Things have been groovy in San Diego. I can’t complain. But my system can’t take the sustained exposure to fake blond hair, BMWs and strip malls without the occasional infusion of reality. So to that end, Sue and I decided to head east, over the mountains and through the great Palm Canyon to edge of the Salton Sea.

The Salton Sea is an inland, saline, endorheic rift lake in the Sonoran Desert of extreme southeastern California that governs an area of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

The Salton Sea is an aquatic birth defect that languishes 250 ft below sea level and directly atop the San Andreas fault in the middle of a bloody desert. The rumor at the Salton City Chamber of Commerce is that it is the only locale in the Northern Hemisphere that Starbucks never considered for a store. Since the eighties, the Salton Sea has experienced massive bird and fish die-offs, and residents are strongly advised to limit their consumption of anything that still boldly lurks beneath its surface. The area was also a water-target missile testing facility for the Sandia National Labs in the 1950s, the glory days of bigger and better bombs. If someone with regular access to a laser pointer were to spend a few minutes with these data points, I’m sure it would lead to several class action law suits and at least one black SUV with Virginia plates.

Travel sites will speak of the area’s great recreational choices or its amazing diversity of wildlife. But that information is manufactured by L.A. PR types who’ve never been there and suburban militia members with apocalyptic ATV fetishes. In contrast, my tourism experience involved broken conversations with wall-eyed children, neighborhoods of abandoned trailers inhabited by packs of wild dogs and strangely aggressive tumble weeds.

The fourth law of thermodynamics states that the deeper and stranger the place, the more beautiful and miraculous the exception. That’s an unwritten law of nature and one that I’ve found holds true even in Fresno. In this case that miracle was found near Niland by taking a left on Main Street and following the lonely road to the edge of Slab City. There you will find the structure of a life’s lesson and Leonard Knight hard at work on Salvation Mountain.

I arrived at Leonard’s mountain at sunrise and was greeted by a smile and two waving arms covered in paint. Leonard and I spent the better part of the morning together, touring the only world he has known for 24 years. A world without electricity or running water. One forged of his own hands and built of clay and straw, desert sticks and paint… Thousands and thousands of gallons of paint. We talked about the power of a smile, Nebraska and the way his mountain looks during a moon rise. But mostly he talked about God. Some might bristle at the use of this word, but for Leonard, God is simply the word he chooses for love. Not love of a particular flavor or faith but one that is simple and universal.

Time passed and it was time for Leonard to focus before the sun did its thing. He shook my hand and invited me to walk the yellow-brick-road to the top of his painted mountain before I left.  As I walked Leonard’s life’s work, I watched his tiny figure as he slowly picked through spent cans of paint and bales of straw. I thought about how his hand felt in mine, and about the future of those wall-eyed children of Bombay Beach. I thought about a sea that lay dying and about the people that stayed at her side despite being forsaken. Looking out over his colorful kingdom, across a desert and toward the Salton Sea I found myself smiling and certain of how different the world can seem when viewed atop a mountain of love.

From somewhere out there,
Gabe