UNLESS YOU HAVE A THING FOR RURAL desiccation, there's no aesthetic lure to California 111, a dust- and sun-beaten route with little commerce save the occasional shanty selling date shakes. The more noteworthy visuals along this 120-mile highway that starts at Palm Springs and ends in Mexicali include Bombay Beach, a crumbling port on the stagnant Salton Sea, a lonely hangar with several border patrol agents checking citizenship and a town called Niland (population 1,042), whose business district consists of the Jail House Cafe, a 99-cent store and several smelly superettes. Unemployment here stands at about 30 percent, obesity is evidently higher, and the general comportment of residents is one of resigned entrapment.

Compared with Niland, the squatters' colony two miles outside of town is a party. WELCOME TO SLAB CITY! reads the hand-painted sign at the entrance to this former World War II naval base at the foot of the Chocolate Mountains. Owned by the state, wedged between a gravel pit and a navy bombing range, the Slabs, as it is colloquially known, is the world's largest seasonal encampment of squatters. Living in top-of-the-line RVs and dilapidated buses, classic Airstreams and freestanding camper shells, the 2,000 or so "residents" stay all winter, for free, in hopes of fulfilling an atavistic quest: to survive in the wilderness, with hard-pack dust in lieu of blue yonder, the motor vehicle standing in for the mule.

What began as a settlement of cooperative retirees in the late 1950s, however, has since devolved into an increasingly fragile city populated, as all cities are, with the good, the bad and the downright bizarre. The old-timers who organize swap meets, singles dances and games of Trivial Pursuit played over the CB must now vie for space with relative newcomers whose taste for illegal drugs and violence--not to mention occasional dismemberment trying to salvage scrap metal from unexploded bombs on the adjacent range--is straining the unspoken social contract that holds the place together. And yet Slabbers stand by a "don't fence me in" conviction that this scrubby no-man's-land offers freedoms they cannot find anywhere else: the opportunity to live out their later years in peace, to gather the fortitude to push on or to simply stay alive without the fiscal and moral constraints of "civilization."

The Slabs offers no services: no electrical hookups, no municipal water, no restrooms. How rough you rough it depends on your pecuniary standing. People who can afford them have solar panels and generators; people who can't, flashlights and candles. Fresh water is trucked in (the Sparkletts truck whizzes by seemingly all day) or collected in plastic jugs and hauled home, a laborious and tedious undertaking when one's car is broken. Those with toilets in their RVs pay septic trucks to pump them or, more often, run illegal lines directly into the ground; those without dig "gopher holes." There's no swimming spot for the kids (the Coachella Canal, which borders the north side of the Slabs, is full of pesticide runoff), no nearby 7-Eleven in which to grab a quart of milk, no public telephones. In fact, the 640-acre site, dotted with concrete foundations from when Camp Dunlap pulled up stakes in 1945 (hence, the "slabs"), isn't really good for anything but boondocking--which the state discovers whenever it tries to sell or lease the land, the revenues from which would ostensibly help support the State Teachers Retirement Fund.

Attempts by developers to mm the Slabs into a conventional RV campground have all failed, partly due to the grassroots efforts of Slabbers, who in a 1985 memo to county supervisors insisted, "Slab City has existed for many years as a unique collection of recreational vehicle dwellers policing themselves with very little assistance or interference from government agencies." Meanwhile, Imperial County, which is financially responsible for providing the limited civic services at the Slabs and would love to flex a little jurisdictional muscle, can't seem to wrest the land from the state.

"A few times we've thought about suing the state over that property, because the county incurs a great deal of cost without being able to get anything back from it," says county supervisor Bill Cole. "And quite honestly, things out there are getting worse. These people don't want to pay for anything; they don't want us to do anything. They just want to do what they want to do."

"Why the state doesn't do something about it is the $64,000 question," says Wally Leimgruber, an Imperial County supervisor. "We're always working with the state over this; they've been going back and forth with this for 10 years. It's basically foot-dragging, and it's frustrating." According to Betty Carapellese, aide to state senator Dave Kelley, the Slabs is a nonissue. "The senator has no dealings with [the Slabs] because his constituencies don't have any dealings with it," she says. Further stressing the area's inconsequentiality, she continues: "We only hear about it because people use it in their books," most recently Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild.

