Urban Desert and the Last Free Place: Overnighting with Rocket

Slab City. “The last free place,” the Slabbers cry. Welcome to the bastion of the outcast, the savior of the damned, the village on the hill, the end of our world, and the beginning of something else. Lost to the government, free to the thinkers, Slab City is wildlands, Mad Max, and Burning Man in a blender. Slab City is a mess of trash and trailers, artwork and personality on a patch of sun-bleached, forgotten land. To those who live there, Slab City is everything. An experiment, a thrill, an escape, a rebel and a cause, a microcosm of all things evil and beautiful. Backed up to the gunnery range, the days melt together, and the fighter jets scream overhead, and the bastards rattle the earth beneath with their deafening bombing runs. We sit, we chill, we talk. Boom. Boom. Boom.

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Welcome to Slab City: the place with more community meals than restaurants. A “disaster of capitalism” to one NGO that donates food to the town. Here, $4 for a cheeseburger at the open mic night and $10 for an eighth of weed. Organic, of course. Here, a school bus driving down Main Street, kids going home, jets overhead, needles in the sand. Here, drug addiction, violence, theft. And here, mutual aid, sculpture, swimming, horticulture, free concerts, and drum circles. Our trash, their art, no entrance fee, touching required. This is the last free place. Free land. No services but sun, sand, and sin. There are no rules. Except don’t steal shit. Because then your camp is burned down.

Gregory Rubin felt terrified the first time he drove through the main drag. A burned-down camp on the left. Two drifters rambling down the road. Trash blowing in the wind. A mountain covered in paint, one shop for passing tourists. Not much else. He said, “What kind of person would ever want to live here?” And quickly, he left. But the Slab City curse is a heavy weight.

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Eventually, he would come back. And back. Bikepacking would bring him out here time and time again, and he’d stay a little longer, and he would make friends at the Ponderosa, and sit for a concert at the Range, and have a rambling conversation around a fire in the oil drums, and begin to love it. The place serves as an exciting complement to 25 years of routine in the suburbs of Palmdale. So he bought a trailer and made some friends and backed it into a corner of a bigger camp on the outskirts. Cloud 9 painted on the tires, butted underneath the bushy Palo Verde, with the Salton Sea kissing the horizon, the nuclear sun setting just right there, those damn fighter jets streaking straight overhead. Easily, he became one of those people who would want to live here.

Gregory Rubin, with the dreads down to his waist, grown out since the 90s, with the chrome 24-inch rims on the cherry metallic Lincoln, Greg with the Rasta beanie and the sun-bleached Marijuana flag battering in the wind, the Elton John glasses and the rice paddy hat, Greg was always one to stand out. Growing up in Tucson, he was the one kid to never get tired on the school hiking trips up Mount Lemmon. He was an outside kid back when that meant outside and free, scraping knees and trapping snakes. When he worked as a junior counselor at summer camp, he’d disappear into the junipers and saguaros for the entire day on horseback, wandering, listening, roaming. Gregory moved around and grew up. He ran hurdles in college and studied agriculture. Later fashion design. He served in the army and was a guard on the Berlin Wall. He worked as a tailor. He drove a bus. He grew weed. He was a mobile DJ. He was always doing it.

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Greg was living in Inglewood when he got involved in the Outdoors Club. His childlike fascination with being outside had gone dormant during his time in the army and even more so while building a life in the city. He was living in Inglewood and sewing clothes for a living when some friends brought him out hiking. Hiking turned into his reprieve from the grit of the city, and that eventually turned into backpacking trips in Angeles Crest. He began backpacking in the desert he grew up fascinated by. And when that became more and more extreme, it turned into canyoneering. And when the canyons got deep enough, it became rock climbing. Greg chased the climbing bug for two decades and climbed 20-pitch routes in Yosemite. He was the first black climber to lead the eastern face of Mt. Whitney.

Greg rambles when we talk. A 66-year-old Rastafarian, he likes to sit around and roll a joint and get into it, the blues on his phone speaker, LED lights in the trees. His accent, southern feeling, almost Texan, it’s thick. He makes quick jokes and laughs with himself. He’s lived so many lives that I’m dizzy with my notes. Greg bangs a left and drops into another story. “I was going out all the time, man. I’d ask my gangbanger friends to go drop me off in the desert, and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, right up here!’ And they’d be like, ‘Here?! Are you serious?!’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah!’ And then I’d just walk back. Four, five days, camping out, being alone. I loved it, man. They gave me the name Rocket because they said I was always goin’ somewhere.”

Rocket had to leave rock climbing when he reached up in the kitchen one day and had a nerve pinch. Sadly, he would never climb again. Greg says he didn’t find bikepacking next but that it found him. He had a bike and was riding a bit at the time. He was linked with a group protecting Native American rock art in Death Valley. A few hundred miles, it was far, but not that far. And so he sewed his first set of panniers and improvised those few days on the bike. Looking back, he’s excited. The transition from backpacking to riding the bike was astounding. “Man, I got to my first campsite so fast I didn’t know what to do!” And he says at the event, people were more excited about the panniers he sewed himself than the artworks. His first orders, his business, and his love for bikepacking all came from that ride.

Here Greg is now, five Stagecoach 400s deep, 10 years of making bikepacking bags full-time, and hooked. Greg is tapped in, chasing the freedom to be himself, to smoke his joint and look at the things around him and wander. Greg wants his own space, space to spread out, space to ask questions and let the answers spiral. Greg is a desert guy, and riding his bike around it, the Mojave stretching straight out of his creaking trailer door, connecting the oddities around his camp and further out, it’s his heaven.

