published in the Spring 2022 issue of Seasons of des pair
Forty miles north of Calexico and 70 miles south of Palm Springs, in an arid expanse of Southern California desert, stands the Eighth Wonder of the World: Salvation Mountain. A hulking commemoration of God’s love. A 50-foot-tall man-made mound built of adobe and trash, covered in thousands of gallons of funfetti-colored paint and topped with a white cross. At 150 feet wide, the lumpy hillside blazes with religious phrases and depictions of flowers, birds, trees, waterfalls––it is both blinding to look at and impossible to turn away from. It appears like a mirage on the side of the road leading to Slab City, an unincorporated commune of trailers and shacks built on concrete slabs left behind from a briefly used Marine Corps training facility that the military abandoned in the 1940s.
I approach a man in a yellow high-vis vest with “DOCENT” emblazoned on the back. He’s sitting in a folding chair, facing the mountain. Under the vest, he appears to have sheets draped around his body in lieu of clothes. He calls himself Ayoka and he has lived in Slab City for three years (“four summers,” he specifies, because he arrived during one of Imperial County’s 120-degree seasons). Most of the inhabitants depart during the summer months, shrinking the population down from a few thousand to a few hundred, he says. I ask him what he does when it’s that hot. He has a generator, he tells me, so he sits in his air-conditioned trailer and watches TV. His voice is gentle and inflected with Georgia drawl. How did he discover this place? The movie Into the Wild.
I don’t remember when I first learned of Salvation Mountain. A man named Leonard Knight dreamt it up in the 1980s and spent the remaining 30-odd years of his life devoted to its construction and maintenance. I first saw it at age 16 which is now ten years ago.
Ayoka is barefoot and his feet are calloused and yellow. His shoes sit three yards away, next to his motorcycle––a cafe racer baking in the sun. There isn’t much violence out here, he tells me, but there is rampant meth use and occasional theft. I scratch behind the ears of his sleepy dog that lays contentedly in the dirt. He answers all my questions, except for when I ask, “Where is your family?”
There is nothing to write about this place that hasn’t been said.
I am in the desert with three girls. One of them has the same name as me. We made the two-and-a-half-hour journey east from San Diego in Hannah’s Mitsubishi Outlander, like a pilgrimage, to visit the Slab City skatepark. We pulled over for Salvation Mountain on the road in.
The giant block letters on the adobe spell out messages, “God is Love,” and “Love is Universal,” and there is a big red painted heart inside which is written “Jesus I’m a sinner please come upon my body and into my heart.” Why why why would someone phrase it like that. “Come upon my body.” I’m standing there squinting at this monument to God’s love and I’m thinking about jizz.
Leonard Knight died in 2014. A man named Ron lives here now as a full-time caretaker, Ayoka tells me, gesturing with his thumb towards a trailer off to the right.
There are trailers everywhere. Across the road is one with “DADDY’S HOUSE” spray painted on its side.
When we drive into Slab City, the other Cora says “Wait, so like, who’s in charge here?” And I have to tell her she’s thinking about it all wrong. She is searching for order where there isn’t any to be found. She moved recently from Minnesota and she’s never heard of this place, and she can’t quite comprehend why anyone would want to live this way––beyond the reach of running water and laws.
Hand painted signs line the road, urging us to drive 25 mph because of an over-abundance of dogs. Besides that, there aren’t rules. It’s “The Last Free Place.” That’s what they call it.
The skatepark is a culmination of cement quarter pipes, busted wooden ramps, and two different carcasses of burned cars, all contained within a large rectangular former pool where the Marines, presumably, used to swim.
A man approaches us as soon as we step out of Hannah’s car. He is wearing a clean blue button-down and his white hair is pulled into a ponytail. He introduces himself as John. “Do you have a good memory?” he asks me, and then explains how to get to the Library, the Range, the Sculpture Garden. I ask him if he lives here and he laughs and says, no, he lives in Niland––the several blocks worth of town that we drove through on our way here. He tells me that God brought him to this part of the country, and adds, “But that’s a story for another time.”
Slab City is primarily white people. Mostly dirty, friendly men. Other Cora suggests that the majority of these people were raised in middle class households. I’m inclined to agree. You need to have something to throw it away.
There is a shack next to the skatepark, and the noises coming from within suggest that it’s a bar. Julia enters to borrow a broom, and a pack of dogs run circles around her, curious at the scent of a stranger. She sweeps the bottom of the pool free of the pebbles that threaten to introduce us to the concrete. Time passes without us much noticing. Our shoes leave ghostly, dusty footprints on the grip tape of our boards.
