camps is not uncommon dog lovers abound which brings me to another local lewis most people are hanging out with you know jill from accounting and matthew from management i am tomahawk from black jesus and nobody yeah it's fun before we jump into lewis though we're going back to history class how did slab city get its name and how has it evolved since its inception 1942 america is actively engaged in the second world war the navy is evaluating sites on the west coast to be used as a training area for artillery and anti-aircraft technology san diego is the most desirable location but the airspace is already heavily trafficked so they look east just over a hundred miles to imperial county deep in the sonoran desert there in march of 1942 the training facility of camp dunlap begins construction virtually the entire infrastructure is built of temporary materials shortly after the war the base is decommissioned most of what came in is carried out except the building's concrete slab foundations hence the name slab city years later the department of defense transfers the property to the state lands commission of california having fun yet well there's more currently a group of slab city residents have a pending application to purchase the land this has been pending for years and it gets more interesting any proceeds to the sale of slab cities land will go directly into the california teachers retirement pension fund any revenue generated from one of the most notorious squatters encampments in america will go directly to the california teachers retirement pension fund to this day despite camp dunlap being all but an afterthought there's still plenty of military activity nearby it's like a show you know some nights when they're doing their war games with the flares and the lasers shooting around and you hear the guns they shoot every gun available over there on a near daily basis dozens of armored trucks and transporters will roll through the slabs many exchanging waves it's not uncommon fighter jets or helicopters fly overhead some nights they'll come over so low if you're laying in your bed you'll feel the rotor wash in your chest without thumping them and because of the active artillery range nearby bullets and casings are routinely discovered by slabbers [Music] from the early days of the slabs the slogan of the last free place lived through we're out here checking up on slab city tell us a little bit about it place in the whole wide world oh it's wonderful now why do you say that because it's free we line dance we round dance we clog we there's square dancing out here we have a shuffle board we have horseshoes and free wasn't just defined in a financial sense this was a place where people could do whatever they wanted including walking your pet llama they enjoy being able to have their pictures taken and all the loving they get from many many people every day so the slabbers like the llamas how many other rv parks could you go walking around with your llamas every morning very few and even going back decades your neighbors your community was a major tenet of the slab city lifestyle we've been here about uh 25 years we've been really yeah why why do you keep coming back here well because of the people in the nice climate the people mostly yeah we have real nice people here we have potlucks in fact we're going to have a weenie bake tonight and you're living in slab city yeah i have been for 20 years really now why have you stayed here so long well i haven't died yet it made it to 82 and i like the weather like the people and the companionship yeah that's why i'm here probably one of my favorite moments though of the historical footage is a resident running through her daily announcements on a cb radio each resident took his or her turn break 2-3 break 2-3 that's friday night november 24 1989 approximately 5 59 pm this is shamrock lady and it's time for the announcements soul winner do you have any announcements yes i do thank you i'll say there's no ups this weekend uh might go the sun soul or whatever his hand or is i forget right now uh anyway i'm sure if he's listening he knows who i'm talking about he had i believe 13 or 14 cases of solar panels so where does that bring us today with lewis well part of the infrastructure of camp dunlap included three partially underground bunkers these bunkers were allegedly used to store ammunitions today they're some of the most sought after locations in the slabs though a bit far from quote unquote city center they boast a number of benefits we're 50 to 70 feet below sea level here those mountains that almost surround us 350 degrees form a bowl we're the bottom of the super we get a lot of flash flooding here we get hurricane force winds we have hundreds of earthquakes a year i feel it on a regular basis we are on the san andreas fault people watch on youtube and they're like oh it's easy i'll just put this up or put that up but when you get here the people make it difficult the terrain makes it difficult no services it's a lot harder than it looks and on regular basis we have natural disasters that would shut a city down and we're just like the next day we're like okay i guess we're rebuilding the one-third that was destroyed so that's why the bunkers are prized because if there's hurricane force winds they're not going to affect them [Music] [Music] hello [Music] so what happened here properties in this view people can just burn your house down most people don't call the cops here tend to be their own police force nobody gets arrested for it everyone's a slabber during the season with three to five thousand people live here during the summer only 150 stay i'm one of those four times in a row 10 of those on average die so we have 15 deaths this year in 60 days that's how rough it is you are twice as safe being a combatant in afghanistan that you are here during the summer [Music] did you really think i'd end the story like that part two starts right now [Music] [Music] hmm i feel