A skeletal woman with the body of a teenager and the face of a grandmother stood in front of the gas station, looking bewildered in a pair of day-glo yellow plastic sunglasses and sloppy orange lipstick. She was a portrait begging to be made, but by the time I got there, she was inside, obsessively checking the corn dogs, which weren’t ready yet.

This was Niland, a place that was described by one blogger who spent some time in Slab City as a ‘burned-out barnacle of a town”.

It sits across the highway from the Salton Sea, at the foot of the road that leads to Salvation Mountain and Slab City; a modern-day desert Hooverville established on a plot of abandoned cement slabs next to a bombing range.

At seven in the morning, two bearded men were burning trash in silence by the side of the road. They watched me as I walked past with my camera, and said nothing.  A minute later, a car full of hippie kids from Pennsylvania gave me a  “WHOOOOOO!” as they sped by, on their way to turn donuts in the dust at the end of the paved road. A snow-bird stopped to chat, and told me about how taxes had ruined the state of Oregon. A man, cleaning up from the night before, flung empty beer cans out the door of his trailer, while a Mexican radio station blared.

This slab covered in discarded clothing is what the locals call the "Slab City Wal-Mart".

Cat lives with his wife in a section of the slabs known as "East Jesus", where he maintains a website, and curates a sculpture garden.

Slab City is defined by the characters who live there; a motley and always shifting collection of missionaries, addicts, adventurers, snow-birds, and grifters.   It would be impossible to capture an authentic sense of the place without getting to know the people who live there, but in the two hours I spent walking around,  I did meet some amazing people.

A man named Vince introduced me to his wife and seven of his eight children, and told me they had moved to Slab City to make a reality show about the experience of being homeless in America.  I met  Troy, a down-on-his luck permanent resident, who was trying to get his dogs out of impound, and Cat and his new wife Penny, who lived in a compound known as “East Jesus”, where they curated a collection of sculptures created by a now-deceased artist named Charlie.

Vince Neil brought his entire family to live in Slab City, where they are fixing up a kid and senior-friendly area, with nightly activities.

The influence of drugs, and the true desperation of some of Slab City’s residents can’t be ignored. The Slabbies appear to live in an uneasy harmony with each other for the most part, but there were implications of a more sinister place;  in the reminders to lock up my stuff, in the discussion of a nasty dog-fight, in the fact that the majority of residents carry guns.

Even within the alternate society they’ve created, a lot of residents seem to live like refugees.  There’s a whole section dedicated to “LOW’s- Loners On Wheels,” and another section that is designated as drug-and-alcohol-free, for Christians and recovering addicts. On the day we visited, Vince and his family were getting ready to corral all of the kids into a protected space, behind a steel wall for the next two days, in anticipation of the 2,000 bikers who would be arriving that afternoon for “The Slab City Riots.”  Last year, the bikers started burning cars, so this year, they were taking precautions.

Despite the spirit of freedom and ingenuity that defines The Slabs, it was undeniably a “Hotel California” kind of place.  All of the things that Slab City evokes- a festival, a camping trip, a barbecue, a summer-  are loved so well specifically because they are impermanent. In some ways, Slab City is like a party that never ends, but I had the feeling that for the people who simply can’t leave the party, and for the ones who have no other place to go, living in the Slabs might be more like a day-after hangover that never goes away.