Desert Cities

The Slabs and Palm Springs at Night

“The desert is never-ending and at night the imprint of oblivious ages lies upon it, ages that have swallowed up all things human— passion, hope and high resolve. The stars that hang in endless space with such complete finality strip the soul of all earthly passion and leave but a burden of wonder and an all-pervading unrest.” Daughter of Earth, Agnes Smedley

We are strangers in a strange land. Eighty-five miles south of Palm Springs, the dark town of Niland slides like a silent film past our windows. Marble pillars stained lime green with age and a gas station shrunken into the darkness leer at us as we pass. Turning onto a residential road, we crawl past pencil-straight dirt roads and fenced lots of bungalows. The beaten dust of the road dances under our tires. We are solitary ants climbing out of a hill. The distant mountains seem like they couldn’t be reached if we drove for miles and miles and miles. What would compel a person to come out here, to etch an existence onto a dusty expanse of nothing but silent desert cities. 

To drive away the quiet, I turn up the music. And, while riffing on each other's favorite artists and lamenting the lack of minorities within our fifty-mile radius and making fun of past situationships we strangle the silence around our little lonely car.

As we crawl up the road to Slab City, scraggly shrubs creep toward us from either side. There are little bobbing lights in the distance. We turn down the volume knob. We pass two Slab City guardshacks plastered with a warning: “ReALiTy AHeAD.” To our right, Salvation Mountain’s usually evocative colors are muted dull shadows. The darkness suffocates everything. It dulls the eyes, breathes clouds of uncertainty down the back, drips little tendrils of hemlock over the fingers. My hands shiver slightly as we pull into the main street. 

Trailer homes line either side of the wide unpaved road. We drive by a house with an open fire pit on the city's north side and hear conversation and laughter, and I exchange looks of curiosity with my friends. Stopping by the hostel on the east side of the city, we get directions to the skatepark in the center of town. Korn is blasting from the speakers of a bar near the park as a man extricates himself from the small bar crowd and introduces himself to us. 

William, a science camp instructor who works up near Big Bear, talks as if he needs for himself an audience, pouring hungry words over our ears while giving us a tour of the skatepark pool. He points out the graffiti art layered around the concrete and asks us about the symbolic significance of a pair of twin towers in a world on fire. You don’t think it’s a bit much do you? We should’ve been there last night dude, he says, every Saturday they have a little performance and dance at the Range. His friend Gabriel, there, sitting by the top of the bowl, had driven down from the Bay yesterday to compete in a BMX race at the park. William had come down for the rave — People were still out in the desert right now — Of course, they last for twenty-four hours, haven’t you ever been to a rave before? After climbing back out of the bowl, Mechanic Mike joins our conversation. Unlike William and Carlos, he lives full-time in the Slabs throughout all seasons. We talk about BMX and tripping out in the sand, and what brought him out of Babylon, or normal society, to the Slabs. Despite the hollowness of the desert, the Slabbers have created their unique community and presence. While preparing for this trip, I had assumed the residents of Slab City had been driven here out of economic necessity. After arriving, although the former may still be true for some, for others, the emptiness of the desert may also provide a solace from the uniformity of typical society.

Our last stop of the night after returning from the Slabs, the strip in downtown Palm Springs is bright with barfront lights but cooling off in the evening after Saturday night. The inside of Hunters, a prominent gay club in the area, is sleek and modernist and minimalistic and shifting with blue-toned lights, far removed from the dark towns of the desert we passed by on the drive here. Only eighty-five miles apart are Slab City and Palm Springs. But the DJ here is playing mainstream house and he seems like he’d sooner put his controller away and take up competitive jugger than play a band like Korn. Yet I think about how this place, also integrated deep in the desert, is visited by strangers searching for an escape from monotonous society. Like the skate park in the Slabs, Palm Springs is also filled with noise and human commotion, shaking up the silence of the desert at night. I look around at the people in the club and wonder what exactly brought them too from Babylon to this place. I think it’s because of, not in spite of, the land’s endless space and silence that people are drawn to create their own pockets of vibrant noise amid these dark desert cities.

Words: Andrew Tao

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