like i just walked out after a bomb went off where's lewis it's all random stuff i've found here uh these are smoke grenades smoke screen m18 i got about a dozen of those i found an old radio antenna this is my second one uh they're great for wi-fi some old military uh ammo belts pretty cool these are great i can hook that directly to a solar panel doesn't matter the voltage it'll swim faster or slower if you're wondering how lewis became so handy well you're not alone lewis carries years of experience as an engineer need an iphone repaired and live in the slabs look no further than the man that does backflips off his roof all right i'm from the bronx from the housing projects i was born poor and in a violent place and um i got successful like jay-z i pulled you out of the projects and thrown me into 30 rockefeller and said come you know use your talents to make more people buy more that they don't need forget about the people who lifted you up to get you here forget about the people who fed you forget about your family back there that they can't get into the parties they're not cool enough that's why i feel guilty about it i provide a lot of services here i do a food pantry like i'll box everybody at food i do uh attic services needle exchange narcan tests i have all the attic services here like alcohol prep pads clean needles narcan tests and they drop off their dirties uh i never put a needle in my arm in my life but uh my mom was a addict and has been clean for decades she's got an a keychain taller than her and my son was addicted for a couple of years and is now clean for a couple of years so i do it for them somebody kept them alive somebody gave them clean needles i also gathered broken and scrap electronics all these phones all those laptops seeing which phones i could get working again program the sim cards and i have a list of who needs these devices and i give them for free people bring them to me too these just came in because people know i do this so locals say hey you know i got these i got these broken phones and tablets here i'll fix it give it to them first then keep the rest of them distribute them or use them for parts in la i had a little first floor loft with exposed brick and um i knew three people in the whole building um but i know every tenth outside my sidewalk because those are my neighbors too i just tend to get along with those people because that's how i grew up more like this than like that in new york city i would go to port authority i would go to the lower east side go to poor neighborhoods and build bikes i didn't have to leave my house to do right here they come to me this was originally a renergie board that i keep adding to this is another part that was originally on my bike this little guy here plus the battery that attaches to it which i have around here um is the equivalent of two car batteries two solar charge controllers um four usb outputs two dc outputs 110 output cigarette lighter output my last paid job was a professor of computer science taught at the digital new york film academy i taught mostly veterans in like 20 programming languages my specialty is actually artificial intelligence most people don't find out what i do here that i was a professor or anything so i know for a year or more until they hear the rumor and like why do they call you professor it's not a nickname it's a title it's the last job i had to lewis giving back is a way of life but he doesn't do it alone another slabber who wish to remain off camera has a partnership with a non-profit out of los angeles which among other services provides a safe needle exchange my name's soma and i'm the director of the sidewalk project we are the harm reduction organization that works directly on the street these have dirty needles in them let me show you something this is off of the ground out of slab city this is a part of the ugly part but beautiful part and why it's beautiful is this it takes a community to get these off of the ground not only do people bring them in but we have camps and people that bring these needles in from camps that don't use they will literally go and bring them in just picking them up off the ground let's put this in perspective for a moment this is like residents of a city walking around picking up dirty needles off of the street and delivering them to a site for processing the fact that she collects so many of these needles and does it you know so consistently like this is very very successful it's beautiful keep in mind we have a base population of 250 and only about 10 of those people use needles 25 people consumed that barrel yeah when we started the harm reduction program out here in the slabs there was a young man that was actually in the business of resharpening these needles without sanitation and the mrsa infections and the cysts hep seeds spreading around so and so forth was out of control we're not promoting the drug use we want them alive and healthy long enough until they can make the choice this summer we have helped six people go to rehab i've had people come from as far as el centro for narcan el centro is about 50 minutes away narcan is a life-saving device and i'm not going to turn them down i'm just not people are coming off the grid to get access to services so that they can't get on the grid which is so counterintuitive it's mind-blowing i expect it to serve a base population of 250 and now it's turned into thousands let's make one thing clear drugs are a part of the lifestyle of many slabbers like charlie who uses regularly charlie isn't proud of it but he's honest about it and we spent nearly a full day together starting with a visit to his friend's trailer jd i was a truck driver since 86 i've got over 5 million miles in accident free no tickets no warnings i just got hired on the phone by a company out of pennsylvania when can you start and i said well there's a catch i said if i have to wear a mask no bueno i said i'll wait till that settled in the courts