Cole would like to see the area turned into a "primitive camp," i.e., one in which a minimum of services, such as potable water and showers, is provided in exchange for a small fee. "Most people out there could afford to pay $2 or $3 a day, but they don't want to," he says. "They don't want us to regulate anything. But we're the ones who send out the fire department, the sheriff's department, the health department. When the season's over, we've got abandoned trailers, burned-out buses, and we've got to get rid of those things every year, and the next year, it's all right back. My feeling is, if it's state property, they ought to fence it off and control it."

Back in the mid '50s, when the first families started coming to the Slabs, they didn't leave anything behind. "You hauled it in, you hauled it out," says 79-year-old Nadine Anglin, whom everyone calls by her CB handle, Colorback.

"Early on, it was great out here," says Anglin, who has written a self-published book about the Slabs, As I Remember, which she sells out of her 1993 Encounter motor home. "We'd have potlucks and jam sessions. If you had a problem with your car, there'd be a mechanic to fix it--and no money changed hands. It was like a small town. Everyone knew everyone."

Still, the Slabs has a measure of a small town's tolerance for the floridly eccentric. Leonard Knight, a beaky, bow-legged 68-year-old, hands out free postcards of his "work in progress": a three-story, 100-foot-wide adobe mountain sculpted with flowers, waterfalls and scriptural messages that serves as a gateway of sorts to the Slabs. The 40,000 gallons of paint Knight has meticulously applied for 14 years make the mountain shine like a box of glossy hard candies and elicits the same provocative pull: You want to lick it, touch it, climb all over it, which visitors are welcome to do, as Knight has painted a yellow path leading to the high-gloss red G-O-D on top.

"I snuck in here with a shovel and wheelbarrow, and California left me alone," says Knight, sitting in a blistered La-Z-Boy in front of the elaborately painted 1939 White fire truck he lives in at the foot of the "mountain." Knight says he couldn't have done this anyplace else but the Slabs. "I been here 14 years, never once had any graffiti. They're good people."

But Anglin says things started changing for the worse in 1981 with the opening of the Christian Center. "Before the Christian Center came, there were no children here, no welfare. That element came because they could get help, food and money. They come here with nothin' and expect to be taken care of." (In an act some consider providence, the church blew away in a 1992 tornado.) Anglin shoots a scornful glance toward an ironwood tree 60 yards from her camp. "We call that the Slab City drugstore `cause that's where they sell their drugs. We had no drugs before, except prescription Tylenol." She invites a newcomer to take a spin around the "good parts" of the Slabs in her dune buggy. Double-clutching over ruts, she points out Gopher Flats, the Slabs' nine-hole "golf course," the pet cemetery, the coffin-size pit with an irrigation pipe spewing hotspring water in which residents so inclined may take a makeshift shower. "When we first come out here, we were boondocking--didn't need no showers," she shouts, revving the buggy up into the hills overlooking the Slabs. She parks and gestures below, where a suntanned boy tosses a stick to a dalmatian. "The majority of the parents are on welfare, and they don't care if the kids go to school. The kids wind up not knowing any better because they're not taught to know better."

"You come here and think maybe you're helping these people, and if you can brighten their lives a little, well--what's the word?--altruism," says Cora Mondor, mixing a veritable vat of meatloaf in the shaded dining area belonging to Slab City Singles, one of several Slabs encampments where singles, most of them in or near retirement, camp communally. Watching as several nonverbal octogenarian widowers collect their $3 meal of meatloaf, potatoes and salad, Mondor says quietly, "I think some of the men camp here because they know they can get a few good meals a week for very little."

After dinner, the group gathers around the fire, telling stories late into the night. "It's one of the last real, free places to live in the United States--just pull up near a bush and park," says Philip "Marty" Martin, a former navy employee, tossing wood onto the fire. The evening's serenity is broken by a series of staccato booms and a sky suddenly lit by four orange flares, their smoke trails silhouetted against the full moon. "That's the navy SEALS doing desert warfare training," he says. "We seen dogfights. And we saw the Stealth before they ever claimed to have them. You can always tell when they're getting ready for war because you get a light show every night." (Indeed, within weeks, Operation Desert Fox will be launched.)

