salton sea, etc.

Went to the post-apocalyptic part of Southern California last Friday and Saturday. Tod, Amarantha and I, except Amarantha didn't answer her phone when we were in San Bernardino, so we shrugged and kept going. Stopped next in a 24-hour travel gas station around 3 AM in an otherwise desolate area south of Coachella, and Tod was almost pickpocketed by a band of grungy ranchy middle-aged Mexican men. This is not racist or meant to make you think rural Mexicans are pickpocketers, it's just a description of what happened. Arrived next at a campsite in the Salton Sea State Recreation Area. We put up tent there, and I fell asleep. Tod was still on a high and instead of sleeping wound up walking a good distance along the Salton Sea shore and finding what we would later refer to only as "the blood bath." According to Wikipedia, "Over 400 species have been documented at the Salton Sea." I can vouch for this, as I was awakened by at least 400 different kinds of bird songs about three hours after I shut my eyes. Later, during my designated sleeptime, I spent a good two hours combatting a small fly. At one point, was it noon by now?, I woke up and found the flies guts smeared all over my hands. Did I kill it in my sleep? And then suddenly, a giant fly's silhouette appeared on the outside wall of the tent. It must have been maybe an inch and a half long, and I felt blessed in comparison for the size of fly in whose guts I was adorn. And the heat was overwhelming by now, probably 96º as forecasters forewarned.

Tod arrived during my fly-gut revelation, saying he wouldn't let me feign sleep any longer. I cellphoned a fellow in my class named Aaron Winkle who has a certain kind of Kansas City charm that I could really get into, and I mean, get into with my tongue. Turns out he didn't go on the field trip, so he read me the number of this girl Courtney who might as well have been a 70s fashion model if she hadn't been born in 1985. She said they were already only a few miles from Salvation Mountain. We took down the tent faster than we set it up, which wasn't difficult, since I think it took less time for me to kill that fly than put up that tent. We flew through the campground exit fast enough that no one by foot could have stopped us to make us pay the $18 camping fee and lived. In Niland, I photographed an abandon gas station and a business whose main mode of advertisement was pink-princess-castle-esque signage. Found classmates walking down the main street, then followed them to Salvation Mountain.

In God's name.

Slab City community bulletin board.

Slab City is a town living out of the shells of old campers on an abandoned WWII military base. Leonard Knight, who made Salvation Mountain, first moved to Slab City twenty years ago with the goal of building a balloon saying "God is Love," but ended up with this mountain instead. It's made of adobe clay, straw and thousands of gallons of paint. He lives out of a 1939 firetruck with no water or heat. See the rest of my photos for a glimpse of Leonard and his truck. After Bombay Beach, an unsuccessful resort town on the Salton Sea now half underwater, I went back to our camping area in search of the aforementioned bloodbath. Trudged down the Salton beach, made of partially ground up fish bones instead of the usual sand, my feet are still recovering from the ensuing cuts.

Then Tod was exhausted and going into a withdrawal, and my class had gone to the annual High Desert Test Sites art show in Joshua Tree, so we bypassed it. (I heard it wasn't very good and continue to tell myself that as I wait for another year to pass.) A few hours later, Tod woke up and was ushered into an ugly suburban home in San Bernardino with eight cars in the driveway and a hideously obese man shirtless in its kitchen. Tod slept soundly on the couch as cousin Amarantha served me a dinner of banana/sweet potato mush—looked like the kind of unidentifiable substance a fifty year-old spinster whips up in an opaque red plastic dish for your potluck and no one eats it—and portabello mushrooms doused in peppers and orange juice. Tod and I had already stopped for a snack-turned-combo meal at Wendy's two hours prior, so it worked out well. Later, when Tod was awake enough to eat his leftovers from the Amarantha dinner, he exclaimed his love for the mush and mushrooms. "It reminds me of the meals my mother would make for special occasions." It irked me that Amarantha lived in a household of seven people, four of whom had no relation or friendship with any other, all of whom were either obese or over 50, all of whom were white and paying very low rent in an upscale-ish multiethnic white-minority neighborhood (a.k.a. the landlord thoroughly weeded out minorities in the tenant selection process). And Amarantha's bedroom might have been eight feet by six feet if I measured generously.

Please have a look at the rest of the photos.