and then you've got your guy and they said we'll wait remember this jd builds bowls bongs and the like and whenever possible he likes to use local materials and by local of course i mean bullets i had some herbs somebody gave me and i had nothing to smoke it out of so i had these two bullets that i found around here because it's a bombing range so i put that together in my head before i started putting it together for realsies so i figured a way to do it in my head and then i made it happen 20 millimeter body 50 caliber bowl the 50 caliber bowl was cut off of the other side of the 50 caliber and that turns around and that becomes a mouthpiece i had a dremel and an inverter and i hooked it to my battery and my ford festival and a half hour later i had that compromising is for other people american med used to mean fit and finish and quality and when you bought something here in this country from usa that meant you're going to get something that's going to last no longer it's all planned obsolescence because i'll make it on the chief you find the need of the people you'll do okay but if you're not good at that you're not going to make it here and then you're not gonna say who wants to sit here and be broke every day speaking of the need of the people charlie has a business of his own he actually purchased it from the previous owner bill's bike shop most people don't have working cars here and if they do they're not the most reliable however the weather for half the year is relatively mild the slabs aren't that large if you want to get from point a to point b and there's a mini mart four miles away the closest on the grid stop for slabbers and what does all of this have to do with charlie well you find the need of the people bicycles are extremely valuable here growing up on the south side used to be a bike fee because we were too poor we couldn't afford a bike so if i wanted a bike i had to go steal a bike i ended up finding out years later that i'm not very good at stealing because i was doing life on the installment plan when it came to prison so i snapped the hell out of that most people i meet here they don't have a lot of communication with the outside world i don't either but it's because i'm a drug addict and i don't want to bring no embarrassment to my family i love my siblings very much you know but i think they've always went through their life thinking i don't want nothing to do with them it's the parties think from the truth i just let's face it man i see dope man i do it every day sometimes twice a day i don't want my mom to know that stuff i didn't want my dad to know that stuff i'm the oldest in the family my responsibility is an older brother i feel a little guilty about that growing up they never seen me i was in juvenile institutions and then once i graduated to 18 then i went to the joint when i got there i joined the aryan brotherhood and i became a member they tried to kill me and my friend they killed my friend the brotherhood that you joined yes and i denounced them since then i was 19. i wanted to prove myself i wanted to i wanted to be a part of something i was never a part of nothing [Music] we lost two people this year in the canal because they were trying to save their dog i tried to explain to these people i know you love your dog i understand it but you don't understand if you die how it affects us as a community i mean 17 deaths this year man last year i lost three friends [Music] the canal charlie is referring to is the coachella canal part of a series of colorado river fed aqueducts a small portion of its over 100 mile span borders slab city because most don't have air conditioning and daytime summer temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees the coachella canal provides some respite from the heat however it's deceivingly dangerous and authorities have repeatedly made attempts to stop people from accessing it once you go up one of them drops it's so deep the water keeps you under there you will not get your breath back before you get to the top nonetheless people find a way through each year everyone from slabbers to their dogs to children to undocumented immigrants drown in the canals i'm a strong believer you get back to the sled and i promise you if you don't give back to the slam people people don't like the community stand together brotherhood i see what we're trying to do and i'm in i i bought it hook line and sinker [Music] the storm has come [Music] is this is [Music] is [Music] charlie isn't the only local committed to the slab city community nor is he the only business owner meet spider spider has lived here for over 10 years he provides monthly meal plans offers several structures of his property on airbnb and is considered to have one of the most desirable camps in all of the slabs this is our littlest cabin in the desert uh it's one of the coolest places to be so what do people look for when they come to your airbnb like what type of experience because it's obviously a little bit different yeah it's a little backwoods you know but uh people mostly come because they enjoy uh the way i treat them with respect people like that what do you think about people in babylon i love them i need them i want them to come and see how i live i've been here for 10 years i've earned my stripes here in slab city the tattoo here says i'm a true slabber we've been through a lot here in this lives i'm not very book smart can't read very well and i don't have comprehension of books very well so whatever i do i do with my hands and i make it better and i improve on it putting all recliners around my fire pit it's messy out here right now because i've been doing a lot of work i rebuilt the kitchen and rebuilt the bar and everything got shoved outside it's two bunks it's got power uh people can plug right in there for their phones to charge their phones stays nice and warm in here during the winter yeah this is very popular one of my popular airbnbs this is one of the largest