Y and I have had Salvation Mountain on our list of places to visit for years now, and two weeks ago on a whim we decided to make the drive out to Slab City, where it sits on the fringes of. It was about three hours each way - I drove, and Y snoozed as she had been up at an ungodly hour the night before. When we arrived I felt an eerie sense of excitement, and the bright adobe/painted hill welcomed us with crazy, earnest declarations of love for God, along with other Christian sayings and verses from the Bible. I admired the intensity and passion that must have filled Leonard Knight to compel him to create this art installation, though my own days of piety and prayers for salvation are a thing of the past. When the colors and sayings became too much, I focused instead on the construction of the piece - eyeing bales of hay, rolls of chicken wire and branches and imagining how the project would have been pieced together. We walked back to the car, but not after pocketing a few rocks, and started the drive back.
But who drives all the way out to Niland, CA from Los Angeles and skips a visit to the Salton Sea? Not us! We stopped at Bombay Beach, which was eerily quiet. It didn't have that fresh salty smell of a saline body of water - more of a rank, tired odor, and there were dried up skeletons of fish strewn all over the shore, as well as decrepit remains of houses and shacks sadly leaning over on their last breaths. It was weird and beautiful.
On the last leg of the trip, we made a point to view the Cabazon dinosaurs, but didn't feel up to paying $8 each to see what we assumed would be kitschy life-size dioramas of said dinosaurs in semi-realistic settings. We were happy enough to see the T-Rex and Brontosaurus at the entrance. As we left the heat of the desert and the swooping wind turbines, heading back to (at the time) rainy L.A., I exhaled a silent sigh - happy with the small adventure we had, and grateful for the freedom and panache we possessed to make it happen.
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