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“Mannn. I’m a desert rat. I just love waking up here and knowing I’m in the desert,” he tells me one night around the fire. The wind is light tonight, no jets bombing the gunnery range, no concerts either. A quiet whisper has fallen over Slab City, and in this moment, it is complete peace. Our haven from the world, dogs patrolling the camp, music in the distance, us dozing off to the crackling of the ironwood burning in the rocks. Chicken legs straight on the grate, gasoline in an old beer bottle, Greg telling stories from the far reaches of his traveled life. Here, in this lovely corner of the Slabs, I could easily see myself calling it home someday too.

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Greg reminds me repeatedly how only 20 percent of the US population lives west of the Mississippi River. He calls the land around the Slabs “unexplored.” It’s the hostility of this desert, the dry heat, the spiny plants, the emptiness, the dust in the eyes and ash on the skin, the no water and no services, that keep the 80 percent away. And it is the nervousness that Greg first felt when driving through Slab City that keeps everyone else out of this bohemian enclave. The parallels run deep. Greg’s love for the desert and for Slab City are two branches of the same palo verde. Freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of place. Surface harshness and a deeper, intricate, and internal beauty. Risk and reward. Life boiled down to its purest elements in the sun-bleached expanse of a place left to rot by the other 80 percent.

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Greg now splits his time between Slab City and his home in Palmdale. Running Urban Desert bags was a natural progression for the ex-tailor and fashion design student. Greg says he makes around 400 bags a year now, half of them here in the Slabs on his 40-year-old industrial machine, pinched in the space where the futon once was. His bags are clean, hearty, solid, and well-made. After almost 13 years as a fashion designer and all that practice, making bags came easy. His prices are more than fair, his attention is keen, and the name Urban Desert fits perfectly for this commune in the wasteland.

On the Bikes

Rocket and I load up for a local overnighter. There’s an abandoned railway through the mountains to our west, a dozen miles long, 20 wooden trestle bridges to connect over the canyons. Greg has always wanted to ride it, but there’s so much to see closer to home that he hasn’t made it yet. Together, we drive out of the Slabs. Painted on the abandoned military checkpoint as we leave is a hallow reminder of the rebellion from it all. “Back to reality,” it says. I chuckle. Not quite for us.

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Greg parks his Lincoln Navigator and ties a Coke bottle to his stem. At a 66-year-old Rastafarian pace, we slowly move from camp to the car, from the car to the bikes, from the bikes to the trail. Greg is riding his Northrock fat bike he bought for $400. With the worn grips, the torn saddle, the tubed tires, and his hand for a front derailleur, it’s obviously a working bike. It’s his commuter around the Slabs and his vessel of exploration. Lately, he’s been considering upgrading to a new Schwinn. For him, the bikes are all the same: simple tools to go and see a bit more of the desert he’s so entrenched by.

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We pass by the daggers of yucca, the hard shell of the manzanita, the sweetness of the mountain sage, and the jitter of the buckwheat. Granite and sand, iron and wood. The railroad cuts through the canyon walls, distant memories of man’s dominance over this harsh landscape. The tunnels are now collapsed, and we ride around, scraping our arms on the reaches of the cholla. We stop to pick sage, to fix loose bolts, to look at the bridges and the sun going down. The bridges creak under our weight. Holes in the slats, a few loose nails, a 100-foot fall. Greg yells, half joking, mostly not, “Don’t look down!”

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We camp in a small pull-out. To our right, abandoned train cars are pushed down into the gorge. Greg hustles down the hillside and throws old rail ties up the hill to burn later. He yearns for the fire. Normally, his rides and trips are all solo. Halfway through, he realizes he’s never gone on a bikepacking trip with another person. Through the long and cold wonder of the lonely desert nights, fire is his companion.

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Around the fire, I take my railroad ties and pry at the warm core. “What’s the whole point of all of this, Greg?” I ask. Greg is quick in his rebuke. “Ask the beaver if the beaver thinks there is a point. There is none!” Greg is content in life. He loves his home in the Slabs, his business, just hanging out, and the excitement of something new. All of it another branch of this bizarre world stretched out around him. He has this casual appreciation for the riding that I admire as we go slowly. “Man, this is just so cool! Can you imagine being the first guy on the train! Haha! Not me!”

Greg and I, riding together in this enclave of beauty and peace, joking and giggling, can both accept this as right. The human body is best in motion, in nature, around a fire, and out in the world. It keeps him young. Greg’s kids were never into the outdoors. He tried, but it never clicked. His son now drives gas tankers. Greg is excited by the growing diversity and Black representation in outdoors settings. After 40 years of being out here, he’s seen it all change. He says its representation and diversity have really exploded with social media. He says, “Back when I was hiking, I wondered why more people didn’t hike. When I was backpacking, I wondered why more people didn’t backpack. When I was canyoneering, I wondered why more people didn’t canyoneer. And now that I’m bikepacking, I always wonder why more people don’t bikepack.”

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Greg grunts and yawns, smiles and guffaws. He eats his hoagie, he takes a photo, he pushes off, and we ride on. We move through the trail all day, taking our time, enjoying the world as it is. Greg is excited to get back, to light a fire and roll a joint and watch a documentary about the railroad. He’ll sew a bag project tomorrow, a four-piece set for a rider on the East Coast. We’ll have coffee and watch the mourning doves swim in the pond. But now, still rolling, the sun going down, our world small and intimate, we pedal slow circles. Border patrol drives by and kicks up a cloud of dust, and the haze drapes a warm glow over both of us. We arrive back to the cars at night, full of wonder and curiosity, a few stories and a couple of scrapes. I ask Greg how he feels about the ride. Brimming with joy, he says, “Oh man! I gotta do that again!”

And the thing about Greg is, I’m sure he will.

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