I am paring an apple with my jackknife when a man named Gilly approaches me. His fingers are so unclean they appear gray, and even though I am eating, I take his hand when he extends it to shake. It is limp in my grasp, as if he forgot what he was doing. His legs are covered in tattoos and his black cowboy hat has rifle cartridges poked through the brim. His voice is soft and his jaw is clenched and he can’t really hold a conversation. He asks where we are staying for the night and I tell him we haven’t figured that out yet.
I want to see the library because I work at one back in San Diego. Unlike mine, this library does not have a catalog or require a card to check out books. It also doubles as a bar. The floor is dirt embedded with rectangles of carpet. The shelves are lined with faded paperbacks. There is a trailer outside spray painted with the warning: “Library Property. You touch, you die!!” A woman named Zoe is working, accompanied by a long-haired cat coiled on a stool. We buy $2 Tecates from her to drink at a table made from a road sign that reads “Niland Landfill 1.5 Miles.”
Julia says, “I could live here,” and I think no you couldn’t, but not in a mean way. She just has too much love for the world to turn her back on it.
Cora (the other Cora) asks what they do with the trash. She keeps thinking there is some sort of infrastructure that does not exist. I gesture around us. The trash is everywhere. We drive past “the dump” while the sun is setting, and the sky looks like the rapture. The end of times will be beautiful and strange, like this. The dump is just little piles of windswept trash, dispersed across the desert.
At the Range it is the annual talent show. There are white people with dreadlocks and fire poi and banjos. There is a roaring trash can fire. Zoe stands in its warmth, with some other locals, illuminated by the glow. Ayoka is not here. We sit in the front row and I open a bottle of Stella Artois for each of my friends. I drop one, green glass and bubbles spreading across the concrete. No one even turns to look. I gingerly pick up the pieces, as if it makes a difference. There is glass everywhere here.
An old dog lurches up onto the stage to settle in behind the performers. The dogs have it so good out here. I haven’t seen a single leash. This is “The Last Free Place” after all. A midsize dog, wearing a sweatshirt, comes sniffing around our feet. I pick her up and hold her on my lap, even though she’s covered in a fine layer of dirt. I lean against the Other Cora.
A round woman wearing face paint performs spoken word poetry. She sounds like she is pleading with God and also admonishing humankind. “Mother Earth is being choked out,” she says, over and over. By the fashion industry, the beauty industry, anything that ends with industry. She’s not wrong. “How many layers of product do you have on your face?” She asks the crowd, not wanting an answer.
There’s a young man onstage wearing a witch hat and playing guitar in a five-piece band. His foot is disastrously swollen and he rests it on the amp next to him. He couldn’t put it back into a shoe now if he tried. He probably stepped on a shard of glass.
We return to the barren expanse where we pitched our tent, out past the dump and far from anyone’s settlement. Hannah builds a fire so efficiently and beautifully that I am at once elated and jealous. I like to be the one who knows how to do things. I want to be the desert island friend. The one you pick for the apocalypse. Other Cora asks about our skincare routines. “Mother Earth is being choked out,” she says.
In the morning I wake up before the sun rises and I walk through the desert, past piles of empty whip-it canisters and discarded shoes whose soles peel away from them.
We return to the skatepark and find John there once again. He tries to convince us to come out for the annual “Not my President’s Day” weekend, which culminates, he says, in lighting a car on fire. Last year it was a limousine. Other Cora wants to know: Which president? John isn’t sure. Could have started under the Bush administration, he says, could have been Obama. She’s trying to find out something that can’t be found out. The politics here are on both ends of the spectrum. It’s more about extremes than anything.
John tells me that it’s lonely out here if you’re not an alcoholic or a meth addict. He writes his number on a Post-It for me in case I ever want to come out and shoot guns with him. I do.
The tires crunch over the dirt road as we depart. We pass Salvation Mountain again and I ask Hannah if we can stop. I want one last look at Leonard Knight’s magnum opus. It’s blinding in the direct sunlight, and I have to lower my eyes to slits to take it in. The cascading stripes of waterfalls, the rainbow of flowers, the soaring birds. It is always fading, always being repainted by volunteers. A roadside attraction in constant need of attention, because if neglected, the desert will discolor it and pick it apart. The heart with the Jesus cum message was recently repainted, vibrant and bold and impossible to miss.