structures in slabs and i'm not done with it yet oh hi chicken don't worry we won't bother you this is the honeymooner we're gonna be repainting in here again this year this one has power it has water uh i can't turn it on because it's not hooked up at the moment saves on the battery so there's a full bathroom in here too oh yeah this has a full bathroom what we're going to be redoing it this year i have to redo the floor it's old you walk through my door you walk into a family that's what this place is and that's what i promote is family my family wasn't like that so screw them but i am that's what made me this way you know past guests they know that if something happens to them they can always come here and they got a family to go and actually have a cornerstone to relax and recoup and think about what's going to happen and how they're going to go on them how many people you think you've had here a couple thousand maybe a little more because they're not only from the united states they come from canada iceland's uh germany uh japan okinawa all over they come from all over the place wow i have a map that's put away right now because we're redoing the the bar but i have a map and it's got a lot of pins on it and it's pretty astounding when you start looking to see where these people came from out there i couldn't have this i can't afford to buy the land that they they want to sell i make enough here to support for the following year people want to keep calling it a bar but it's not really a bar it's a lounge i've got tvs in here we got game rooms music guitars instruments on tuesday night we serve chili it's two dollars a bowl people that come and play music get free chili this one's not quite done yet but i put this kitchen in the number of people sometimes is quite overwhelming how many people would you cook for in a typical meal in the winter in a month usually one day i usually cook for 28 people every day since i've taken this place over i have a big thanksgiving dinner and i would like all of the slabs to come to that and i get a half a pig i'll cook her out on my fire pit out there make all the fixings pies chips whatever it's a lot of food this mess out here is my little world i save and collect things that noise in the background that's the generator this is a luxury here and helps power spiders lights tv and even air conditioning of course generators are expensive to run around the clock spider considers energy costs during his construction process for example he builds walls that recycle whole glass bottles these create a thermal barrier while allowing in natural light i got aluminum lamps that i'm going to put up later make them solar fish tanks because i collect spiders and bugs and insects dogs because they help us out here if anybody's traveling in here at night i have to get up and see what's going on this is where we live me and my family my daughter's trailer is right there my son sleeps outside in the front and these two trailers this is my shower house and this is my bedroom when they say the slabs is free you have to work you have to do what you can do or you're a bum sure but people get tired of bums living out here for 10 years learning different ways and being totally off the grid it's hard you have to have an astronomical amount of money to be able to afford the panels for price takes that you would need in order to do that if all my panels were on the roof i'd have over a kilowatt of power and that's plenty to run my kitchen lights all night long tvs i live like a king out here in slab city because i make it that when you go to the other camps and you see their lifestyles and how they're living and i'm sorry but some of it's dirty you don't have to be like that if you put the work into it as much as sometimes we hate oh i want to sell this damn place and go we don't slab city is a really cool place there's a lot of beauty here you just have to be able to open your eyes to see it [Music] it's definitely a reach to live like spider most aren't so fortunate and 120 degree heat makes this a dangerous place in the summer and some aren't so lucky meet tall paul i came across him one morning cleaning a camp that bordered his own of which he subsequently claimed the previous squatter he died cause of death heat related you gotta drink two gallons of water a day and you gotta learn to eat ice it's a food group and you know i just can't do that now i'm pissing every five minutes i said dude that means your kidneys have failed so he died from the heat that's what they wrote on them got certificate first two years i was here i had food stamps but i wasn't going to buy ice because i had to buy food so i drank the hot water for me i was down at the zero mark man just like nothing and nothing to look forward to so i rode my bike 200 miles to get here when i got here this looked like up to me how long have you been here five years out there they're always chasing you you're looking for cans you got to get up early beat the other cane guys you know if you're sleeping like me i slept along a bike path you got to get up for the joggers and the dog walkers because they're the ones that love to call the cops for me it was great because there's garbage to go through and pick neat things out of the first three months i was here i had 36 cents in my pocket you know nobody cared nobody asked them it wasn't nothing you know it wasn't even a thing wasn't an issue nobody asked me what i did they still don't ask me what i did so what's the plan i mean you're this isn't really a plan i just do what i do whatever it is i just got lost in the details in the minutia because you know we're all gonna croak it really doesn't matter what you're doing [Music] tall paul isn't the only slabber that arrived here after living on the street this is rob and this is the slab city skate park formerly the camp dunlap swimming pool rob takes care of the skate park because he feels it's his duty to do so the person that built this