How Free Is ‘The Last Free Place in America’?

“Everyone here is insane,” says a man who introduces himself as Wizard.

He is holding a staff, and uses it to gesture at the desert around us. His long white beard trickles over the slogan on his T-shirt: “I support sex workers.”

Wizard, in his late 70s, has lived in Slab City for more than a decade. He describes himself as an amateur sociologist, which is a polite way of saying he has spent decades watching broken people arrive, then try (and usually fail) to knit themselves back together.

Slab City is often described as “the last free place in America.” In reality, it’s a collection of semipermanent camps squatting on land in Imperial County in Southern California. There is no running water, official electricity, taxes, or real government infrastructure.

Recreational vehicles, or RVs, sit alongside homes hammered together from reclaimed wood and corrugated metal. On the outskirts, tents sag and tear in the desert wind. Everything is the color of old blood and oxidized tin, shimmering in desert heat that can soar beyond 120 degrees.

Slab City has been the subject of endless breathless documentaries and photo-essays. Usually, it’s framed as some sort of anarchic utopia, a frontier fantasy played out in real life. Slab City is, we’re told, about Americans opting out, artists rejecting capitalism, veterans finding their peace off the grid.

But how does that play out in reality?

Today, depending on the season, anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand people live in Slab City, and few of them would describe it as a utopia. Drugs are everywhere. Crime exists, if unevenly enforced. The heat is punishing, and the living conditions are brutal.

People who have slipped through the cracks of American life arrive carrying trauma, addiction, and paranoia, and the desert has a way of amplifying it all. If Slab City really is the last free place in America, what does that say about the rest of the country?

If anyone’s to blame for Slab City, it’s the U.S. military. During the Second World War, American military officers believed this stretch of desert, 50 miles north of the Mexican border, would be the perfect place to prepare troops for a potential North African campaign. It was hot, arid, and brutal—a convincing simulation of a Libyan or Tunisian desert.

By 1942, Camp Dunlap, as it was called, contained dozens of buildings, a swimming