Despite the occasional pyrotechnics, the Slabs impresses with nothing so much as its utter quietude, broken only by the sounds of sparrows and yellow-rumped warblers and the occasional balmy gust. Touring the packed-dirt main drag known as Main Street past places with names like Registry Slab (a holdover from Camp Dunlap) and Poverty Flats, one has the sensation of passing through a nascent civilization, with all the promising and fearsome possibilities such a place offers. Shift the prism, and the prosaic comes into focus: the UPS truck making its daily drop, the trailers with IMPERIAL VALLEY PRESS and BRAWLEY NEWS mailboxes out front, the school bus pickup, the abandoned cars, the shrill parents and ratty children. Keep looking, and the Slabs is not a romantic place at all. It's a precious concept co-opted by the mendicant masses. Meanwhile, the 6,000 seasonal retirees the Slabs used to attract shrinks to 4,000, then 2,000, as pioneer Slabbers cease to return, having seen their December idyll become both banal and disturbing.

"TWO BLOCKS FROM HELL" is how Mark describes being stranded at the Slabs since last summer. A 39-year-old former ski lift repairman wearing a blue garage jumpsuit, he claims he can "fix anything ... except her." "Her" is his wife Juanita, a manic 36-year-old mother of two teenage boys who, in her crop top, short skirt and Spice Girls makeup, could pass for 16. "We got stuck here last summer, didn't have any money," she says, spinning an elliptical tale about a lawsuit she has going against her former employer Wal-Mart. "They said I failed a drug test, but I never even sent it in! And I suffer from depression, so basically Mark has to baby-sit me, which is why he's not working."

Mark, Juanita and their sons live on $750 worth of welfare and food stamps per month and spend their days at the Slabs in front of their broken-down Dodge Fireball RV, chatting with passersby and trying to sell off their possessions. "We're trying to get rid of stuff, make a little money," says Mark. "The main problem here at the Slabs is, people don't take opportunities. They just sit and mold." He wanders off to tinker with a dune buggy he's building, while Juanita breathes quickly and audibly through her mouth, perpetually fidgeting, the full-on sun giving her blue mascara a savage, iridescent glint. "I been forced out here," she finally says, futility and hysteria in her voice.

"You have four generations of welfare families living out there now," says Niland's fire chief Mike Aleksick. "There used to be people in the winter only. Then about 15 years ago, they put all this `Free Place to Live!' in Trailer Life magazine, and people started coming all year-round." A powerfully built man who chooses his words carefully, Aleksick seems at once weary of and utterly avuncular toward Slabbers, a relationship honed during 32 years of settling squabbles, delivering babies and generally trying to keep the peace. "I been shot at twice, been in so many fistfights I can't count them," he says, explaining why he carries a gun and wears a bulletproof vest. "Women would rather deliver out there in the filthy dirt than in a sanitary hospital. I've delivered four for the same woman; they're all fostered out now."

Aleksick believes this is both a problem of transportation--most Slabbers have no working car, and if an ambulance takes them, they have no way to get back--and a symptom of Slabbers' distrust of society.

"To them, there's no concept of protection in this world. They want to handle everything themselves. We go out there, and there are people carrying six-shooters. And then you have people selling the property like it was theirs. We had a guy come in saying he'd paid $5,000 for a piece. We told him, `The land belongs to the state.' And he says, yeah, but this guy he bought it from had it kind of parceled off with tires and rocks, so it was his, right? We just told him, `Whatever you say....'"

Some stories from the Slabs are not so meanly amusing. "We get bomb calls all the time--injured, missing hands and feet." Aleksick pulls out some photos. "We had a guy hammering a 2.75 rocket he found," he says, pointing out some shoes and legs near a campfire, what's left of the rest of the body beneath a tree 10 feet away. "He would've gotten $13 worth of aluminum. We had to blow up somebody's trailer because it had a napalm bomb in it."

Given the contrarian culture of the adults who surround them, some children of the Slabs have internalized a frank sense of fatalism. "Why plan for a future when you don't even know if it's gonna happen?" asks Susan, a 14-year-old with such pale blond hair you can see a spray of microscopic red dots on her scalp, possibly bites from the horseflies and sand fleas that plague the Slabs. Susan is originally from Crescent City and has been living here for three years with her unemployed father and two brothers. Her friend Brian, a preppy-looking 16-year-old who hopes to become a professional football player, says he prefers the Slabs to Barstow, where he and his family lived until last year. "It's better here because you have freedom," he says. "You can ride your dirt bike anywhere, scream and yell all you want. Only bad part is, people in town, at school, make fun of you because you live out here." Adds Susan: "They think they're better than you, and they're not. They think you're poor, but who can be poor when you own such big rigs and stuff?"

