Imperial (172 page)

I think they’ll protect it, he replied with a grin.

And who could be a more private figure than Leonard Knight? What Imperial secrets lie sheltered within the cool darkness of any soul? Once he said to me: I was praying in the spirit. All the sudden I got the heavenly language. Since then, thank God, God has showed me many more Scriptures. Twenty years ago I said, God, I want this Holy Ghost fire. And I got it.

He got it, but no one other than Leonard Knight and his God will ever know the heavenly language. No one other than my God and I will ever know mine. What should I do? Should I stop speaking it on that account? Should you and I both lay down our private selves on the altar of a spurious commonality, and leave them to desiccate? I think not. To quote a certain Leonard Knight: If the Bible says something, my attitude is, oh, Lord, You wrote it and I don’t understand it but
You wrote it
and I ain’t changing one word for nobody!

When darkness came we descended, and now the brightest thing was the line of bluish-white light which was the Salton Sea (so it looks from the base of the mountain), far brighter than the narrowing dome of orange sky in the indigo sky above it. Leonard was getting his brand-new motor scooter; he was getting ready to ride it for the first time; two neighborly men were helping him unload it from the truck.

I have ascended Salvation Mountain by night, the cool wind whickering event-fully out of Slab City, Leonard’s cat prowling with magical softness across the inscriptions as a much-loved woman and I climbed that frosted wedding cake. And I have taken Leonard’s tour year after year. In 2005 he said: I got about three hundred gallons of paint and I got about four hundred gallons comin’ in. Sometimes it’s old paint. This mountain has really picked up speed in the last four months. It’s almost staggering.

Leonard never became jaded, and so his Imperial Idea never ceased picking up speed.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

The mountain itself, pastel at dusk, then a pale analogue of phosphorescence, spread out its pale wings from the great red heart, which was delicious as any Mexicali prostitute’s lips, the white legend within as clean and pure as her teeth:
JESUS I’M A SINNER PLEASE COME UPON MY BODY AND INTO MY HEART
. And Leonard roared off on his scooter, laughing like a boy.

Oh, God, he called out, it’s so beautiful! Isn’t that beautiful? Jeez! You wanna take a little spin?

And now the mountain was a beautiful ghost of itself, hanging in the dark world which, as the desert and sky took on equal darkness, was all one;
WATER IS HERE
; the Idea moved upon the face of that water, and the mountain was its own cloud and island in Imperial’s endless sea.

Chapter 181

SIGNAL MOUNTAIN (2003)

When America was young to the rest of the world and the Declaration of
Independence was announcing there would be a new republic established,
Indians made their signal fires at the crest of this crumbling mountain.

—Otis B. Tout, 1931

I
t’s not easy, said José Quintero. They got snakes. But they don’t do nothing if you just walk carefully. You just go in the night time when you go up Signal Mountain.

He’d gone to TJ but
just didn’t like something about it,
so he’d then proceeded to Mexicali, where he’d passed a month already when I met him, sitting each day five hours on the bench by the border turnstile, then five hours in the park, spending each day ten dollars for a hotel, eighty pesos for food,
and you gotta buy clothes.

I like water too much. You don’t see water right here.—He smiled then, saying: Sometimes I go to the other side to take a shower. Beautiful! I go over there, me and my friends, and we have a swim, have a cold drink of water.—He was pointing to the All-American Canal.—I see the Border Patrol. They don’t tell me nothin’ ’cause I’m not goin’ deep.

The next time I came to Mexicali he was gone. I never saw him again. Perhaps he’d crossed over Signal Mountain.

To Acting Governor Arrillaga it was, rather inelegantly,
the Big Mountain which is lined up from the south to north which I crossed when I passed by the mouth
of the Colorado. He wrote those words in 1796. From the air, at least from American airspace, it is a squat pyramid in the midst of or at least foregrounded by green field-squares; Laguna Salada’s hazy whiteness behind it resembles cloud upon field, not sand at all; it looks soft and lush.

Blue Angels Peak at four thousand five hundred forty-eight feet is actually Imperial County’s highest. As usual, there are higher places in Mexico.
³⁴⁰
All the same, the mountain befits the county seal, being the termination of American Imperial, whose concentrated greens, blues and tans might as well be the tones of a black-and-white photograph; suddenly one has reached the verge, the desert.

