After coming down the valley out of the desert the box canyon may not seem like much. The vice of comparison again. I lost it. Long ago in a sailors’ tavern in the port of Amsterdam. I now take one thing as its own universe. If everyone and everything, literally every celestial matter in the universe comes from stardust, then it is infinite. Drifting through the narrow rocks and sand on the sides of the road is the perfect setting for a passage between two worlds, especially if they are such opposites as a sea and a desert. It is an opportunity to regroup, to refocus, to aim. But right there I forget where I came from or where I’m going to. Box Canyon looks as it really is: infinite.

What a beautiful couple the sand and the asphalt make. A marriage of reason and interest certainly, which still bred passion. Millions of years ago the two sides of the canyon were one crust of dirt until the tormented guts of the planet shrieked, punched and twisted it cracked. This artery has dried up, until new blood started to flow of which I am a mere cell. I day dream, my gaze following the lines of layers of rock forming both sides of the canyon. Each one a different shade of brown, as if it were an onion. I only run across a couple of car in an obvious hurry to get out. I understand why some would feel oppressed here, vulnerable. Think mid nineteenth century, horse carriage with all your belongings and your family, your whole world moving slowly and noisily on the gravel, looking above the edge of the canyon anxiously expecting for some gangsters or some Indian warriors to attack. Maybe that fear became engraved in the genome of Americans and even today, riding on four wheels through such a gorge in the middle of the desert instinctively feels like danger. I feel at peace, feeling the dice have been thrown and are rolling on the green mat. That moment between the throw and the outcome where all control is relinquished, is very liberating and peaceful.

As I finally get out of the canyon and get closer to the lake, I cross train tracks, push along a few more miles of desert and stumble across powerfully green orchard meadows and palm tree plantations. Unexpected, but omnipresent around here apparently, it attracts labor, shapes the landscape and the traffic. Tractors and other sort of specialized vehicles go in and out of the meadows and the plantations. This oasis takes my mind away from the perspective of the Salton Sea for a moment. I am impressed by so much green in the middle of the dust, by those juicy looking oranges in the midst of the thirst. Soon though we reach the town of Mecca and make a sharp left on Grapefruit boulevard. The first shock is the realization that this sea did not rob its name. From its North shore, looking South, the horizon line merges with the water. You cannot see beyond it. We could be on the deck of a ship sailing into the ocean. It should be an elated sight yet bears a silent foreboding warning.

Grapefruit boulevard becomes the California 111 and slides along the Salton and beyond, all the way down to Calexico and then across the frontier to Mexicali a mere 150 kilometers away. It’s a plain road carved in the sand, well paved, looking very crisp under the bright blue sky. Driving southbound, the railroad is your companion, riding on your left like a life line, like hand rail for the disoriented, like a dog on a leash, the whole time. Every once in a while, long train from the Union Pacific comes your way pulling hundreds of double stacked containers. It’s a fearsome sight, of a mechanical boa constrictor that, at certain angles, in certain curves, looks like it’s going straight in my direction and will swallow the Ford before turning it into a container. The coast on the right-hand side looks more like a dried swamp than a beach, and the sea does little to balance the dystopian feel that fast emerges from this ride. Yet another planet. One that has barely survived the apocalypse and that stillappears to be haunted by some strange virus…

Here the shadow of a man walking aimlessly in the middle of an abandoned gas station formerly known as “Felix Auto Repair”, near a double-trailer-truck loaded with haystack… There a wide one-story building with an apparently pointless white structure on top surmounted by a sail boat mast with an American flag floating in between palm trees… “North Shore Beach & Yacht Club” is written in golden letters on the right side of the entrance door with a golden anchor below and the letters NSBYC scattered around it. It’s Monday in the middle of the afternoon. No car on the parking lot. Doors closed. All lights off inside the building. Most peculiar, no deck behind the club on the sea side and… no ship, boat, jet-ski or even a canoe… A little further the windowless ruin of what might have been a fast-food restaurant has been assaulted by urban artists lacking inspiration and work ethics… I keep going deeper into this twilight zone. A road sign indicates Niland 33, Calipatria 42 and Calexico 75. On my right the couple of hundred yards to the beach is as desolate as the desert in the Antelope Valley, cracked sand and bushes plunge directly into the sea that runs far beyond the horizon… Where have I landed? What is this world? I’m expecting Mad Max’s furious War Boys on their spiked-nitro-boosted-chainsaw-equipped trucks to appear in a cloud of dust…