As they stand in the waning sun looking like they don't know what to do next, the paradox of their situation crystallizes: The freedom every teenager dreams about has here been transformed into a burden. Without typical quotidian demands, the children of the Slabs seem repressed, even mildly depressed.

"These kids experience a certain sense of shame and stigma when they go to school," says Madeleine Stoner, professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. "Even out there, they get TV and radio, and they absorb the dominant images of the culture. They know they're considered marginal and deviant by the community. And for children, whose peer pressure is so strong, that kind of identity is very damaging."

Then there is what sometimes passes for family life in the Slabs: a father who forced his four towheaded kids to sleep on the ground outside every night while he slept inside the bus, warmed by a wood stove--at least until he got drunk and burned down the bus; the family rumored to be pimping their daughter. "We had a girl who was made to kneel, and this guy shoots her in the back of the head," says Aleksick. "Well, she lived, and we get her in here and say, `Who shot you?' and she says, `I can't tell you. He'll kill me.' And we're saying, `Girl, what do you think just happened to you?!' "

While it would be easy to credit Aleksick with being a good soldier who will not leave his watch, his commitment to the Slabs appears to be more than that: He is hooked on the place, on tracking the kismet and misfortunes of people who, no matter what, are hell-bent on doing things their way. "I've had 30 years of watching this stuff happen, and people ask me why I don't work someplace else," he says. "But the thing I have to admit is, they have a life that is unique to anywhere else. It's not something we could make up. You never know what you're going to find there next."

WITH SEVERAL TEETH, a bit of a beard and snarled gray-blond hair she's tucked beneath a Santa Claus hat, Toni Williams is the kind of Slabs inhabitant who gives the place its reputation as a haven for nutters and ne'er-do-wells. "I been here three years. I got stuck like chuck and can't get out. No money."

The 63-year-old Williams stands in her lot of used goods--boots and clothes, rusty tools, a box of paperback novels--trying to make a buck. What she lacks in funds she makes up for in possessions, the latest of which is an immobile school bus. "It's got a lot of space for my junk. But then my wagon died, so I got no transpo," she says, pointing to a spent Chew sporting a DON'T WORRY--BE HAPPY sticker on its sagging bumper.

Williams's boyfriend Desert Rat, a hulking figure with a fleshy face pocked with gin blossoms, walks from their dingy trailer holding an Old Milwaukee. Despite the heat, he wears black, with the exception of a straw hat with a band of pull tabs. "I'm ex-Marine Corps," he says, his eyes unfocused and rheumy. "Been here 14 years, year-round. Gets up to 118 in summer."

Rat shows off his garden, boxes full of tomatoes and beans, a head of broccoli growing from a porcelain commode and a pen in which two Chihuahuas furiously yip. The compound exemplifies a people dealing only with essentials: habitat, food, water, elimination. While this bare-bones encampment may be antithetical to the American ideal of accumulation and the comforts it affords, its economy yields what those living on the grid complain they've lost in the hustle: time for relaxation and human relations. Which is perhaps why everyone can afford to be friendly. A man who deals in novelty toys, stored beneath a tarp on Williams's lot, delivers water; a woman strolling a toddler with a mouthful of rotted teeth purchases some children's books. And though many of the Slabs' inhabitants are stranded by circumstance, they do not, in fact, consider themselves homeless.

"There are different kinds of homeless people," says USC's Stoner, "different forms of marginal living. The most dysfunctional kind is one who has completely lost attachment to any place or any person. These are more highly functioning people. That they choose to live around other people means that they're still desirous of a sense of connection, so they flock together. People do this all over--they do it on skid rows, they do it in Montmartre in Paris. They create, in fact, a community."

And despite the hardships and horror stories, so is the Slabs a community. At a time when there are perceptibly few unspoiled, unregulated frontiers left to be conquered under one's own steam, the hardscrabble existence on 640 acres of desert dust allows Slabbers to believe that the world is of their making, that what they make cannot be taken away from them, and that no one is allowed to tell them any different.