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The next morning, I drive past Calipatria, into Niland, and beyond the trailers and the power plant and that mestizo couple sharing a cigarette under the unfinished hall on Main Street. I drive into the open desert, to the place called the Slabs, and onto the bit of land where Leonard Knight has been squatting for the past twenty years.
Leonard Knight- accused of many things.
A Christian fraud, a freak, a lunatic, and a one-man environmental catastrophe. In a way, he is all of these, but in a good way. Leonard is seventy-three years old, and from Vermont.
He did all sorts of things in his younger life. He taught guitar, he welded. He went off to serve in the Korean war. He came out to the Salton Sea twenty years ago, and started painting a mountain: Jesus, I’m a Sinner, Please Come Upon My Body and Into My Heart.
That mountain - it's one of the geological 'slabs', is really just a clay hill. The slabs are a series of wasteland buttes that extend into the empty desert beyond. Leonard began painting one day when it was 118 degrees in the fierce Salton Sea summer sun. It was terribly hot, and Leonard was just planning on staying in the area a few days, but instead of leaving after painting his messages of God, he decided to stay and paint forever.
I bring Leonard a Cactus Cooler, and we sit in the sun talking stories. His painted world - God is Love - expands each year into new creative directions. It's not just a painted mountain anymore, but also an elaborate system of caves made of hay and adobe, and Tatooine-style huts built into the mountain, each a shrine to Jesus, and to Leonard's own salvation.
Leonard shows me the eroded clay on the butte. "This is the best clay in the country," he says, throwing it into a wheelbarrow of water and hay. "And adobe is the best construction material in the world." He kicks with his foot onto one of his own creations. "Indestructible."
From the mountain, Leonard stacked barrels of hay into a series of tunnels and domes, each enforced with adobe, and gobs of brightly colored paint. The domes themselves are lit by donated car windows, and the structure is enforced by 'trees' built from car tires, logs and more paint. The end result is terribly interesting, if not absurd. Peewee's playhouse for Jesus.
I talk to him about the Los Angeles Times writer whose rather innocent words popularized the movement to destroy Salvation Mountain in a series of 1994 articles.
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