One of the best views of it I ever had was coming west from Glamis on Highway 78, a smell of feedlot in my face as I rode out into the irrigated acres. In a swarm of young date palms, there was squat Signal Mountain, that translucent turquoise pyramid; now it had centered itself in a field of green, in Bermuda grass, thrusting above road-mirages and golden walls of hay bales. I passed palm-islands in a flat brown field-sea, glimpsed beehives under their tarps, smelled another feedlot whose cattle were darker than the evening shadows. By now I had begun my rushing through a green dream of evening homesteads east of Brawley, with the cool-looking mountains of Anza-Borrego ahead. Sheds and palm trees, flat fallow fields, sunset thunderheads reflected in the Rockwell Canal, flat wet olive-green irrigated acres fading into moist darkness beneath other gilt-edged thunderheads, these were the tissues of Imperial’s heart. Imperial’s soul was Signal Mountain, which continued to hold its contrast against the earth, by darkening in proportion to the dim sky.

One New Year’s Day, Lupe Vásquez and two friends and I decided to walk up Signal Mountain—Centinela, I should say, since we were then in Mexico.

The reddish-grey rocks, probably basalt in my opinion, were middling warmish to the touch. The canyon twisted and climbed fairly gently past the occasional abandoned jug, sock or jacket. I wondered how many of those
pollos
had successfully reached the gardens of Paradise. At the base of the mountain, on the east side, very near to the border, there is a path to a cave, and on another occasion, a woman and I were guided to that cave, where we found many empty water-jugs. The woman was with me today. She was already losing her desire for me. She did not hold my hand even on the wide path, and when it narrowed I let her go ahead to grip those rock-tussocks that were the color of dried blood.

Looking down into the dreamy banded rainbows of Laguna Salada, Lupe said that he’d heard there was once a rainbow above Centinela, a
supernatural rainbow,
he said meaningfully.

He gazed down into Laguna Salada for another moment. Then he said: There used to be shrimp down there, when there was water, twenty years ago.

(Arrillaga describes Laguna Salada simply as
a plain which, on the east and north, reaches the horizon . . . The plain has no pasture whatsoever . . .
This very year, Lupe proudly said, a special stadium would be built there so that the people could hear Pavarotti sing.)

Many squat, multifaceted quartz crystals lay around us. After an hour’s easy walk, we stood at the topmost upcurving ridge of the saddle (which of course is not the top of Signal Mountain at all), observing how the trail swung deep down around a lower squat point, after which the bowl widened and deepened infinitely into Northside, where Plaster City resembled frozen snow-clouds on Imperial’s reddish-tan ground, beyond which rose the mountains of the Anza-Borrego Badlands. A breeze swept through the gap, strong enough to whirl my cap off my head as I sat writing these very words at the top of a mound of reddish-greyish stones.

This is why the Spaniards in their maps drew California like an island, because it was like
this,
said Lupe almost to himself, pointing north.

I picked up a piece of quartz that was yellowed and veined like very ancient ivory; and here I was; here I was, between the tan peak and the blood-red sprawl; and the trail went on down into my America, which delineated itself by pale green dots; far away, I spied a low range of sand-molars set into the earth’s jaw, and one of them was stained yellow like that piece of quartz.

I turned to looked back into the wider endlessness of Mexico.

Lupe said: I wanna look for that treasure, though. It’s supposed to be at the top, where they encaved themselves to stop the gringo land grabbers.

He believed that twilight sun-gleams revealed the gold in one of the upper caves. It was not twilight by a long shot, but he went off by himself to search for gold. He was gone for a long time. When he came back I asked if he had found the treasure, and he smiled and said: If I had, do you think I’d tell you?

As for me, I took my pick of treasures from the artifacts bestowed here and there upon the mountain; in particular, the
pollos’
jugs reminded me of the concretions which Eva May Hyde and her friends had discovered at the northern foot of Signal Mountain, back in about 1912.
They were so numerous that we thought little of their scientific value.
A quarter-century later she had not forgotten them, and published a brief essay in
The Mineralogist.
In the photograph, they seem to be spheres, each with its own long tapering beak. Nobody knew how they had been created. People who lived near Signal Mountain proposed this theory:
Each one is formed by a hole being made by a crab or other marine animal and as the water poured in the hole the sand was set in motion. As it went round and round the center solidified and the length of the handle was according to the depth of the hole.
Well, well; that’s as good a story as any. By the time I got to Imperial at the end of the twentieth century, the concretions had long since been gleaned away.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