To avoid any such post-apocalyptic confrontation, I make a hard right following the sign for Bombay Beach only to find myself diving deeper into the surreal. The name has an exotic ring to it. From landing in LAX to driving through this salt crusted, town dug deep in the sand, 223 feet below sea level the reference to the largest city in India is not lost on me. I am driving slowly, my Ford on electric mode exhaling faintly. Stealth mode. On my right and is a ten feet high dirt embankment. On my left a motley succession of trailers, rough concrete houses, wooden wrecks, abandoned jet-skis, the Chow Minimart with a sailboat on dry dock in the patio and a pirate flag hoisted above it, a wooden cabin with windows blinded by a thick layer of dust, two old caravans behind a makeshift fence made of crumbling cement block that was never finished. The Bombay Market, a plain-green-windowless building with a big sign on the front indicating the opening hours in red letters on a yellow background and on which a couple of corrections were made by way of two grossly drawn and cut sheets of paper taped over the former obsolete information. More derelict buildings and rusted caravans, a Freightliner truck behind the fence on a patio. When I reach the south end, I park, exit the car and climb the embankment.

Get an acoustic feel of what this place can breed at https://youtu.be/AIjrmY5B7tc (Florian-Ayala Fauna grew up in Bombay Beach).

Behind it, another hundred yards of the Sonoran Desert, swirls of brownish grey stained by wide leaks of greys brown, scattered with a few rocks and isolated dried weeds, sliding lazily into the endless sea. Towards the, the ruin of a concrete construction submerged in mud, covered with graffiti. To the North the same dried up swamp and on the other side of the Salton, the sharp Santa Rosa Mountain range. And right in the middle of it all, two people engaged in a strange pantomime. From the distance, the easiest interpretation of their movements would be that they are enjoying a fun time at the beach. But this ain’t Malibu. This ain’t just a beach. It’s desolate, stinking, almost cursed. She’s wearing a tight short dress with long sleeves, revealing her pale legs in shiny contrast against the dark mud, dark tennis shoes, a dark backpack and holding something that could be a large camera, an ipad or simply a map. There is another backpack laying in the dirt about fifty feet away from them in my direction, probably his. My intuition tells me there are not locals and that they have a purpose. What would bring a couple of tourists on that specific patch of dirt? I will never know but my imagination will run wild. I go back to the car.

I start cruising through the town. I see absolutely no one in the streets. The only sign of activity are the cars on the parking lot of the Ski Inn Bombay Beach Cocktails and Home Cooking. Half a dozen cars, well kept, fairly new models…. I am very tempted to go in for a plate of anything and engage with fellow drifters. I want to know more, feel the pulse of this place, share a moment with the people who keep this hollow dip into the mud alive and who in turn are shaped by it. According to the census bureau, about one thousand people lived in Bombay Beach in 1990. By 2000 less than 400 remained. In 2010 the census counted 295 people. At this rate the town will be no more by 2030. It’s difficult to imagine the kind of life one can have here. I am mesmerized by the raw beauty of this derelict village. Something special is going on, a stillness, a silent heartbeat, a disguised freedom, an inescapable bond with a forsaken land, a challenge to nature, an indestructible yet frozen pioneering spirit, that has eventually given birth to a parallel universe. I’m almost hesitant to keep on going forward. How much deeper can I go into this world without being swallowed and losing my way back?

