Imperial (171 page)

He gave the other numbers—for instance, twenty-five cents for cooling, five cents for the rubber band. As numbers will, they added up.

Yesterday was expensive, he said, because we had to pay time and a half.

Our growing cost is about eleven hundred dollars an acre, he said. We’re looking at two hundred-plus crates per acre. You can watch the percentage in value in asparagus and it goes down . . .

We’re in the state of California, and what happened January first was that the Workers’ Comp rate went up by ten to fifteen percentage points. The costs I gave you were based on minimum wage. Anything we get paid below eighty-five cents per pound, we’re losing money. Even at a dollar we’re not making money. So you add ten percent for Workers’ Comp, and that has to come out of the dollars coming out of the field. California is a scary place to do business, because you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. You’ve got OSHA;
³³⁷
you’ve got the ALRB,
³³⁸
which is a government front for the union. None of us want our workers to go hungry or suffer or work in terrible conditions. However, what is acceptable has changed and keeps changing.

Eighty-five cents a pound for asparagus, he said. Eighty cents of that is labor cost.

The price of water has gone up. It’s about ten to fifteen times cheaper here, but you couldn’t farm if you had to pay residential rates.

I asked him what he thought about the water transfer, and he smiled sadly and said: As if a couple of farmers have a chance of pulling together against MWD and San Diego!

He gave me a tour, and I saw Mexican-looking ladies sorting the asparagus on a slow belt. It was very cool in there and they did not seem unhappy.

He gave me a box of asparagus to take with me. It was delicious raw.

I asked him about Mexico, and he said:
There’s nothing that we can do that Mexicali cannot.

Chapter 180

SALVATION MOUNTAIN (1996-2005)

It’s happening more and more. People looking at the mountain, people want me to come to church and listen, and I say no, just come and listen to the mountain!

—Leonard Knight, 2003

Y
ears it’s been now since my first visit to Leonard Knight’s mountain; back then he told me that his ambition stopped short of extending the accomplishment; he wished simply to overpaint it as many times as he could until death. Up close, it became the world; a few steps away it began to resolve into the puny production of a single human being. Nearly as foolish as my own attempt to express Imperial in a book, it metonymized its near neighbor, Niland, which the 1914 Imperial Valley directory celebrates as
“the Main Line City,” and the Wonderland of Activity.
In an undated photograph, the two-storey train depot resembles a Victorian house. The porch-roof says NILAND. A small fleet of flatbed wagons awaits in front; men and boys stand wearing Stetson-type hats; two long tall trains adorned with many windows bask upon the two tracks, on the far side of which is a parklike zone of trees fronted by a row of young palms. (Those trees are gone now.) Because of its proximity to various important railroad destinations, the Main Line City’s future was assured.
Niland had not an inhabitant on March 14;
³³⁹
had 300 on July 1; will have, it seems certain, thousands within its first eighteen months . . . Niland abolished summer in Imperial Valley.
That was the situation in 1914. Since Harry Chandler happened to be a stockholder in the First National Bank of Niland, I am less than surprised to read that
the opening was attended by trainloads from Los Angeles . . . Many lots were sold.

In 1930, John D. Reavis promised us all:
Some day Niland’s dream of commercial and horticultural greatness will be realized.
We’re still waiting.

The building of the All-American Canal will vastly increase the productive area
of Niland, prophesied Otis P. Tout.
Because of its reputed frostless climate the entire
district bids fair to become the favored citrus section of the Valley.
In 1939 the WPA guide to California reported that Niland possessed
some of the largest ranches in the valley; on one ranch alone are 4,000 grapefruit, 17,000 orange, 6,000 lemon and 2,000 tangerine trees.
I have never seen a single citrus orchard in Niland.

