29Palms - Sunday, July 05, 2009

 

I don’t think this is going to work, but I have to try.

Probably won’t be able to put much down, and what I do get down will probably get wiped and redone, but something needs to get put down here while it’s still fresh in my mind. I think. Maybe. Might be just the opposite, though. Might be that my brain is going to need some time to integrate what it’s just been exposed to. I dunno.

Leonard Knight's place, through a glass, darkly

Back a couple of hours ago from a trip down through Joshua Tree National Park and the east side of the Salton Sea, to a place called Slab City, where a gentleman by the name of Leonard Knight lives.

And it’s going to be the Leonard Knight part that’s going to give me trouble, I’m sure of it.

So let’s not talk about Leonard just this right now, ok?

Let’s talk about the drive down there.

Just me and Newt, in his nice truck.

Stop in town for some gas and provisions, and up the hill we go, into Joshua Tree.

Left turn before we get too far into things, and we’re off on a roundabout path down through the Pinto Basin, out and across I-10, down through some badlands and out to the agricultural area on the north shore of the Salton Sea, and then down the east shore of the Salton Sea to Slab City.

The part through the Pinto Basin was just as cool as shit. Mile after endless mile of seriously severe rocky-hills, huge alluvial slopes, and just generally wicked-cool hard-ass desert.

Nobody anywhere.

Not a soul on the road with us.

The Fourth of July weekend was doing its thing, and keeping everybody occupied elsewhere, and we had the whole place to ourselves.

As we drove along, Newt explained and identified various features and items as we went past them.

Cholla Forest in the Pinto Basin

First stop, on the slope down into the Pinto Basin, was a little something called the Cholla Forest.

I’ve already mentioned cholla, but maybe I need to revisit it a bit, for those of you who still are not sufficiently frightened of the stuff, ok?

Cholla is a cactus.

A smallish cactus.

Very unprepossessing cactus.

Soft looking, in fact.

Looks downright inviting, doesn't it?

Stands anywhere from a couple of feet high to perhaps head high and even a bit taller sometimes. Baby ones aren’t much more than ground-level nubs.

Stems about as big around as your wrist, maybe. Braches off into an almost, but not quite, bushy-looking aspect.

Grows here and there, and there’s even a bit of it at Newt’s, that he’s planted between the Hell Trailer and his house, just because he can.

Very fuzzy looking stuff, rounded off around all the edges.

Almost cute, even.

But once you get up close to it, you realize that the “fuzz” is actually a nimbus of insanely close-packed needles, and if you so much as brush up against it, you will suddenly discover that the nimbus of insanely close-packed needles is now attached to you, and it’s there to stay.

Like you'd almost want to snuggle up to it or something

Welcome to pain.

Serious fucking pain.

It has such a marvelous ability to attach itself to you, that it’s also known as “Jumping Cholla” because you can’t quite bring yourself to believe that you even so much as touched the stuff, and instead it must have “jumped” over on to you from a distance. Newt informs me that there are people out here who swear that it really does jump, and they cannot be dissuaded from this neurotic belief system in which spring-loaded cacti lie in wait for the unwary, all the better to punish them for......who the fuck knows? But the stuff don't jump, ok? And that's alright, 'cause it's plenty evil enough without recourse to violation of the basic laws of physics.

Once it "jumps," you’ll discover to your horror that entire branches and segments of it are now adhering to you, and every move you make from then on only serves to make things much much worse.

You cannot remove it with your hand, as all that does is transfer horrific numbers of needles to your hand, which is thereby promptly rendered unusable owing to the pain.

Brushing it off with a stick affords no comfort, and rids you of no needles.

Nice fuzzy jumping cholla

It is said that you can do yourself a little good, by using a comb (carefully, very carefully) to take it off of you. But the comb can only do so much, and at some point, up to literally thousands of embedded needles will need to be removed from your skin, one at a time, with tweezers or something similar.

I myself have not had the misfortune of dealing with the cholla directly, and am only going on what I’ve been told by people out here.

They ALL say the same thing, and I believe them, yes I do.

One look at the stuff should convince anybody.

It’s wicked. Wicked wicked wicked!

And so I find myself in a fucking forest of the stuff here on the side of the road, headed down into the Pinto Basin.

No way to turn, no way to go anywhere without encountering the claustrophobic swarm of cholla in every direction.

Fortunately for me, I’m on a Park Service walkway that’s been constructed out into the stuff, away from the roadway.

Evil wicked mean and nasty goddamned cholla!

And all around me, I’m literally eyeball deep in a sea of cholla.

Scary. Scary like a motherfucker.

So I take a few pictures, and then scurry back to the safety of Newt’s truck, and get the hell out of there.

Ye fucking gods!