What happened here. What is the Salton Sea. In a parallel universe this could be the nicest Riviera, a vacationing paradise. The presence of a Yacht Club seems to suggest that at some point there was boating going on. Are all those cadavers of stores, commerce, this ghost town, the outcome of a desperate attempts to domesticate an impossibly hostile wilderness or the aftermath of some tragic catastrophe? Everything is at once bleak and beautiful, surfing on a very thin line separating the bizarre from the bourgeois, the insane from the prosperous. This sensation that there is an underlining reality just below this world, that everything is not quite what it looks like, that it is a set up and that a parallel dimension is about to unfold at any second, reminds me of movies such as the Truman Show (we could be in a dystopian version of Seahaven) or the Get Out (going backwards from a nightmarish post nuclear disaster zone to a magnificent beachside community).

The Truman Show's studio town of Seahaven (Peter Weir) — *The Truman Show*'s studio town of Seahaven (Peter Weir)

Yet I’m back on the 111 where I run across yet another UP monster crawling straight towards the North… What is it transporting? Where do the goods come from? Where are they going?

Fifteen miles further, on the northbound half of the road is a station where all cars seem to be stopping and be checked by men in uniformed as if crossing a border. I reach Niland, a town significantly larger than Bombay Beach, with sturdier looking buildings and people seemingly going on about their business. It still feels like being on the same slowly sinking boat. The stores and commerce on 111 that once were the life this post-office town, are now mostly abandoned shells, some appearing to have burn down, with no windows above the low brick wall that runs along. They have offered themselves to the creative impulses and boredom and desperair of unevenly talented graffiti artists. Only the outdoor sign of Jaquim 99¢ Plus remains, after which three or four more cadavers of small businesses, then Bobby D’s restaurant (breakfast, lunch, dinner, pizza), United Food Center and Liquor and a café appear to be alive. I turn into Main st, drift four along four more blocks to Nialand Av and stumle upon a once-upon-a-time majestic looking building with heavy pillars. It is now obviously abandoned, it may not have ever been finished. It could have been the court house or the city hall… It could have been commissioned at a time the town was doing well and expending… then something happened… or nothing happened… and it was left to rot… I will later learn that this was apparently the First National Bank building in the early 1920s. What delusion of grandeur drove men to erect this temple in this town lost in the middle of the Sonoran Desert? What vision of the future did these men have? Yet there is life, there are people actually living here. If I was uneducated, gullible and bored enough to believe the earth is flat, and if I took acid, I’m sure I would think I’m about to reach the end of the planet and that a few miles further people actually fall over into space.

Though I’m not on acid, or any other kind of drug – at the moment - I’m pretty sure I’m high and that DMT is dripping in my brain because I keep driving in a state of deformed awe until I reach Slab City, a hippie camp featured in Sean Penn’s Into The Wild. Without the benefit of an intense road trip, it is difficult to contextualize this place when watching the movie, aside from the short part in plays in the inexorable path to self-discovery and self-destruction of its uber romantic hero Christopher McCandless. After drifting all day long through the desert and along the cosmically disturbed Salton Sea though, it appears under a different light. No Kristen Stewart walking around for sure, but Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain is there alright at the very beginning of the dirt road in front of beautiful handcrafted signs indicating Slab City Hostel with shadows of backpackers drawn, warning about Roaming Dogs on a yellow bone shaped board, mentioning the Slab City Library and Trading Post as well as the East Jesus sculpture garden written with white letters on a lit up sunset background.

The “mountain” is a thirty feet tall haystack and mud embankment that has been literally handmade and painted by Leonard Knight a gentle illuminated soul who took the message for all it’s worth: all is love. It’s very naïve and colorful.

