Salvation Mountain & Other Curious Odysseys
I am a little pencil
in the hand of a writing God
who is sending a love letter to the world.
- Mother Teresa, 1910-1997
Salvation Mountain, California
This image was taken about an hour south of Palm Springs, California. Last winter, I headed out with a new friend into the desert on Route 10 past the wind farm, with its 4,865 turbines standing sentinel, at the foothills of the San Jacinto and San Gorgornio mountains. We passed the cell phone towers dolled up as palm trees, and passed the massive Shadow Hills seniors’ community, with its 180 social clubs. We passed Mecca, where you can have a date shake at the date palm farm/RV park combo. We passed the pumice fields, where the spongy stones abound, relics of long ago volcanic eruptions.
And along the circumference of the Salton Sea*, we came to Niland, a lonely crossroads. A bank sat forlornly on one corner, its cash flow clearly dried up long before the current crisis, its still-imposing Ionic columns scarred with graffiti. Diagonally opposite, a long train sat dead in its tracks. We headed over them further into the desert, the expanse around us studded with molehill-like protrusions of old Army bunkers. Suddenly, lo and behold, we saw an exuberant oasis of swirling primary colors rising from the dusty desert floor and reaching for the indigo sky. We had reached Salvation Mountain.
Pulling into the parking lot, we passed a baby-blue mailbox proclaiming “God is Love.” I couldn’t help but grin at the man-made desert garden stretching out before the Mountain’s base. An assortment of broken down vehicles had been given new life, every inch of their surface emblazoned with primitive, child-like designs of birds and flowers in vibrant hues. A pickup truck, camper, two motorcycles, and a boat were each transformed into individual beds of vivid blooms—I buzzed from one to the next, savoring the sweet artistry.
A wiry and spry Leonard Knight made a beeline for me from inside the mouth of the Mountain, and cried out a warm welcome. The creative force behind Salvation Mountain, Leonard was tan and lean, with good teeth and tousled white hair. Dressed in a cotton button-down shirt and chinos, he looked as though he could have been on the 19th hole, save the multi-colored paint splotches. His boyish appearance belied his 74 years of age and was enhanced by his earnestness and lack of guile. He was, in short, imminently and instantly lovable. I didn’t know what I had expected of someone who had wound up here 24 years ago from Vermont and began a new life by slapping adobe on the hillside, and painting it with biblical passages. I was pleasantly surprised and deeply touched by Leonard.
A self-described rebel who nonetheless was bullied as a kid, Leonard made his first trip to California in 1956. Eleven years later, he returned to visit his sister in San Diego. According to reports, it was here where he experienced his first religious feelings after he rejected his sister’s attempts to teach him about Jesus: “I was about thirty-six years old and I’d never spent one minute, hardly, thinking about God or the Lord. I remember (to my knowledge, it was on a Wednesday, about ten-thirty in the morning in 1967, in my van, by myself) and I just started saying ‘Jesus, I’m a sinner, please come into my heart.’ I figured, hey, I’m all alone with Jesus, there ain’t no harm in me keeping repeating this. And, man, for twenty minutes I was just saying it over and over again, and it changed my life completely to the good.”
Returning to Vermont and impassioned to share his conversion, he happened to see a hot air balloon pass overhead one day. Inspired to build his own as a means of promoting his message of salvation, he spent the next 14 years traveling across the country, all the while sewing a massive inflatable that, alas, he was never able to get airborne. In 1984, he found himself defeated and deflated, in the desert, his dream dismantled. He decided he would spend one week making a “small statement” before moving on. As Leonard is reported to have said in 1996 “It’s been a good week.”
He gave me a personal tour, as it seems he does for every visitor, and enthusiastically showed me around his Candy Land-like patch of desert. He pointed out the evolution over the past quarter century of his three-story Christian cartoon, now spreading over a couple of acres of dunes—for which he has used more than 100,000 gallons of paint, much of it donated.
I took in the latex “sea” at the mountain’s base, akin to a huge kiddie pool; the blue-and-white striped waterfall aside the ‘yellow brick road,’ that climbs to the top of the 30-foot mountain, with a 15-foot cross at its peak, just above the big red heart shouting ‘Say Jesus I’m a sinner, please come upon my body and into my heart.’ Leonard then guided me through the latest addition to the Mountain, an igloo-shaped structure attached to its side that he called the ‘museum.’ He told me that the trees he made here are forged from cast-off wood and tires salvaged in the desert, and showed me his technique for creating the flower swirls embedded in them—balling up his fist and smashing it into the adobe thick with paint. Flower power!