Fortunately, the Cholla Forest is an anomaly, and soon enough the creosote reasserts itself, and the cholla goes back to being a sporadic danger instead of a crazed ocean of death-dealing needles.

Yikes!

And from here we wind down, around, and across, and all around us the desert bares its fangs, and lets us know in no uncertain terms who’s the boss around here.

Naked gray-brown hills. Great jumbled piles of rocks. A sea of creosote. Spindly, spiky, dead-looking ocotillo. Weency little somethingorothers (I think they’re Antelope Ground Squirrels, but I could be wrong) skittering across the road just ahead of our wheels every now and then. Joshua trees. Yucca. White patches of quartz standing out among the dark rocky hillsides. Cholla lurking in the creosote. Occasional rocky mounds and outcrops that don’t look like they even belong. Traces of the mining industry that once existed, here and there. Blastingly bright sun, surging down from a steel-hard, cloudless blue sky. Occasional whiffs of creosote. A lonesome roadway ahead, completely overwhelmed by the implacable desert all around. An air of patience, oh-so-long-term patience. Vast spaces filled with cruel silence. A few jackrabbits (And how do they manage to stay clear of the fucking cholla?). An eagle, or perhaps a large hawk, eyeing things from overhead, looking for something to kill and eat. Khaki-colored sand and dust. Great rocks upturned in the washes and ravines, witnessing silent testimony to cataclysmic flooding in the unreachable past. And more, and more, and more…

It all goes by too fast. I find myself unable to keep up with it, and instead my eyes just sort of hit the high spots, sipping as much as they can from the firehose of information that I’m being overwhelmed with.

I find myself wishing I could spend five years or so out here, taking every path, walking through the rocks, stopping to consider a cactus, taking in a vista, carefully avoiding the cholla, listening to the silence, and just simply learning this desert.

I find myself falling in love with the place.

The desert admits to no bullshit, and I find that a most admirable quality in things, so of course I find myself siding with the desert in every regard.

I cannot describe what I saw out here, although I wish I could. But this desert also doesn’t admit to easy description, and to compound matters, I really don’t even know what the hell I’m looking at. So I apologize for not painting a better picture of the wonders and marvels we drove through.

Come and see for yourself, is about all I can say. Many of you, I suspect, will see little or nothing, and leave shaking your head, wondering what the hell kinds of drugs I must be taking, but a few of you will instantly understand, and that’s plenty enough for me.

Out of the park, across I-10, and down to the Salton Sea.

Along the way, we pass through a badlands where the geology steps up a notch.

Down through an erosional cut that winds along between vertical aspects on either side, compacted and cemented dirt and sand layers, with included rocks, boulders, and debris. Past that into a riot of folded rock with strata upended in all directions, clear evidence of some hyperslowmotion violence that played itself out, unimaginable eons into the past. And then suddenly we’re out into irrigated farmland with the deep blue of the Salton Sea contrasting psychotically against the desiccated mountains beyond it.

The Sea doesn’t stink today, but I’m told it does, mightily, at times.

An accidental inland sea, created by an unholy alliance of farmers and the Army Corp of Engineers, who misdug a canal and then had to just get the fuck out of the goddamned way until things reestablished a new equilibrium, in the form of this very out-of-place body of water.

Which started out nice enough I suppose, but was then further knocked out of equilibrium by the unpleasant effects of too much agricultural runoff, and then the resultant algae blooms and eutrophication killed off most of the fish, and left the saline water behind in a state of stagnant decay that remains to this day.

But we’re not here to partake of the dystopian pleasures of this man-made sea, and instead we wind down the eastern side of it, on our way to Slab City.

Bleak. Dead. Post-apocalyptic. Utterly barren.

Along the shoreline, you can see mile after endless mile of what was once agricultural land.

No more.

The desert is reclaiming that which it once held sway over, and apparently no amount of irrigation can reverse this process.

Bleak.

Post-apocalyptic.

Abandoned.

Forlorn.

A Southern-Pacific freight train goes by on the rails that parallel the road we’re on, just inland, away from the sea.

Parched attempts at settlement, some still occupied, some abandoned, dot the landscape every so often.

Things are getting quite harsh out there.

Abandoned Greco-Roman architecture in Niland

And then we find ourselves in Niland, California, or what’s left of it, and we strike out eastward through the middle of what might or might not be called “town,” headed for the promised land of Slab City, and Leonard Knight.

Leonard Knight

And now, goddamnit, I’m going to have to come to grips with Leonard Fucking Knight.

And I don’t think I’m up to the task.

I really don’t.

Leonard is crazy, I’m pretty sure, but maybe not. Maybe we’re all crazy and Leonard is the only sane one left.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Slab City is an abandoned military installation, wherein a host of desperate people, expelled or self-exiled from what passes for civilization, have fetched up, far enough from the eyes and arms of authority to have been mostly left alone out here, squatting on the land.

