Some peo­ple think that con­ver­sa­tion has run dry when you start talk­ing about the weather. They’re obvi­ously not gardeners–or even golfers or jog­gers or con­struc­tion work­ers. Weather mat­ters. And I can’t think of many things nearly as fascinating.

Here in the far south­west­ern cor­ner of the coun­try it’s been dry. Scary dry, almost. I have buck­ets below the eaves to catch and save runoff from the roof, and even last week’s “big rain” day didn’t fill them more than half way. At least the storm had the decency to drop some rain by the time I was leav­ing work so that I didn’t feel like a fool for bring­ing an umbrella and tak­ing the car instead of rid­ing my scooter.

Today we’re in Day Two of a sev­eral days of pre­dicted light rain. I’ll keep my fin­gers crossed.

It’s not that I don’t appre­ci­ate the sunny days. Last month we picked a bright weekend–we had many choices–to head east, into the desert. Des­ti­na­tion: Sal­va­tion Mountain.

I’m about as reli­gious as Howard Stern is sub­tle, but you couldn’t not to feel the earnest­ness of this big pile of folk art.

The whole instal­la­tion is built into a hill­side, using not much more than hay­bales, mud and paint. As we walked over it you could hear things crunch­ing under­foot. With­out con­stant main­te­nance the whole thing would start to degrade into the desert around it.

This is a polaroid that some­one had left show­ing Leonard Knight, the man who built this. He gave me a detailed per­sonal tour the last time I vis­ited, maybe five years ago. But the news reports last fall men­tioned that Mr. Knight’s demen­tia was tak­ing over, and he had been insti­tu­tion­al­ized in a facil­ity in El Cen­tro. For an art­work as frag­ile as this is, it seemed like this win­ter might be the last time to see the place in the state that he left it, before the desert claimed it.

The side of the Moun­tain that faces west is crossed by a painted yel­low path up the moun­tain that you can see in this image, the Yel­low­brick Road.

I’m not sure what the main high­way from the Wiz­ard of Oz has to do with the Chris­t­ian mes­sages being com­mu­ni­cated, but there it is. Please stay on it.

Peo­ple bring stuff here. This bible, blow­ing in the wind, fits right in.

Some­thing else peo­ple bring here is paint, thou­sands of gal­lons of it. Used to be, you came to Sal­va­tion Moun­tain, you’d bring a bucket of paint. It was a great way to share paint left­over from projects. The word now, though, is that peo­ple should leave their paint at home, now that Mr. Knight isn’t able to do any­thing with it.

Built into one size are a series of grot­toes that appear to have been built as lit­tle shrines. On a scorch­ing mid­sum­mer day these spaces are a cool escape. Peo­ple have brought con­tri­bu­tions here too, but I’m not sure if the angel and bowl­ing tro­phies were orig­i­nal to Leonard Knight’s orig­i­nal vision.

Parked in front are sev­eral art cars that have been cus­tomized by Mr. Knight. At this point I’m sure they’re fixed sculp­tures and no longer mobile.

[ Details of the art cars… ]

Another fea­ture of the Moun­tain is the side maze-feature, made of tele­phone poles, sal­vaged trees and more hay­bales, mud and paint. It’s hard to pho­to­graph but would work great as a video shown from inside as you walk through it.

Here’s a view from inside the maze, look­ing up.

As long as we were way out in the desert, we stopped by the shores of the Salton Sea, just a cou­ple miles away.

Part of the south shore is set aside as the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. (Yes, that Sonny Bono, Cher’s late ex.) You don’t see any in this pic­ture, but birds were every­where. You hear about the Pacific Fly­way but it’s always a stun­ning expe­ri­ence to visit one of the main avian truck­stops along the route.

And with this image we return to the theme of rain and water. This view­point is a fairly famous one. I’ve seen a few pho­tos shot from here, with trees cov­ered in birds and still water below, reflect birds and trees. (I have a few old shots myself.) But that was prob­a­bly ten years ago.

South­ern Cal­i­for­nia has been draw­ing increas­ing amounts of water that was for­merly used by farm­ers around the Sea. With less agri­cul­tural runoff to feed it, the water level has been drop­ping, so that the Sea itself is now a quar­ter mile away.

My lit­tle buck­ets of water, plain­tively wait­ing for the rain, prob­a­bly will do next to noth­ing to restore the Salton Sea. But a drop in the bucket is more than noth­ing at all.