A New Year

Yes, 2014 is well over, and good riddance I say.  It wasn't the worst card in a generally shitty hand, but it wasn't the best either. Some good things happened. Some bad things happened.  A friend passed away, I lost a family member after a long final illness, I lost something, or someone, very dear to me.  On the other hand my niece Ruby was born, and I was filled with the wonder of having a new person so closely related to me after I had given up on that expectation.  Someone with my eyes and maybe my pointed chin, and my brother's goofy, sardonic grin, and her sisters' and mother's unmistakeable stamp as well.  So that I look at her and think, Ruby is the bridge.  She is the one related to all of us and thus she ties us together.  She is a little miracle, or more probably a big miracle.  I can't wait to get to know her.

But I also want to get to know my two other nieces.  It wasn't Ruby who made me an aunt and gave me an anchor in the world again at a time when I was filled with a sense of loss and irrelevancy.  It was her sisters Bela and Myka.  They are so beautiful it takes my breath away.  They are like goddesses, and they are apparently very interested to meet me which naturally endears them to me.

Perhaps it is only a wish to find the comfort of meaning after a long stretch of difficulties, but I believe that the end of 2014 signals the end of a 7 year cycle for me.  Things started to slide south in 2007 so my hope is they'll get better following 2014.  Seven has always felt like a lucky number to me.  The idea of the 7 year cycle, (the 7 fat years and the 7 lean years) has been around a long time, so it's not just my idea.  I'm ready for a brighter year.

I am sitting in Slab City as I type this.  I have been here since the 22nd of December and I have not made a single blog post, despite all my best intentions and promises to loved ones.  I've had ideas and plans for posts, and throughout the last few months have even put together drafts which I never got around to polishing up and posting.  The plan was I'd turn over a new leaf once I got here, what with the rich fodder of writing topics this place provides.  But a weird lethargy seized me and I just haven't been able to bring myself to get the laptop out.  I arrived still battling the tail end of a nasty virus and on New Year's Eve came down with yet another, so my energy level hasn't been what I'd hoped it would be.  And time seems to drift out here, a dreamy, sleepy flow of hours, sunshine and bird song and sunrise and sunset and the sound of trains and generators and calls to supper and nightly campfires, all blending into an unbroken, dreamlike flow.

KD at sunset, Christmas Eve, 2014.  Slab City, CA. 

I am so behind on chronicling everything that I couldn't figure out where to start, and then I remembered someone once giving me the advice to start right where I was.  And so here I am.

Biela and Luo left yesterday because Biela has to be back to work on Monday or the world will end.  I have another week of vacation, so I had the choice of cutting it short and driving back with them or being brave and going home by myself.  Since I came down here by myself last year and since I survived the Big Adventure, I reckon I can manage to make my own way home.  But it is lonely without them and without our de facto camp hosts Rich and Mary, who also left early this year to do a house sitting gig for some traveling friends.

We have fewer people in general this year in our little corner of Area 10.  Some are gone and never coming back.  I learned of one person's permanent exit from the world by his own hand since I was here last year, and others have moved on, camping elsewhere in Slab City or traveling in other parts of the country.  A pall rests over this place, a funky desert settlement unofficial by every measure, illegal and hipshot and crusty and crazy, yet a refuge of sorts for the brokenhearted and the lost.  There are all kinds of people out here, some of them pretty functional with incomes of some kind and decent rigs to live in, and money for gas and propane and food and access to medical care.  And there are the totally broken angels, the ground down alcoholics and addicts, the lifelong fuck ups and petty thieves and drug dealers and career criminals.  I've had moments of insight about who shows up here, and sometimes I think there isn't all that much difference between any of us, no matter how much we tell ourselves that we aren't like those losers.  Talk to people out here and given enough time their secret pain leaks out.  The cheerfulest and the kindest and even the wealthiest eventually let it slip, the horror and loss that lurks back there somewhere in the years before they got here.  The thing that haunts them, gives them that thousand yard stare when they think nobody is looking.  I have often thought, we are all broken here.  We are all brokenhearted and seeking solace in the desert, hoping for healing as though we were TB sufferers in the days when they could do nothing for you but send you to a drier climate.  We have come out here to find the light and the air and the clean, open spaces, the spare landscape with its spiny bushes and thin-leaved trees, its pure sunrises and its piping birds and clever snake and coyote.

But the pall which rests on us all is the spectre of change.  The inescapable agent that constantly tears down and renews, like the very earth remaking itself through eons of volcanic action.  Our biggest vulnerability out here is water.  More water than we could use flows right by us through the Coachella Canal, clear and cold from Colorado, destined to supply cities in Southern California.  Naturally it is illegal to take water from the canal (not saying that doesn't happen), and it has not yet been treated for consumption as it runs by us.