It looks like something out of a cheap movie, and I’d bet good money that it’s served as the inspiration for more than just a few of them.

Out here, the apocalypse is none too far away, and occasionally it’s hard to tell if the apocalypse lies forward or backward in time.

And as you enter the outskirts of Slab City, you must first pass by Leonard Knight’s lifework.

He’s still out here working on it, by the way.

How do I describe this thing?

Part wedding cake, part wasp’s nest, part carnival, part church, part monument, part insane asylum, part junkyard, part roadside attraction, and part something else that I can’t think of right now.

By the time we arrived, the heat was starting to kick into gear, but it wasn’t quite lethal just yet.

What is.....

.....that thing?

I find myself looking at this thing from a distance, and a Great Need to use the camera comes over me and I ask Newt to stop, so I can get a couple of shots of it in the distance.

Newt obliges, and we then take the turn off of the two-lane paved road, and enter Leonard’s version of …… what?

Fuck if I know what, that's what.

It looms riotously in the middle distance, as you get out of your parked vehicle and consider the scattering of gaudily-painted wrecks standing like an archipelago of small islands all around you, above the flat brown of the desert floor.

Jesus, god, and bible malarkey is festooned across any and all surfaces, and yet somehow it completely fails to be annoying in the way that kind of stuff usually annoys. The overall impact of the place somehow subsumes the religious propaganda into itself, and you find yourself appreciating the art and the herculean work for its own deranged, compulsive sake, completely oblivious to the tired, beat-to-death message of the lettered cant and dogma.

I am completely flabbergasted by this thing, despite having been appraised of it in advance by Newt, and also having previously seen pictures of it.

Please keep this in mind while you look at the pictures of it, ok?

They’re of no use, really.

None at all.

They fail utterly to capture the spirit of this place.

You MUST come out here and take this thing in through the pores of your skin.

Otherwise, you’re not really going to get it, even though you probably think you get it.

And please also keep in mind, that Leonard is old, and he can’t last forever out here doing this kind of work under a nuclear furnace of a desert sun.

Yeah, we got to meet Leonard.

Down into the hallucinogenic labyrinth we went

I was out front, on the apron of the edifice, amid the archipelago, where it goes from wedding cake to desert, taking pictures, when I heard Newt call for my attention, and there was something about the tone of it that caused me to instantly stop what I was doing, and quick-step it toward the center of things where Newt was beckoning to me.

Outside, in the same general area as I was, there was but one other soul around, also with camera in hand, who had arrived by chance immediately after us, and who was also dumbfoundedly walking around, possibly trying to make sense of what he was seeing and photographing.

Newt had turned on his heel and was reentering the “structure” even as I arrived where he had been standing when he got my attention.

I followed, still quick-stepping it, and as I finally caught up to him and attempted to inquire as to what was up, his response was only to shush me and keep right on walking.

One of the heartiest greetings I have ever received

Down into the hallucinogenic labyrinth we went, and by god, just past a now-stopped Newt, there kneeled Leonard, arms covered in a slurry of mud, happily continuing and expanding on the vast psychosis of his lifework.

Leonard espied us, and immediately stopped smearing the slurry onto the ground, came erect from the waist up, spread his arms wide, smiled even wider, and gave us one of the heartiest greetings I have ever received in all my life.

Miraculously, I had my camera at the ready, and actually managed to get a shot of this.

Leonard made to stop working, and we told him to please go right ahead and do not let us interrupt him.

And he bent back to his task

And he bent back to his task, but only for a moment, as he was unable to contain himself and refrain from further welcoming us and offering to tell us about his endlessly-ongoing project out in the desert.

Leonard sought to enlighten us a little regarding various particulars of his work

Leonard led us into a different part of the bowels of the thing, and sought to enlighten us a little regarding various particulars of his work.

Newt, who has been here before, and who, it must not be forgotten, has a fine appreciation for art, engaged Leonard in a sensible give-and-take while I, for the most part, simply kept thanking Leonard for taking the time to talk with us.

And so, inside a cacophonously-colored grotto, we learned a thing or two about Leonard’s construction techniques.

Leonard’s interior columns are actually trees, and  down at their very base, they are anchored by large truck tires, covered with, and filled with, the adobe mud that Leonard works in, and adobe-welded to the ground. No sign of a truck tire remains when the work is finished. The adobe just smoothly blends from column to floor without a hint of what lies buried within it.  Leonard was careful to be sure that I actually understood how he had, over time, refined his adobe-making technique so that the stuff would completely fill the truck tires, resulting in a much more robust finished product.