In spite of the odd plastic bottle or scrap of cloth, from this spot of vantage, Imperial seemed to have been scarcely stained at all by humanity. I felt as if I’d entered a certain old book which they keep behind the counter at the Calexico Public Library. This volume is entitled
Report of the Boundary Commission Upon the Survey and Re-Marking the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande 1891-1896. ALBUM.
Hatted men and horses, numbered boundary steles succeed each other in what begins as empty palm desert; the palms disappear long before we reach Imperial. The numbers increase as we go westward. Sometimes ocotillos seem to grapple with the white obelisks—but not every monument is an obelisk; part of the border’s charm back then was the allowable variation; a monument might be thin or squat; moreover, each view in this album was composed from a different distance and perspective. Here’s a horse and wagon on the overlook to Las Palomas Valley (station number fifteen); there’s a marker built out of bricks; it rises about two-and-a-half times the height of the men who pose around it, one man leaning on his shovel; that’s monument number forty. Number seventy-six, in Cañón de Guadalupe, Arizona, is made of iron. By the time we reach one hundred and ninety-three, we’re in el Desierto de Yuma, which we now might as well begin calling the Yuma Desert since it’s been ours ever since Guadalupe Hidalgo; more ocotillos grope like the desiccated arms of victims of a live burial, straining out of fractured sand. Two markers later, we’re still in the Yuma Desert. A man sits on what could be either a barrel or a bedroll; he looks as if the heat is getting to him. Indeed, it’s Yuma Desert all the way to monument two hundred and three, which happens to be an iron stele on flat grey sand; then comes number two hundred and four, also iron, old, repaired, claiming for my nation the mesa just east of the Colorado River. So it is that number two hundred and five, which indicates our possession of the river’s bottomland, introduces us to Imperial itself, where immense, leafless trees reach high above the stele. (Aren’t most of those trees gone now? Closing my eyes, I seem to see only the sprawling mediocrity of Yuma.) On the western side of the Colorado our album depicts more trees; then comes the fateful monument two hundred and seven, built of stone, on the mesa near Pilot Knob, where the irrigation of Imperial will commence. In the album, of course, that’s still several years away; who could believe in such a utopian enterprise? A distant figure in a broadbrimmed hat poses with his hands on his hips.

Number two hundred and eight: Flatness west of Pilot Knob. Two hundred and nine: Sandhills west of Pilot Knob. Two hundred ten is an iron syringe which points absurdly erect out of more sandhills west of Pilot Knob . . .

With number two hundred and eleven, whose material is also iron, we find ourselves officially “on the Colorado Desert,” whose borders wax and wane most disconcertingly in every new publication about the region. Here we find horses and buggies, not to mention a providential water barrel, and four men, two of whom stand posing at shoveling the flat earth. In fact, it’s flat all the way to two hundred and seventeen. Two hundred and eighteen (iron) demarcates a place I’d never before heard of, to wit, the Salton Valley, which is also quite flat, but surprisingly twig-strewn as well as sandy, with low trees or bushes on the horizon. There must be water hereabouts! Two hundred and nineteen (iron) marks title to more of the Salton Valley; we see a mule team in this photograph—freakish! How could such a miserable spot ever be suitable for agriculture? Number two hundred and twenty (iron again) is squat and tapering with a shield, and the world it possesses flat all around; we are east of the New River. Two hundred and twenty-one brings us west of the New River. Two hundred and twenty-two lies in another place I didn’t know existed, the New River Valley—how we love to subdelineate!—and a man with a view camera poses there for us eternally. Two hundred and twenty-three bears the distinction of being the lowest point along the entire boundary. Two hundred and twenty-four stands on a spur of Cerro del Centinela, which is to say Signal Mountain; from where I stand right now, I can’t see its successor;
³⁴¹
the peak on my right occludes it. Two hundred twenty-six brings us back to the Colorado Desert again. May I skip a few markers?
They were so numerous that we thought little of their scientific value.
By the time we reach two hundred fifty, “on a ridge of Tijuana Valley,” everything is quite lush, and we’re only still in Imperial because of the pedantic way that I define her; two fifty-seven stands on a high mesa overlooking the Pacific Ocean; then comes the last one, two hundred and fifty-eight, right on the beach, very grand, caged like the altar in a Mexican shrine.