“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.