I do not know where he gets his water or bales of hay to make the stuff with, but it’s quite clear that he has an ample supply of both.

There’s a vast snarl of very real trunks and branches, some quite heavy, around and overhead, springing from within, and disappearing into, the riotously-painted adobe all around us

The truck tire and adobe “trees” then morph into real trees, and there’s a vast snarl of very real trunks and branches, some quite heavy, around and overhead, springing from within, and disappearing into, the riotously-painted adobe all around us.

Who the fuck is going around transporting trees out here into the middle of nowhere and then lifting them into place, sometimes surprisingly far above ground level? Leonard? Helpers? Elves?

Dunno.

Thumping the walls of the thing results in a very dull, dead sound, almost no sound at all, without any hollowness whatsoever.

This fucker is solid.

Which was more or less comforting, because there were places, walking around within it, where that which lurched, cantilevered, and extended overhead conveyed more than just a little unease, as I wondered how well it was going to remain in place while I walked beneath it.

Leonard continued his narrative, before a car door imbedded within an inner wall of the thing

Leonard continued his narrative, before a car door imbedded within an inner wall of the thing, emblazoned with “JESUS loves you, you love JESUS,” advising how his layering of slurry on the ground made for a much better bond between layers of adobe, thus enhancing the overall strength of the construction.

Thoughts of car doors and large truck tires caused me to ask where he got his material, and Leonard serenely replied, “In the desert.” Which I took to mean that he has scavenged the lot of it from out on the sunbaked surrounds, for who knows how many miles around.

Newt advised that sometimes this or that group may come out to this place, and pitch in to do a little helping hand work for Leonard.

So there’s no telling how all of this stuff got here, by who’s hands it was brought, or why.

Leonard don’t seem to give a rat’s ass, and has cheerfully incorporated anything and everything, tossing it all into a common pot and yet somehow producing something spectacularly unique, lasting, and mysterious.

Deeply fucking mysterious, in fact.

There is no end of color, brightness, and brash in-your-faceness, but underneath it all an infrasonic hum of unanswered questions thrums unhearably.

We’ll start off with: How in the name of living fuck can an eighty-something year old man just keep on grinding it out, day after day after day, out here under the molten desert sun for all these years?

I mean, yeah, I realize that adobe is a pretty fucking good thermal insulator, but goddamnit, it routinely hits one hundred and ten degrees out here, and can go quite a bit higher than that when it takes a notion to.

Leonard’s half-crazed smile offers no answers.

Instead, he cheerfully explains how he makes his “flowers,” which cover the inside of things, and the outside as well, like pockmarks on a plague victim.

The method is simplicity itself and consists in taking a glob of adobe and throwing it against something, and then while it’s still fresh and wet, punch it with your fist right in the center.

And that’s it, sum and total.

Walk away from it at that point and move on.

The adobe will dry, soon enough, and once it has you are free to daub your new “flower” with whatever bright shade of color strikes you as most appropriate.

And you’re done.

Flowers erupt from every surface, all around you.

Hell, the whole fucking thing is an eruption.

An eruption of madness, somehow lashed to pattern and purpose, resulting in an ongoing question mark that is not quite noun, not quite verb, one hundred percent marvelous, the likes of which exists nowhere else on earth.

///////

I see now that it’s after 10pm, and I’ve been writing about this for most of the afternoon and evening, and I still have some ground yet to travel with my narrative.

So I shall put this down right here, right now, turn out the lights, and get myself sufficient sleep to wake with the dawn tomorrow.

Wish me luck with Leonard and his lifework, ok?

///////

Well here it is, past 3:30 the next afternoon, Monday, and I guess I’m as done with Leonard as anyone can ever be.

We walked around all over the thing, which you are encouraged to do. Part of it is hollow, and part of it is icing over an existing rise in the land. All of it defies description. Leonard gave us a few trinkets to commemorate our visit, and at no time mentioned the words Jesus, god, saved, or any of the rest of the standard litany of the religiously deranged. I guess he figures that if you’re not getting the message on appearances alone, then there’s not a whole lot more he can do for you by adding spoken words to it. Newt graciously handed him a twenty by way of a donation/thank you note, and I took a lot of pictures.

The fucking pictures, as I said earlier, aren’t really any good by way of conveying the atmosphere of the place, but it’s the best I can do.

Ah well.

Then we took a drive through Slab City, and I took a few more shots, including a couple of a Sheriff’s cruiser, no doubt keeping the place safe for The Children. Think of the children! I’m pretty sure the children in Slab City will get by, sheriff or no sheriff.

Then we drove back the way we came, and the whole thing wound back up exactly the way it had unwound in the first place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leonard Knight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ok. Now you tell me. Just what the fuck was it that I saw here?

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