September 5, 2013 the great dental adventure of 2012, part 1
This post is the first of a series. To see more Dental Adventure photos, click here.
BECAUSE WHY NOT?
As the dramatic year of 2011 came to an end, I was conscious of a deep desire to rest and repair myself. I was done with wedding and portrait photography, finished with the Red Bat partnership, and my schedule opened up to receive more free time. I had imagined myself devoting that time to the pursuit of long-delayed projects, but as 2012 began, I found I lacked the energy and drive for anything that felt like work. I didn't want to crack open those long-negelected Lightroom databases of non-professional photos, didn't want to look at a computer screen at all. I just wanted to write in my journal and think about the past five years, mine the undercurrents in my psyche that I'd ignored while being busy. There was unfinished business of the emotional and mental variety to be taken care of before I could move on with my creative life.
I had unfinished business of the physical variety to deal with, too. I needed sleep, green smoothies, and hikes in the woods. I also needed a dentist. Years of constant effort to maintain too many roles had boosted my nightly teeth-grinding to unprecedented levels, and now I had a cracked filling to show for it. Dental work moved to the top of my priority list, but how would I pay for this with no insurance and a newly diminished income?
Fortunately for me, my grandparents had recently discovered a town in Mexico, just across the Arizona border, where several hundred dentists plied their trade at cut-rate prices. They'd learned about this place from fellow retirees who gave them names of several trusted practitioners, and had tested the waters themselves by getting care for their own teeth during a trip to Arizona. In an act of generosity I'll never forget, my grandma Bev offered to take me to this magical world of discount mouth repair in her RV. This journey would serve as our annual trip, with Sundari along for the ride. The first few days of April found us bound for Yuma, Arizona, our gateway to Los Algondones.
FROM JOSHUA TREE TO THE SALTON SEA
To get to Yuma, we took the same route we'd used to reach Joshua Tree, and visited the same Thai restaurant in Twentynine Palms for takeout before finding a spot in a Joshua Tree campground I'd never slept in before. My fortune cookie told me I'd have a long and wealthy life, a message I found encouraging in light of my current financial difficulty and nervousness about opening my mouth to the drill in a foreign country. The next morning, we explored the trails near Cottonwood Spring campground, and I took pictures as usual, though my heart wasn't in it. I was tired of thinking about photography. I just pointed the wide-angle lens at things and took it easy. The taskmaster inside me was telling me to switch lenses and really document things, but I ignored that. You're lucky I'm taking any pictures at all, I told her.
Our route away from Joshua Tree took us in a southern direction, along the Salton Sea. The desert was sunny and wonderfully desolate. I began to take an interest in shooting again. It seems the desire never leaves for very long. Whenever I turned the camera off, an intriguing wreck of a building would come into view, or a field of green against the dusty mountain backdrop. This road was familiar to Bev, who heads over to Arizona when January is rainy in Santa Cruz. To me, it was untravelled territory, and I lost myself in contemplation of the same question a new place always raises in my imagination: what is it like to live here?
I was especially captivated by the Salton Sea itself, and wished we could stop at the Salton Sea State Park for a closer look. It looked beautiful through my window as we drove by. I saw hundreds of birds on the shore, and a beach of pure white. I wanted to sit by this huge body of water that seemed so out of place in the treeless desert and enjoy the feeling of sparseness.
The Salton Sea is a lake that was formed in 1905 by a flood of the Colorado River. It's saltier than the Pacific Ocean, and just slightly less saline than the Great Salt Lake; every year its salinity increases, and dead fish wash up on the shore all the time, leaving their parched skeletons and scales. The Salton Sea is found in the lowest elevations of the Salton Sink, a geographic sink similar to Badwater Basin at Death Valley. Its deepest point is only five feet above the lowest point at Badwater Basin, and its surface is 226 feet below sea level. It sits directly on the San Andreas Fault. This sink would be submerged in the Pacific Ocean right now if it were not for the action of the Colorado River over millions of years, which built up a massive delta and cut the Salton Sink off from the Gulf of California. The Salton Sea has been the site of many periodic lakes created by rainfall and rivers over thousands of years, each one evaporating after a while, until the dramatic and truly bizarre 1905 flood event that made a permanent lake here.
This is a weird and fascinating area that I'd love to say more about, but I'm going to save that for a time when I can show a bunch of photos, instead of just a few shot from the RV as we sped by. I saw this from Keys View at Joshua Tree, I remember thinking as we passed it. I'm getting closer. Someday I will drive south with the Salton Sea as my specific destination. I will find those dead fish.
