The Land of Lead and Honey

Off California Highway 111, at the southeastern tip of the Salton Sea, technicolor shapes and textures rise out of a bleak desert landscape. After driving an hour southeast from Palm Springs, the development starts to thin out. Movement is imperceptible in the elusive miles of dry, barren land. Passing through the small town of Niland to reach the first concrete slab of an RV settlement called “Slab City,” a former military base, to discover “Salvation Mountain” is a salvation.

It’s the middle of August and the thermostat shoots to an unrelenting 114 degrees. My skin sizzles and I struggle to breathe through the heavy smells of the overripe Salton Sea and Leonard’s paint fumes. A sign that looks like it was made out of playdoh introduces the site with the words ‘God never fails.’ These words of hope have sustained Leonard Knight, creator of this psychedelic Eden, for the past seventeen years. I expect to find a ticket booth, or a tour guide but there is no one in sight. But as I reach the site the dirt road turns to pale shades of blue, with what look like heavy coatings of latex paint. I think it is meant to represent a sea, and nearby I see a small boat partially buried into the ground, its top floating in the putrid air.

Salvation Mountain rises thirty feet, a mere hill in contrast to a real mountain range behind it. The Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range is where US military jets practice bombing with high velocity heavy missiles. Occasionally the inventions of man will gaze at each other as the jets navigate around Leonard’s mountain. Knight builds his vision of paradise out of whatever he could find; window caulking, bales of hay, tires and windshields. He then covers it entirely with layers of bright paint. As I climb up the peak, the ground feels spongy. I feel like I’m walking on a brightly colored cake frosted with flowers, trees, birds, American flags, waterfalls and biblical verses. Paint fumes smell toxic, though, and my body slowly gets coated in a fine mist of dust. At the summit a cross contains words that read ‘God is Love,’ written in puffy raised letters. Below a big red heart says “Jesus, I’m a sinner please come upon my body and into my heart.” The
glass-like sea in front of me, the dry mountains behind me, and the road I came in on are all startlingly austere and desolate in comparison.

Environmentalists and county supervisors proclaimed Leonard’s mountain a “toxic nightmare,” and tried to take it down. It is ironic that bombs are allowed to explode out here but a painted mountain is somehow considered more toxic for the environment.

There is something about the bubbly words, “God is Love,” that echo the Beatles song, “All You Need Is Love,” combined with the religious fervor of Howard Finster and the all-embracing spirituality of the early 70s. Leonard neurotically covers every surface in biblical scripture and imagery. He is obviously crazy about Jesus and comes from the tradition of long-haired Jesus freaks with their fingers raised high saying, “One way to change the world. Jesus is the way. ” Some would describe Leonard’s work as “outsider,” “folk” or “self taught” art, art that is essentially “pure” in its expression because it is produced by an untrained artist that has no relation to the “high art” world. There is a distinction between Leonard’s cartoonish Eden with flowing blue water, abundant evergreen and candy coated pinks and reds that raise innocent and youthful sentiment and the imagery used to promote the reclamation of the West in the early 1900s. Both cherish an idea of purity but for very different ends.

While gazing out to see if there is any sign of life, I hear some clamoring at the base of the mountain and see a tall thin figure waving at me. Leonard, the infamous seventy-four year old man, is still working away at his dream. “Welcome to Salvation Mountain! Feel free to take a look around,” he shouts. His congeniality takes me by surprise since I feel like I just trespassed on his mountain without permission. He is dressed in a long sleeve plaid shirt, black pants speckled with paint and a white hat. His face is toasted brown. The lines on his face accentuate his smile. His skin clings tightly around his mouth as he talks and reveals a set of white teeth that looked too big for his mouth.

Leonard’s voyage began with an idea that floated in the sky in the form of a hot air balloon. Only he wanted the balloon to be four times bigger than a standard hot air balloon with the words, “God is Love” sewn across it. He wanted to float in this balloon across America and share the freedom and happiness he had found in this message. It took him six years to make the balloon and when he was ready to take off from Nebraska, the wind was too strong. He never made it off the ground. So he packed up his balloon in the back of his truck and went from city to city to find a place to display the balloon. It was in Niland that he found a welcoming spot near “slab city” for his showcase.

The desert was the perfect tabular-rasa, monochromatic with an endless feeling of space. Niland is also one of the few places where people like Leonard, eccentric and independent could make a place for himself. Unfortunately, he discovered that his balloon had rotted out. This was a disheartening setback, but Leonard found salvation on this mesa, which he then christened, “Salvation Mountain.”

Leonard gives me a tour of the newest addition to the mountain, an igloo-like structure. The armature that helps supports its hay-bale dome looks like a tree. Its trunk is formed out of stacked tires, painted over with dirt and grass, and its branches are real pieces branches grafted onto the cylinder of tires. The branches stabilize the individual bales of hay, acting like ribs in a Gothic Cathedral. Windshields inserted into the ceiling admit light. His days pass without regiments. There are no clocks in the desert. No deadlines. His mountain attracts visitors and his community is at slab city. Only the unbearable heat during the day which slows things down, but then again, what’s the hurry. Leonard is free to work as he pleases out here and that is the beauty of living in an austere place.

From this phantasmagoria, I get the impression that Leonard’s vision encompasses more than a museum of Jesus worship. His art is a large component. Watching him, I see that his eyes scan over his creation, detecting flaws or incompleteness, more work to be done. He points to the exposed mesa and explains to me that the whole mountain is made from the earth from the site. He dug into the mesa, collected soil, and then added water and hay to create clay. The soil has a high selenium content so when the clay dries, it almost crystallizes. With the clay he forms the flowers, trees, and birds that adorn his landscape. It is beautiful and amazing to hear this man talk about a dream and see him build it in the middle of nowhere and out of an apparent desert wasteland.

The backside of the mountain exposes a dirt mesa. Buckets of paint and brushes are hidden behind the cross. Salvation Mountain is a mythical mountain, facing one direction, the highway and its passing travelers. Leonard wants his creation to stand apart from the landscape. Why else such excess and grandiosity? But I appreciate Salvation Mountain’s megalomania because it is imperfect. If Leonard tries for the ideal, pure and innocent promised land, his methods reveal artifice and representation. There is an element of hope in Salvation Mountain that isn’t so much about its Christian ideology, but about the potential of an individual to create a unique sense of place.

Everyday, Leonard refines and fixes parts of his creation. The desert sun washes out color, and when it rains paint peels off. Leonard's mountain at one point collapsed and he had to start all over again, but he proclaims that even the accidents make him better at what he does. It takes hard work to build something for other people to appreciate and enjoy but that is what brings people like Leonard and the snowbirds to slab city. They find freedom and inspiration in a place that is difficult to locate, a place that is not easily definable, a place that might seem to some to exist outside civic law, where the imagination floods the limits of idealism.