As he briskly led me around the mountain he confessed, “I don’t know what I’m doing. But God does. And so I just keep doing it.”
And God keeps letting him. In 1994, hazardous waste experts appeared and cited Leonard as creating a toxic site with the lead in his painted mountain. Leonard fought the charge, and won. Publicity surrounding the controversy attracted the attention of a Hollywood producer, who formed “Friends of Leonard Knight,” which counts among its members several museum curators. In building his missionary mountain, Leonard has been hailed as a visionary artist, and in 2000 was given a plaque by the Folk Art Society of America acknowledging the artistic merit of the sculpture that is Salvation Mountain.
Mother Teresa, quoted above, is certainly a better-known missionary, one who also came into the public eye in part due to the work of a media maven. British journalist, author, satirist, and soldier-spy, Malcom Muggeridge became known as the “discoverer” of Mother Teresa, whom he first interviewed in London in 1968. He introduced her persona and work to the world through a television documentary filmed in Calcutta called Something Beautiful for God, and authored a best-selling book by the same name.
Muggeridge was a controversial figure, said to be a drinker, heavy smoker and womanizer in earlier life and, in his later years, a Christian convert and writer. Calling himself an agnostic for most of his life, he published Jesus Rediscovered in 1969, a collection of essays, articles and sermons on faith. It became a best seller. In A Third Testament, he profiled seven spiritual thinkers, or God’s Spies as he called them, who influenced his life: St. Augustine of Hippo, William Blake, Blaise Pascal, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Soren Kierkegaard. During this time, he also produced several BBC documentaries with a religious theme, including In the Footsteps of St. Paul. In 1982, at age 79, he converted to Roman Catholicism, largely due to the influence of Mother Teresa. His last book Conversion describes his life as a 20th century pilgrimage and spiritual journey.
Muggeridge was born in 1903, the son of a member of the House of Commons; he described his upbringing as “socialist.” In 1924, he left Cambridge University and worked as a teacher in India and Egypt, from where he also wrote articles for newspapers that included the Evening Standard and the Daily Telegraph. In 1932 Muggeridge became a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in the Soviet Union. He then returned to India where he became assistant editor for the Calcutta Statesman. He also published the book, The Earnest Atheist (1936). During World War II, Muggeridge worked for British Intelligence MI5. After the war, he was a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Washington, then served as editor of Punch Magazine. He also worked as a television reporter for the BBC’s investigative Panorama.
During the 1960s, the combination of his burgeoning spiritual beliefs and outspokenness as a social critic occasionally created an uproar. In a 1968 article in Esquire magazine, he called the Beatles “four vacant youths…dummy figures with tousled heads (and) no talent.” In a 1979 televised debate, he publicly attacked Monty Python’s John Cleese and Michael Palin over what he saw as the blasphemy of the film Life of Brian. Writer Christopher Hitchens vilified Muggeridge posthumously in a 1994 BBC program, describing him as a “fraud and mountebank.”
Now affectionately remembered as St. Mugg in many quarters, a literary society was created in Britain in his name in 2003; his papers are held in a collection at Wheaton College in Illinois .
Mother Teresa is said to have heard God’s call at the age of 12; there is no question that her humanitarian work is awe-inspiring. I am equally moved by the stories of St. Mugg and Leonard Knight, quirky characters whose curious odysseys have contained more uncertainty. Like Malcolm, my awakening is slow going and marked with missteps. And like Leonard, I often feel I too don’t know what I’m doing. But I am enjoying writing my “love letters,” and grateful to be allowed the opportunity.
Whatever your path, happy holidays!
For more photographs of Salvation Mountain, see Travel Photos.
* a whole other story in and of itself, which is excerpted here–see Travel Articles
http://www.salvationmountain.us/
Read more: (Thomas) Malcolm Muggeridge – Biography, Works http://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/361/-Thomas-Malcolm-Muggeridge.html#ixzz0aT9syKRb
http://www.malcolmmuggeridge.org/