We had no time for any extra detours at this point. We needed to get to Mexico as quickly as possible because there was no telling how long my dental work was going to take in the alternate universe that is Los Algodones. We'd only budgeted two weeks for the entire round trip. There was a planned detour coming up that day which Bev assured me I wouldn't want to miss. If we stopped at the Salton Sea, she said, we wouldn't have time to linger at the famous Salvation Mountain. I'd heard about this incredible outsider art installation and was eager to examine it, so I let go of the Salton Sea and stuck with the original plan.
SLAB CITY AND SALVATION MOUNTAIN: AN ALTERNATE REALITY ZONE
As we approached the town of Niland, CA, Bev told us about Slab City, the off-the-grid unofficial community whose entrance is marked by Salvation Mountain. Once a Marine Corps training base, Slab City became a free desert camping spot in the 1960s. It's now inhabited year-round by over a hundred independent souls, and several thousand more stay at Slab City part of the year before heading north to cooler climates. There's no water, sewage, garbage, or electrical service, except for what's occasionally provided by locals to those who are willing to pay. The place is truly out in the boondocks, a haven for those who wish to be unconventional, be frugal, or simply be left alone. As you might imagine, I found the idea of it completely intriguing.
We didn't have time to hang around in Slab City any more than we had time for the Salton Sea, but we did get to spend over an hour at Salvation Mountain, so my appetite for something weird to photograph was satisfied that day. As hot as it was in the desert, I scrambled all over and around that monument to God's love with my camera, starting with the mailbox emblazoned with a message to Jesus.
Salvation Mountain is the creation of a man named Leonard Knight, who was born in 1931 in Vermont, served in the Army, painted cars, gave guitar lessons, found the Lord in San Diego, and eventually moved to Niland and Slab City, where he tried to make a giant hot air balloon with the Sinner's Prayer on it in order to spread the Gospel message. The Sinner's Prayer, in case you don't know, goes like this: "Jesus, I'm a sinner, please come upon my body and into my heart." Leonard thought that if people could just see those words in huge letters, they would immediately grasp the simplicity of salvation. Unfortunately for him, his hot air balloon plan never worked out. The thing was just too huge, and it couldn't be inflated without falling apart.
Leonard gave up on the balloon idea, but he was determined to fashion a monument of some sort to communicate his faith in God to the world. Salvation Mountain started off as a small monument in the late 1980s. It quickly grew, as projects will, into something much larger. His first mountain was made of trash and sand covered with a mixture of sand, cement, and paint, and it fell apart after four years. Did Leonard give up? Of course not! Leonard was not the giving up type. He did some research, learned how to make adobe, and built another mountain. This one was sturdier than its collapsed predecessor. He coated its outer surface with multiple layers of paint. People began to visit him with donations of paint, and many of them volunteered time and labor to help make the mountain even bigger and more colorful.
Salvation Mountain had a kind of in-transition feeling to it when we visited that day, a half-finished, abandoned endeavor quality. I assumed this was just the natural state of all things found in the harsh desert environment. But then Bev told us that Leonard used to live here in his truck, and that he was friendly to visitors and grateful for their assistance with his life's work. Visitors often talked with him while he patched and painted. In 2011, at the age of 80, his dementia forced him to move into a long-term care facility. We had missed him by one year. I realized that the disconnected feeling I was getting from Salvation Mountain was due to the fact that its creator had recently left, before his work could be completed.
As you can see, the mountain is amazing, the evidence of a craftsman's dedication. It's not just a mountain you can climb; it's also got a hogan you can walk inside, with skylights made of car windows. Leonard was proud of his masterpiece and fought hard to protect it. He thwarted an attempt to condemn the mountain in the 1990s, by exposing as fraudulent the County's positive test results for lead contamination in the soil around it. He was thrilled when it was recognized by the Folk Art Society of America in 2000 as worthy of protection, and when it was entered into the Congressional Record in 2002 as "a national treasure." When he left Salvation Mountain for the long-term care facility, he was in the middle of building a museum next to the mountain that would chronicle the monument's history and awards.
The day of my visit, I had come prepared to laugh– good-naturedly, of course– at this kooky religious production, but instead I found Salvation Mountain to be beautiful and emotionally moving. I loved the fact that it had begun as an expression of profound faith and had evolved into an artistic obsession. He wouldn't have called it art, or himself an artist, but it's clear to everyone who sees the mountain that Leonard had discovered a creative force within himself he hadn't known he possessed. He unleashed that force fully, working hard until he couldn't work any more. When I think about this, I get a bit teary-eyed. I imagine the often lonely decades of intense physical labor under the hot desert sun, the deep conviction that this was his true purpose in life, and the gratification he must have felt when the outside world recognized his achievements. Leonard truly believed in his message, and wanted nothing more than to leave something behind to convince the world of God's love. He would have kept going forever if he could.
