Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Jul 31, 2001 | "Hello! Make yourself at home."
The old man, scrawny and as tough as a strip of jerky, popped up from an unseen corner of the desert. He had the leathery, chapped look of a fair-skinned man who had fried himself crispy in the unfiltered sun. His hair was an indeterminate color, maybe straw, maybe gray, and it lay in spiky clumps like a jester's cap. But his eyes were a clear cornflower blue -- a startling color against the earth tones all around.
It was hard to tell what Leonard Knight meant by "home" or how, exactly, we should make ourselves comfortable there. Looming behind him was a modest mountain that was painted like a giant, garish birthday cake. The entire mountain was festooned with flowers, ablaze with Bible quotes, stippled with stripes. Slick and tipsy yellow-painted steps led to its summit, upon which a 12-foot white cross perched like a birthday candle.
On the face of the mountain was a 15-foot red heart with white lettering that read: "Jesus, I'm a sinner. Please come upon my body and into my heart." This is Knight's canticle, his life song. It is the message he received 30 years ago when God fell upon his head and spun his life around. He has labored ever since in brave and foolish ways to carry the message he received to the world.
Knight lives on the outskirts of Slab City. ("Turn right at the second grocery store in town and follow the road out to the desert," we were told.) Slab City is an odd phenomenon, a sprawling tumor of wheeled dwellings in the Southern California desert. And Leonard Knight is a prince among eccentrics. He was passing through Slab City some 15 years ago, puzzling about how God wanted him to spread the word, when his truck broke down.
"Folks here were nice to me," he says, and he discovered that the mountain directly behind his truck was made of clay. Knight heard the voice of God and went to work. With a shovel and a wheelbarrow he dug up the surface of the mountain and mixed it with straw to make adobe, then he formed and painted his mountain.
Knight is 69 years old and moves with the agility of a young man. He dwells with his cat in the truck that brought him to the mountain. (It is running now.) He lives on little, asks for nothing and apparently has all he needs to stay alive and pursue his opus. He says his most important donation, although he does not ask for them, came from a little girl who gave him 50 cents. "I wanted a pop," she said, "but I wanted to give this to you more."
The vision that has sustained him through all the years of solitary, backbreaking labor is to "get the message out. I want to put God's love out into the world. I want the whole world to look at this mountain and say, 'Boy, that's simple.'"
And the crazy thing? The deep karmic belly laugh? It worked. Knight's mountain has become an internationally known example of "outsider art" -- the whimsical, sometimes obsessive, often strangely beautiful work created by untrained people who would not think to call themselves artists. Knight's mountain has been featured in a Japanese coffee-table book and on a BBC television program and in a scrapbookful of national press. I heard about him at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.
None of this fazes Knight. He continues to work on his mountain, which grows more intricate and colorful as the years pass. He will patiently answer questions with the candor of a child, but he is more interested in welcoming newcomers than in holding court with interviewers. "Excuse me," he says, darting around a corner. "Hello!" I hear him say. "Make yourselves at home."
I have always pictured prophets as monoliths -- patriarchs with cosmic messages, the Charlton Heston kind of message accompanied by choirs and thunderclaps. I am finding that a road trip is strangely suited to meeting cranks as well as visionaries, and I have met both. The prophets, however, are easy to recognize. They have a sense of direction; they carry a message that is larger than themselves. It can be whispered as well as shouted, lived -- or painted on a mountain -- as well as spoken. Prophets, I think, are common people to whom the scent of God clings in uncommon ways. But most important, the qualities they all seem to share are passion, simplicity and joy.
To me, the most impressive thing about Leonard Knight is not his mountain. It is the spirit of the man himself. He does not preach or evangelize. He does not even belong to a formal church. He simply welcomes strangers and lives his message with all his heart. He is the sweet instrument through whom the message plays.
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