Salvation Mountain
Slab City
Last December my father and I drove down to Salton Sea from his home in San Bernardino. With our camera bags in the backseat and my dad’s rat terrier Little Joe between us, we turned off Highway 10, heading south along the eastern edge of the man-made sea in search of good images and the easy friendship between a father and his son, as he is apt to call me.
My father taught me F-stops and shutter speeds when I was still a boy. A few days later, having absorbed the interplay between aperture size and the velocity of light still untethered in my young mind, he taught me how to drive. I must have been inching up on twelve-years old. We were driving to Alaska on the ALCAN highway at the time in a four-wheel drive pick-up (blue, I recall) with stick shift and a third-hand, beat-up camper on the back.
Sitting there in the cab, I remember the Yukon light streaming in through the window, fondling my Dad’s Spotmeter Pentax, bringing it to my eye to take a light reading. Later, he pulling over to the side of the road and we switching seats as I cranked down on the clutch, scooting way down in the seat to reach the pedal, the interplay between clutch and acceleration, and without it, lurching forward. How just like F-stops and shutter speeds, they both had to work together. Eventually I got the hang of it and eased out on the unpaved highway, permafrost underneath the dirt road that cut through the endless spruce.
A few miles later a semi came barreling over the hill. Coming closer I panicked, overcorrected and began sliding off the road. My father grabbed the wheel and brought us back onto the road into the dust of the disappearing truck. End of driving lesson.
But the photography lessons continued. And I was dutifully reminded of them as drove down the road to Slab City. What follows if our few hours there before dark, exploring the seldom visited piece of California.
Comments