Leonard doesn't live at the mountain anymore, but he does visit it sometimes, as I learned from my internet research. On his most recent visit, he had just received surgery for his cataracts, and was able to see his mountain clearly for the first time in ten years. It's astounding what he was able to accomplish during his final decade living here, when he was nearly blind and rapidly losing cognitive function. He was thrilled to be able to see Salvation Mountain again, and pleased by all the friends who came to greet him on his springtime visit. Leonard has many fans and supporters, and his monument has become known all over the world.
It's not the same here without him, of course. The monument needs a full-time caretaker to protect it from vandals and patch it up as the weather and the shoes of visitors chip away at its exterior. A non-profit organization called Salvation Mountain, Inc. was established to preserve the monument, and volunteer work parties have pitched in to repair damage. The organization is taking applications for a mountain manager to live onsite, and should be announcing their selection soon. It will be interesting to see how the story of this unusual place continues in the future. I'll be checking on the Salvation Mountain Facebook page to find out.
ALGODONES DUNES, MILES OF BLM, AND FINALLY, A CASINO
We left this brightly colored slice of the desert behind and drove on through the Algondones Dunes on our way to Yuma, Arizona. I'd been anticipating this 45 mile long, 6 mile wide sand dune field, but I felt unable to do it justice with my camera when we actually got there. We were all hot and tired and ready to stop for the day, and we had several more hours of driving ahead of us before we could rest. Maybe when I come back to photograph the Salton Sea, I can hang out at the dunes and get the pictures I'm too exhausted to take right now, I thought. The desert in the Imperial Valley is a huge place, full of photo opportunities that require more time than our dash to the border allowed us. I was beginning to understand why some people become desert rats, spending months or years wandering these parts.
The Algondones Dunes impressed me, even though we couldn't stop to explore all the right visual angles. Driving on a desolate road with sand piled high all around us was a surreal experience, especially after our time at Salvation Mountain. This is an active dune field, migrating southeast by one foot per year, carried by the prevailing winds. It's thought that the Algondones Dunes were originally made by the beach sands of Lake Cahuilla, the freshwater lake that used to form periodically in the Salton Sink whenever the Colorado River turned in that direction. These dunes were once connected to the much larger Gran Desierto de Altar, a part of the Sonoran Desert of Mexico; now they are separated from the Gran Desierto by agricultural fields to the south. Most of the sand in the Gran Desierto and the Algodones Dunes was carried there by the Colorado River, a fact that leaves me dumbfounded. A river did all this?
Our path through the sand on State Route 78 seemed to stretch on into eternity, but eventually we left dunes behind and reached Route S34, also known as Ogilby Road. We took it going south and found ourselves in a nearly barren landscape with miles of emptiness on either side and mountains in the distance. Bev told us that this was more BLM land where RVs could find free and easy places to camp. "If we didn't have to get up early and cross the border in the morning, we could stay out here," she said. Oh, how I wished we could do just that. It was lovely there. The sun was low in the sky, and the desert around us was bathed in golden light. We passed many inviting dirt roads leading to old mines. Off in the distance we could see the occasional RV parked for the night.
I stared out the window, unwilling to lift my camera any more. We listened to music from the 1940s on satellite radio as we pursued our course towards Yuma. The desert sunset lasts for a long, long time, so it was still quite bright out when we reached our final goal for the day: the parking lot of a casino close to the US-Mexico border. The following morning would find me walking over that border to surrender my molars to the care of Dr. Ramos, but I wasn't thinking about that yet. I was in a daze of desert wonderment. I felt like I was dreaming, and you know how I love that sensation.
Somehow I found the energy to call my mother on the phone and update her on my travels. It had been a while since we'd talked, and it amused me to report in from this particular location. I walked around the parking lot as we spoke, trying not to appear too nosy as I glanced through the doors and windows of other RVs, some of which had established long-term camping situations behind this gambling palace. Later, Bev went inside the building to win a few bucks on a slot machine, and I prowled around the darkening premises with Sundari. While we talked about love and life and the year 2012, I thought about how far away from home I felt, and how wonderful that feeling was. Even with a dentist's chair as my destination, the journey was sweet.
Reader Comments (1)
I love Salvation Mountain. Thanks for sharing Leonard's story!