Imperial is failed dreams; Imperial is castles in the air transformed at best into grimy bunkers; Imperial is the Niland Tomato Festival, whose sad carnival rides hang almost empty, and whose tomatoes are nonexistent.
The club motto is, “The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”

Once upon a time, an old man in Niland said to me: I don’t much like it here, but I hate the cold; I hate that cold wind that goes right through you.—These words were spoken on a ninety-five-degree day. His aim had been reached; the same may be said of Salvation Mountain.

INTO MY HEART

Presently Leonard decided to do more than overpaint. He built first a hogan, then a gigantic, walk-in replica of the hot air balloon he’d applied himself to for fourteen years (it failed to leave the ground). The interior of this second structure resembles in its cool reclusiveness the interior of the I. V. Restaurant. I can scarcely describe it except to call it a sort of maze which vaguely resembles a lung’s alveoli magnified and garishly colored; the passageways curve, and painted round tree-trunks both rise out of the dirt floor and spread their arms, which resemble strings of mucus, crosswise into the painted walls, where the studs, painted in different hues, bulge out like orifices. Up and in curve the walls, like soft palates; the trees remind me of tonsils. A curving wall of hay bales has not yet been painted. After a moment or two I can smell them; they are better than the best tobacco. Leonard’s new hired man is singing around the corner.

Between that wall of hay bales and another just-born hogan, cool goes to hot, moist to dry, painted to tan; for a few steps away, the desert recommences, rising up high in a wall of pale dirt which is actually Salvation Mountain itself; Leonard hasn’t painted this section of ridge yet, and maybe he never will.

Imperial is scissors on a closed paint can; Imperial is gobs of paint on a palette, and then another recess whose abstractions of colors and shape approach the complexities of reality itself. I see Leonard’s straw hat on a shelf. The tunnel winds around itself; it’s an immense negative doughnut, with fibrillations, bas-reliefs and villi.

Above all, Imperial is the navy-blue-striped waterfalls on Leonard’s mountain, flowing two-dimensionally over two-dimensional reddish cookie-cutter-like trees and crude flowers of all colors;
WATER IS HERE
. Imperial is the yellow steps ascending, zigzagging in and out of sight on their way to the white cross in the cloudless sky.

Within the balloon-thing, Leonard built those trees ring by ring.

All these trees are made out of tires, he explained. Then this adobe, it’s hard, just like cement, isn’t it? By the time I got it half built, God knows it got in
Germany
magazine. Now, God showed me this. It started cracking and a couple tractor tires come in, and honest to God I didn’t have any idea, but I filled one tire full of adobe and then another, and then I figured if I got eight tires it’s gonna look like a tree! I try to learn things that way. And it’s
thrilling
me, positively no end. A thousand bales of hay, that’s how many there are right now. And I’m makin’ a museum over here. Sixteen more tire trees is what I’m aiming for. I shoulda started this thing when I was about nine years old! I wanna make a museum over here. But I’d like to show you this . . .

He always had new things to show me.

What is Imperial to you? Here is what it is to Leonard:

God has given me Scriptures that I really don’t dare go against.
You need not that a man teach you.
The Bible tells you not to go to man to learn. God didn’t reveal it to the preachers. God revealed it to me.

The sun beats down upon the back of my neck; Leonard’s paint is hot to the touch. Everything human must fail. Yet there stands Salvation Mountain, very pure and good, light and bright in the desert.

Isn’t that something, he said, how something can be so
simple
? I ran into beautiful people who’ve given many, many thousands of dollars to the church, and I mention something about letting Jesus into my heart, and they get mad at me.

(Leonard might have been just a bit of a rebel.)

What does Imperial County mean to you? I asked him.

The whole place, and this includes Slab City, too, it’s
freedom.
People can come here in Slab City from November until May and it’s totally free. They can have picnics, and parties, and it’s totally free. I love the people and the whole area. To me, it’s freedom. It’s the way the United States
should
be.

Does the landscape itself speak to you?

