Migrants by choice, residents by desire

A MINUTE AGO THE DESERT WAS AGLOW, THE SKY crowded full of cotton-candy clouds, the whole stark scene bathed in post-sunset pink. But now the sky’s gone inky, the stars are stifled and it’s just half a dozen of us sitting around a campfire in a 60-degree breeze, listening to a crotchety 73-year-old serve up his best left-handed compliment.

“I’d much rather be in a campground along a mountain stream in mountain air, but I’m not able to do that anymore,” Rusty is saying. “This is it.”

This is Slab City, a half-forgotten 640-acre corner of Imperial County desert -- just east of the Salton Sea, just west of the Chocolate Mountains Gunnery Range -- where snowbirds and itinerants hunker down by the hundreds each winter. Sixty years ago, these bare concrete foundations held a Marine training facility. Forty years ago, the snowbirds started coming -- for plenty of reasons, but mostly because it’s free, because there’s no snow, because there’s nobody in charge.

“America’s supposed to be based on living free, and this is the last place where you do that,” says Rusty, a 12-year veteran here.

There are complications, of course. No electricity. No water. No sewage system. And among the neighbors, there’s a handful -- mostly the younger ones, whom oldsters suspect of drug abuse, theft and the most amoral behavior you can imagine. For at least a decade, Slabbers have whispered that the government is about to shut down the place.

Yet here we sit around the campfire, with RVs, trailers, campers and hitchhikers trickling in daily. By January, 2,000 people may set up here, some in tents, some in Mercedes sedans and gleaming Airstreams, some hauling their waste out, some not.

Tonight, half a dozen attend the fire. Sullen Judd has brought marshmallows. Chipper James, a white-bearded musician just down from Eureka, pulls out a mandolin and strums “This Little Light of Mine.” Phil the Preacher, a 68-year-old widower from Oregon who’s been ministering here for seven winters, tosses on more logs.

“You wake up at 2 in the morning, look out, and you’ve got the whole desert just glowing in the moonlight. Just a little bit of beautiful,” says Phil. “But we all know that at any time, they could come and kick everybody out.”

It’s abject liberty. It’s Brigadoon, with sets by Samuel Beckett and casting by Tom Waits. And it’s something to remember, the next time you’re admiring desert scenery in a book or on a screen.

Every year, about the time this place starts filling up, booksellers fill their most prominent shelves with gorgeous gift-season travel and nature books. Large formats, saturated colors. Coffee-table geoporn. And this year, deserts are on every counter. Shimmering oases. Bristling cacti. Creamy dunes, curving under the sky like swimsuit models in repose.

To produce the 424-page “Call of the Desert: The Sahara,” photographer Philippe Bourseiller chased light for four years across North Africa. For the 372-page “Deserts of the Earth,” photographer Michael Martin spent 900 days on five continents. In volumes like this, when you see people along with the sandscapes, they’re traditional desert types, people whose families through generation upon generation have never known another home.

Slab City is nothing like that. In fact, the American West is nothing like that. If you thumb through those pages and then wander out this way, as I did, the difference hits you as hard as that sour scent coming off the Salton Sea. Millions of people filling North America’s deserts these days were born, raised and weathered elsewhere. They’re people who came here to get warm or dry or financially whole.

In Slab City, the story of that weird fit between people and place is writ large in ragged capital letters. Beyond the campfire’s flames, once your eyes adjust, you can just make out the trailers, the tents, the rusted buses, even the Chocolate Mountains, where far-off military flares flicker like fireflies.

“We lost everything in Arizona,” 57-year-old Linda tells me, out on a stroll one morning. “We came here to start over.”

They have hand-printed street signs, jam sessions on Saturday nights, and out at the southeast end of the slabs, they have a library -- about 5,000 books, sheltered by an artful deployment of wayward lumber, fiberglass panels and carpet remnants.

That’s right: I went looking for the desert not found in books, and I found books there.

The collection is immaculately categorized, and the Funk & Wagnalls set lacks only Volume 13. The librarian, Ron, migrates from Oregon each fall and assumes command of all reshelving.

I find him one morning at his post. With the sky for a ceiling and open desert stretching for miles on all sides, he sits at a desk next to the sheltered stacks. He has a pair of glasses perched halfway down his nose and a jigsaw puzzle of a New England lighthouse spread before him, nearly done.

His world is this close to perfect order.

Back around the campfire, there isn’t a lot of perfect order. Nor is there a lot of talk about the desert landscape, at least until I start lobbing questions.

“I come down here to get away from the cold weather up in the panhandle of Idaho,” says 82-year-old Oscar. Then the conversation moves along, and that begins to look like all I’ll be getting out of Oscar. Until he abruptly pipes up again.

“This,” says Oscar, “ is probably the fourth lowest spot on Earth.”

We’re 145 feet or so below sea level, he figures. Not as low as Death Valley, the Dead Sea or the Sea of Galilee. But still, someplace special.

For just a moment, the patter pauses and our flame-shadows dance without music in the sand. Then the chatting resumes, and before long Rusty gives voice to exactly what I’ve been thinking.

“It’s not just scenery,” he says. “It’s a lifestyle.”

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.