place thought of himself as the janitor for the skate park living next to the skate park you got to make sure keep it clean but this isn't all he takes care of rob operates a soup kitchen named the handlebar many slabbers take shifts here some paid and some unpaid to rob and his patrons the bottom line is less a priority than providing a place for anyone to spend a few minutes or a few days you're giving a lot in this community where does this come from that you want to do this being on the other side of that deal most of my life where i was the one going to going to soup kitchens and living on the street getting handouts and stuff and it was nice to be able to put back i was in san diego living on and off the streets i worked construction i worked in kitchens but that life just like never really made sense to me it's just like a scramble so that's why i ended up out here too is because i was looking for a place like this long before i even came out here while at the handlebar i met a patron named queen booty the indestructible and you can bet there was a story behind the name the first season i was here i was stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver after i got stabbed i walked 24 miles home with a fresh stab wound in my chest everybody has a horror story here but there's a lot more amazing things that happen here beyond the horror story the guy that stabbed me in the chest he was ran out the very next day and then he came back last season and they ran them out again so that he wouldn't be able to harm me so the entire community gets behind you when they see something bad happening my cousin said i will pay for you to come back to the west or the east coast and you can stay with me for free and my thought was that's not home that's that's literally blood family related to me and i love them but that doesn't feel like home to me this feels like home [Music] when people end up coming out here it's because they have something that they're trying to run away from or something that they need to heal from and they don't know how to and then there's people that show up here that'll help them in that way that'll show them what they need to know or what they need to learn to help them grow and it's magical for me i had to come back i've lived in community in a lot of different settings before this is definitely the most challenging one this is pirate camp these are pirates and they're a crew and they'll go down for their crew i came to slab city to discover the truth there's no doubt this is a harsh place to live this is either the california dream or the california nightmare some people come out here and just appalled you can see it on their faces when they drive by and some people come out here and just fascinated they all want to move here people come in they say this is a lawless place it's not lawless we self-govern we don't like calling the cops because we can do it ourselves which means it's ugly sometimes one of the prices we pay for the freedom here we would have it no other way as human beings we all carry basic needs beyond food and shelter we all want to feel loved heard and act with a sense of purpose for many the only place that could fulfill those needs is here people end up making of their own lives out here i wasn't reading i just kind of let it quit everything so that's usually when people come here if anyone asks what you do they mean what do you do here not what did you do there wherever one decides to settle compatibility is a factor slab city is not a fit for everyone but it's definitely a fit for some this place represents as best as it can a lot of things that i hold true and believe in i can find them here and i can't find them anywhere else like true liberty and quality and solidarity people who do wrong and try to hide here will eventually get brought to the light and they will be taken out one way or another either the cops will catch them or the slabbers will and like honestly nine times out of ten you probably want the cops to catch you sometimes you just have to let the slabs do what the slaps does i arrived in slab city with the intention of saying a day maybe two that turned into five and the day of departure involved dozens wanting to know when i'd return again i didn't know about this place until i got here i wish i would have found it 10 years ago out there in society everybody's all me me me i don't want to go back there there is no judgment here i don't care if you do math they don't care if i have become a woman sure my day trip didn't turn into years but the community drew me in love thy neighbor is not just a sign it's a message indoctrinated into every true slap we're all a big family when your friend talks about some situation they went through even if you weren't there you understand because you've been through that before suddenly someone who was a friend is your family maybe tomorrow you're protecting them from some sort of harm nothing compares to this place i would put my life on the line to save this place you better bring the national guard at least because we aren't going to leave very easily and it will be messy he's eccentric he likes to talk about rocks i don't give a about no you know and everybody here's got rock and they'll tell me this rock's worth fifty thousand dollars i go what the are you just still doing here i always said the girl for me is gonna be the one that walks up whacks me upside the head with the skillet takes me off to her cave that's my girl he's doing his business right here he's like hold on i'm not done yet he's taking her yeah he totally is are you having trouble she's like okay now i'm done and she's going to bury it at least they're proper kitties guests have to pee underneath the tree next door it's called the pea tree all right jeff your turn you

Channel: Our Story TV

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Id: ILcUScfebJ4

Length: 62min 18sec (3738 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022