The temptation to screen one’s own personal “art” data bank and give it a place in our personal pantheon is as toxically present as ever. And yet, I think it would be pointless. To begin with Leonard Knight was very shy when people referred to him as an artist. Most importantly the Mountain is something to experience in the larger context of the Salton Sea and Slab City. We are in another dimension and in that universe this naïve candy shop of a hill, this postmodern retro hippy Charlie And the Chocolate Factory spot in the middle of the desert, fits just right, as if it had been meant to be from its inception. This is what is so touching about this illumination, the way it found a balance in that bubble or rather brought to it. Whatever your stance on religion, the mountain is harmonious in its surrounding and brings a marvelous expression of creative happiness to the rugged power of the desert. It now draws many tourist and curious which is possibly the last magnet of its kind in the region, and it makes them genuinely happy. I was struck to feel the joy and laughter of people from all around the world taking walking around the Mountain and taking pictures of it. The avalanche of colors and the childlike sense of wonder it conveys transcends opinions. Whatever view one might have about its vague religious message or its questionable artistic quality, it is a place of joy and a work of passion.

From the “top” of the mountain, one can see at 360 degrees around. To the west, the Salton Sea. To the East in the far background, the Chocolate Mountain, and right there a few hundred yards away: Slab City.

Slab City quickly emerges as the last stage of my journey through Planet Salton. It is its quintessential and final expression. It seems to resonate with the Skull in Joshua Tree Park in that it captures the spirit of the area in a way that is long lasting and soul cracking. When I first watched Into The Wild more than ten years ago, I was blasted away. My drifter’s nature found a high frequency resonance with the story of Christopher McCandless. I was already too old to overlook the fundamental fact that his quest was fueled by a childish energy, to prove his daddy a point. But his attraction to nature and Alaska specifically did talk to me. The whole Slab City sequence somehow missed its target with me. I was raised in a hippy family. I am a child of the seventies with all that it means. The idea that his social rebellion could find an outlet through a community rather than through a lonely journey was not what caught my attention with Slab City. It was the rise of Kirsten Stewart as the ultra-intense, mega-talented actress she is that did. Then I forgot all about Slab City and kept drifting towards Alaska. I would reach Denali about ten years later.

The actual Leonard Knight, Kirsten Stewart/Tracy Tatro, Emile Hirsch/Christopher McCandless in Salvation Mountain - Into the Wild (Sean Penn)

When I finally entered the “city” after loading up on the colorful joy of Salvation Mountain, the notion that a few trailers in the desert could become a culture icon became self-evident. Yet after a day of roaming around the Salton Sea, a few hours after discovering Bombay Beach, Slab City revealed itself to me in all its miserable glory. It is a maginificent slum. It is beautiful in every single way, while you are under the Salton spell, into this twilight zone and you focus on the militant choices that the inhabitants of this world are making.

Then at some point, reality caught up with me, the spell was broken, and the whole weight of the desert, the enormously sad tragedy of this ecologic disaster, the feeling of having finally reached a dead-end exploded before my eyes. After a few nice RVs, a couple of reasonable looking caravans and a magnificent red mural featuring a blue sear eye, I walked upon a family sitting around a tent and what seems to be all their possessions: a couple of beaten suitcases, a large ice box, laundry drying on a string attached between a tree and an broken fence... Mum and Dad looking haggard, sitting there looking towards me without registering movement… two young children, dirty and bare feet playing around some game the rules of which known only to them and a toddler wearing only a dipper sitting in the dirt. I’ve travelled far into the third world before. I’ve seen extreme poverty. But as much as I pretend to myself it doesn’t, the delusional fiction of America has intoxicated me and as I suddenly have a flash of LAX airport. I am no longer “desert high” and the sand has caught up with me. It’s time to turn around.

My Joshua Journey is over even though I will work a couple more days helping the crew in the Park. The desert will stay with me for a long time. It will be some time before I see what kind of wild creatures the seed it has planted in my brain will breed. The Salton Sea will keep haunting me. It was an intensely psychedelic drift into some depth of America and I’ll never be the same.