Odd lifeforms in the deserts of California

Deserts are places where you can find things that you wouldn’t expect. These are areas that attract a certain kind of people, who are able to endure and even thrive in the open wastes. Out here, the line between genius and madness gets blurred.

This isn’t the polished pavements of Hollywood or the tech-fueled dreams of Silicon Valley. This is the place where the American dream came to die, or to mutate into something weirder.

Peace, love and dust.

The deserts of California aren’t just sand and silence. They’re filled with ghosts, myths, junk art and people who fell off the grid and never bothered to climb back on.

Slab City is an off-grid community near the Sonoran Desert. A place so far off the map it might as well be on another planet. The name “slab” is derived from the concrete materials that remained after a large Marine Corps training camp was dismantled in the 1950s.

It’s considered a squatter’s paradise where people can disappear into nothingness, but some ingenious people choose instead to create and build. We met Frank Ross, a free spirit who runs an internet café (of all things) and provides free coffee to his guests. We sit down for a chat with Frank and his merry friends. He has lived in Slab City for twelve years, very pleased with not having a postal address. Here he has built his own electronics equipment using car batteries.

Reach out and touch faith.

Another colorful part of the area is Salvation Mountain, and I do mean it literally. Leonard Knight has spent 30 years of his life to create a mountain out of adobe and paint, rising out of the desert like a candy-colored hallucination. He worked day and night, and slept in the back of a truck. Leonard and his creation was featured in Sean Penn’s movie Into The Wild (2007). Unfortunately he was put in a hospital last year, so we explore the mountain area in silence without meeting anyone.

Paint, faith and madness.

I park the car next to another strange place in the wastelands. A friendly chap in a nice top hat appears out of nowhere and gives us an impromptu tour of the area called East Jesus. Charles Stephen Russell has made art installations from a garbage heap here since 2006.

Among other things I see a mammoth created from car tires, a grave cross consisting of computer keyboards and a wall of TV:s where not so sublime messages have been sprayed across the screens. Art installations that look like post-apocalyptic shrines to gods no one remembers.

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

After enduring a vile burger in the small community of Niland, I head west on Route 10. While passing through the towns of Palm Springs, White Water and Sky Valley, I come to think of Josh Homme and his band Queens of the Stone Age. They have a ranch north of Sky Valley, where they record music and arrange their legendary desert sessions. Anthony Bourdain visited the ranch last year in an episode of No Reservations, where they shot arrows at a Jethro Tull vinyl record and consumed a bunch of Corvette Sunrise, their signature tequila drink named after that crappy movie with Mark Hamill.

Some artists stay at fancy hotels in downtown Los Angeles, surrounded by fans, clubs and overpriced lattes. Others choose to live out here, with the lonely wind as their muse.