On his book Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place
Cover Interview of July 10, 2019
A close-up
When you pick up Slab City, you might open it to
Donovan’s photograph of an A-frame shelter made of pallets and cardboard. Late
one afternoon in June, its builder gave us a tour of its three levels that
included a lounge, two bedrooms, a workshop where he hacked the proprietary
systems of rechargeable power tools, and a loft where you could see the
Algodones Dunes and the U.S. Mexico border beyond. To the east, we saw plumes
of smoke from exploded ordnance in the still-active military range just across
the canal. For us, this structure held the personal aspirations of its builder
as it also reflected the core of Slab City as a collective laboratory to test
freedom in its many built forms.
Shelter in Slab City. Photo by Donovan Wylie.
The A-frame also indexes the resourcefulness and resilience
in its materials—the pallets came from the local Target in El Centro but had
previously crossed borders and supported goods along the 21st century’s global
supply lines, and the cardboard had packaged a recent delivery of photovoltaic
panels for one of the massive solar farms nearby. To deflect the harsh desert
sun, the cardboard was coated with white paint that came from Salvation
Mountain.
In Donovan’s photograph, the flags above the A-frame have
slackened in the dry heat of afternoon, and it is as if the builder has taken a
break from painting and stepped back to admire his work. When I returned last
year, this structure was gone. Across the road, a new pallet shelter had been
built with a steeper A-frame, inclined like hands clasped in a kind of prayer.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
A close-up
When you pick up Slab City, you might open it to Donovan’s photograph of an A-frame shelter made of pallets and cardboard. Late one afternoon in June, its builder gave us a tour of its three levels that included a lounge, two bedrooms, a workshop where he hacked the proprietary systems of rechargeable power tools, and a loft where you could see the Algodones Dunes and the U.S. Mexico border beyond. To the east, we saw plumes of smoke from exploded ordnance in the still-active military range just across the canal. For us, this structure held the personal aspirations of its builder as it also reflected the core of Slab City as a collective laboratory to test freedom in its many built forms.
The A-frame also indexes the resourcefulness and resilience in its materials—the pallets came from the local Target in El Centro but had previously crossed borders and supported goods along the 21st century’s global supply lines, and the cardboard had packaged a recent delivery of photovoltaic panels for one of the massive solar farms nearby. To deflect the harsh desert sun, the cardboard was coated with white paint that came from Salvation Mountain.
In Donovan’s photograph, the flags above the A-frame have slackened in the dry heat of afternoon, and it is as if the builder has taken a break from painting and stepped back to admire his work. When I returned last year, this structure was gone. Across the road, a new pallet shelter had been built with a steeper A-frame, inclined like hands clasped in a kind of prayer.