Oh, perish all things; Leonard Knight is dead. If you grew up in Southern California sometime in the last thirty years, odds are that you’ve either heard of him or even made the trip to Salvation Mountain just outside of Slab City.
Leonard Knight, the lean and sturdy New Englander who spent three decades joyously painting religious slogans on a tall mound of adobe he called Salvation Mountain in the Imperial Valley desert, died Monday at age 82…
His death was announced on his Salvation Mountain Facebook page by his devoted followers who have been attempting to preserve his labor of love east of the Salton Sea near the squatter village called Slab City.
Until his health declined, Knight had lived in the back of his truck, sharing his space with a variety of cats without names, undeterred by the brutal desert heat or howling winds.
“Love Jesus and keep it simple,” he once said, explaining his philosophy of life.
The mountain is a sloping, terraced hill about three stories tall and 100 feet long and crowned with a cross. The property is owned by the state, but efforts to oust Knight have long since been abandoned.
He was a really remarkable artist. If you ever got to see and feel Salvation Mountain for yourself, you know what I mean. It’s in the middle of absolute howling nowhere — just beyond Slab City, which is just beyond Niland (which used to be Imperial Junction, and Hobgood before that) Every LA kid knows they used to call the Salton Sea “California’s Riviera” until agricultural runoff in the ’60s and ’70s killed all the fish and chased away all the celebrities. It’s odd out there, and people in the rest of the Inland Empire and San Bernadino talk about it the way the rest of the country talks about Detroit. (John Waters narrated a pretty great documentary about the history of the region, if you’re interested.)
I drove out to see him by myself once in college. I was supposed to make a day of it with a couple of friends but they changed their minds about going at the last minute, so I decided to drive ahead alone. It was only a few hours away — I was attending an evangelical Christian college on the eastern edge of LA County, right where it butts up against the San Gabriel mountains. And it was raining (of course) and I was in the middle of a lonesome sort of crisis of faith, and when I got there he’d gone into town for the afternoon and it was only me and a few cats on the mountain, and I slipped in the mud a few times trying to make it to the top (acrylic gets slippery when you get rain on it). I couldn’t help but take the loneliness personally (I rather made it my business to take things personally at the time), and felt certain that being alone in the rain with a cat on top of a place called Salvation Mountain was the sort of thing that could only happen to me, never mind the fact that it happened to Leonard all the time and that even in Southern California rain is not statistically improbably in the middle of February.
It’s easy, of course, to romanticize and infantilize the story of a simple New Englander who lived out by a ruined inland sea painting a giant plaster mountain with crosses and Bible verses, but he was a lovely man who built a lovely thing that a lot of people have been very happy to see.
There’s even a few minutes of him in the movie Into The Wild:
“Oh! Lotta people in the valley just love me a lot. Everybody now, I think in the whole world, is just lovin’ me. And I wanna have the wisdom to love ’em back. And, uh…hah! That’s about it, so I really get excited.”
He sort of throws his fists up in the air on that last “hah,” like he’s about to take a playful swipe at someone or give them a bear hug. He was the closest thing Southern California had to Tom Bombadil, and I’m sad and I’m sorry to hear that he’s dead.