Well, can you see the Salton Sea from here? For me it’s beautiful. In 1984 I came in my hot air balloon; I towed it behind my truck. Luckily, it rotted out here; I was stuck here. I realized nineteen or twenty years later, I realized that God put me in the very best place to build a mountain. It’s peaceful. It’s so darn beautiful.

In 1967 I was running away from God and from my sister, because my sister was talking about God, and all the sudden I said,
Jesus I’m a sinner, come into my life and into my heart,
and I started crying like a baby, and it changed my life, totally, completely. God zapped me in Lemon Grove, 1967, just like He zapped Saul. So I tried to build that hot air balloon that would tell people about Jesus. I built it in Nebraska, but it didn’t work. In 1982 I towed it out here, and it came to rest right here in Slab City. We tried to put it up twenty-five or thirty times. And it would kind of go up, then it would sink down.

What was Slab City like back then?

It was almost the way it is now. But in 1990 and 1991 they had a swap meet up here, and both sides of the road were crammed with people. They had maybe about eight thousand people here. The authorities stopped it. There’s still about three thousand people who come here in the winter.

And what made you decide to pick this particular mountain?

Well, I was trying to put the balloon up right about here. I just happened to come down here without any thought at all of staying here. That’s when I told God, I’ll stay down here one week and make an eight-foot replica of my balloon. During that week, which is when I made that heart over there—that was the first part of the mountain—something happened to make me stay longer. A man told me where I could get some broken cement, and I thought, that’s friendly. So I stayed another week. Nineteen years later, now I’m here for the duration. At least that’s what I hope.

In 1990, after I’d been working on it five years, when it was just cement, because I didn’t know about adobe then, the whole mountain fell down. I told God, I got fourteen years making a balloon, and five years making a mountain, and I said: Oh, God,
You
do it! That was the smartest thing I ever did. Why did it take God nineteen years to get me out of the way?

Then those eight bimetallists came in. Before the results came in, I was a toxic nightmare. They wanted to take me down, so they could put in a paid campground. The
Los Angeles Times
said, the laws of God and the laws of man are gonna collide in Niland, California! And once they backed off, they backed off totally.

And nobody’s bothered you since?

Not at all. And next two weeks, they’re gonna bring in eight hundred gallons of paint!

How much paint can you use in a day?

If I’m painting the ocean floor down there, and it’s in five-gallon buckets, I can put in a hundred gallons a day.

What did you do for food in the beginning?

I always got by with food. I can scrounge cans, I got a bicycle, and I can get what I want. I was so happy back then to work all day for Jesus Christ. People think I suffered back then, but I was happy. You know, God can ruffle my feathers; that’s a fact. When they told me I was a toxic nightmare, I was upset. Thank You, God, for making me upset, because they made the mountain famous!

At sunset I was sitting at the base of the cross, watching the dark figure of Leonard come scrambling up his moutain. Niland was out of sight, aside from a thin line of lights.
Some day Niland’s dream of commercial and horticultural greatness will be realized.
Gaston’s Cafe, where I used to get root beer floats, had burned back in about 2001, but Gaston had already sold his café and was still alive; sometimes people still saw him watering his lawn.
He made a success through his own efforts. He sold out at a fancy price.
That was Niland for you. But there was the orange-pinkness of the Salton Sea and the pink stain in the Borrego mountains above it, as I sat there looking straight down on everything.

Who could be a more public figure than Leonard Knight? There was his mountain, which could be seen ten miles away. There was his mission: That is what I want to do, put
God is love
to everybody! My mountain even went on satellite disk to Baghdad! Some soldiers were over there, and when they got back they came to me and said: Leonard, we saw your mountain on television in Baghdad! Can you believe it? I love everybody that goes to church. And I love everybody that don’t go to church.

So, Leonard, a hundred years from now, what do you think your mountain is going to look like?

I pray that if I keep painting it thicker and thicker, and if I get it in the Senate, then nobody can fight it.

So if you disappeared from the scene tomorrow, how long would this last?