So most get water in Niland at the Chamber of Commerce, or did.  That tap has been turned off for reasons which are not entirely clear, though many say it is part of a plan to get rid of the Slabbers.  The other main source is the Two Rivers Rest Area on Highway 111, just a couple miles past Calipatria.  That water is good, cool and tasty and free-flowing from two taps.  There is also an RV dump station there, garbage cans and the usual picnic and bathroom facilities.  After years of threats there is now a plan in place to close that rest stop in the fall of this year.  The informational sign said it was to save taxpayers the cost of operating a "seldom used" facility.  Which is a crock.  Wealthy recreationalists with giant toy haulers on their way to and from the Glamis Dunes use that site regularly.  As do truckers and everyday travelers and RVers who stay at the Slabs and elsewhere in the area.  It is one of the few things that I feel good about my tax money being spent on.

If that vital source of water is shut down it will become extremely difficult to stay out here.  Water can be purchased at considerable expense from other sources, but that will be out of reach for many Slabbers and those of us who could pay will refuse to do so when there are other places we could explore, places that offer free boondocking and free or low-cost water.  Slab City is dear to us.  Like other desert towns, temporary or otherwise, this place has a way of getting under your skin, and so the idea that this is the last year we will visit this place is depressing.  But when we have only a few weeks a year to spend on our vacations we won't be spending them in a place that has become impossible to stay comfortably in.

There are other issues boiling up out here besides the water.  A small group of hardcore year-round Slabbers has been stoking the rumor that they are going to buy this land from the state of California.  There are myriad problems with that plan even if it is an actual plan with any hope of going through.  And since there's been a marked lack of transparency about the whole scheme, many are left suspicious and pissed off, unwilling to buy into what seems like a hopeless cause at best, or a sneaky plan to get power and control at worst.  Maybe it all comes down to the same thing, a struggle for power between those who want to dictate what happens in this wild and broken place and those who just want to live free.  To quote a line from Powwow Highway, "It's the same 'ol thing.  Always some asshole tryin to tell you what to do."  Is it a lust for power or a desperate desire to hold onto a way of life that sparks these things?  Who knows.  Is it a desire to tie off an artery that seems to be hemorhaging money that has caused local government to turn off municipal water supplies and threaten private parties who give or deliver water to Slabbers?  Because there is a cost to having this place here.  The fire department, police and ambulance services that regularly have to truck out here to deal with the latest disaster do cost money.  But if Slab City costs the county money, it brings money in as well.  Our small group spends thousands every year and there are several thousand people out here during peak season.  In a scruffy, half-closed town like Niland, every penny counts.

Defunct old building, Niland, CA.

In the poorest county in the state, every bit of money is needed.  I just don't see the logic in doing things that will not only drive off the wealthy snowbirds who bring their money here every year, but will also piss off the rich folks bringing their big toy haulers out here, the hunters and RVers and off-road recreationalists.

But time will tell.  There is a tremendous inertia to this place, which has been around in one form or another for decades, just sort of here with no official legal status.  For years it's flown more or less under the radar, but for good reasons or bad, noise has been made, the hornets's nest has been stirred up, and whenever that happens unfriendly eyes start to focus on what is better left quiet.

Nothing stays the same.  We thought last year might be our final year out here, now we are wondering if it's this year.  You can't control these things.  We've signed petitions and written letters about the rest stop, and the local press has been out photographing the convoys of expensive rigs lining up to use the dump station, thus putting paid to the bogus "seldom used" claim on the CalTrans sign about the closure.  And speaking of that sign, it's gone.  We don't know if someone pulled it down in a fit or rage or CalTrans took it down to quiet a rising tide of anger about the the situation.  But it's gone, as if it never was there.

Meanwhile, life goes on.  The wind moans at KD's corners, a neighbor's generator buzzes sleepily in the hazy afternoon sun.  A couple is having a screaming fight at the Internet Cafe on the next block, a sort of serial fight that seems to break out about once a day, ending in gut-wrenching, agonized sobbing by the female party, so that even though you know there's nothing you can do to help her you still want to drop everything and rush over and put your arms around her and comfort her.  But you don't, because by now you know better.  Every person out here carries the seeds of their own destruction and their own salvation.  We cannot by force of will reach into their lives and fix what is broken.  Which is not to say that we shouldn't be kind, that we shouldn't help one another like good campers do in our interdependent little group which needs each other to survive out here.  But there's a certain sense that develops that tells you when that gutshot sobbing can't be helped by a kind word.  When the screaming fight must just run its course.

It's just another day in Slab City.

You either love it or you hate it.  And sooner or later you'll probably do both.