About an hour from our home is an area called Slab City. It’s out in the desert, well-known enough to have its own Wikipedia page, and has sort of an odd legendary status amongst the locals. Anyway, today we drove out there with the missionaries.
The first sight that greets you is Salvation Mountain. It’s a fifty-foot-high man-made mound of… something. I don’t know. And it’s been painted in bright colors. Lots and lots of bright colors, using lots and lots of paint. According to the volunteer tour guide (!) it took over a hundred thousand gallons of paint.
Many of those paint cans are still there, probably from back in the 1980s.
You can follow the Yellow Brick Road painted onto the mountain to climb to the top, which of course we did. From that vantage point, you can see the desert all around, as well as Slab City itself in the distance. We asked the tour guide to take a picture of our group:
In addition to the hill and the paint, there are a bunch of rusted-out cars covered in Biblical messages.
Apparently it’s quite the tourist attraction, because in the brief time we were there, at least three other carloads of people stopped to get out and wander the area. There’s literally nothing else around for miles upon miles, so they must really be coming just for this.
Anyway, our next stop was the House of Dots. You can’t miss the road sign.
Bonus: it’s Next to East Jesus! We never saw mention of Jesus in any other cardinal direction, though.
We drove into “town”, which is really just a scattered assortment of burned- and rusted-out RVs decaying in the sand and hot sun. But people live here! We eventually arrived at the House of Dots.
We met Dot. She invited us to wander around her little area, which was more or less a collection of not-quite-habitable trailers and tarps.
Imagine all the junk no one wants from every yard sale you’ve ever seen, baking in the sun for years. That’s Dot’s house. After a bit of that we wandered over to East Jesus, which is an “art exhibition”. There we met Wizard, a grizzled old man who spends his days sitting on a busted couch under a tarp. The art consisted of things like collections of old whiskey bottles, a piano that you could hardly tell was a piano, a broken fishing boat, a bunch of propane tanks, and so on. Someone dragged a washer-dryer combo out here, for example.
The highlight for the missionaries was the giant seesaw, which launched you about twelve feet above the ground and was extremely rickety. There was a sign that warned us not to use it, but Wizard said it wasn’t really all that dangerous. Thanks, Wizard!
More art:
Some of the “displays” had obvious messages, like these old televisions.
Others were just inexplicable piles of trash. Art comes in all forms, I suppose.
The best description I can give for Slab City is from Elder DeMordaunt, who quipped, “This is like if Mad Max had an art project.” It’s absolutely a one-of-a-kind place.