Ingrid ZH | Fangruo’s Cereal — Writing, Food, Travel & Coaching

I woke up around five in the morning. The sunrise time the day before had been six. I thought I must be close to sunrise. When I checked my phone, it said seven. Only then did I realize last night was the end of daylight saving time.

That night had been extremely cold. I tossed and turned and didn’t sleep much. In the middle of the night I got up to put on my socks, and I piled extra pillows at the entrance of the tent to block the cold air. Even getting up required courage. I took a deep breath and quickly put on my coat in one smooth motion. Then I ran to the car. Ah—inside the car was much warmer than the tent.

The place I had slept was in someone’s backyard—an Airbnb rental. I locked the tent with the lock the host had provided and drove back to Joshua Tree National Park.

I stood in a field of cacti waiting for the sunrise.

I had read online that people should be careful in cactus fields. Many fallen cactus balls lie on the ground. They look fluffy and cute, but they can pierce through the soles of shoes and injure you. These cacti aren’t very tall. The parts closer to the ground are darker. The base of the cactus has a kind of lifeless black color. That black layer slowly peels away, revealing the cactus’s skeleton. I had never studied a cactus so closely before. Its skeleton is like the framework of a tree—pale beige, covered in neat diamond-shaped holes.

I stood there among the cacti waiting for the sun to rise.

After I went back home to Maryland, my Kenyan roommate told me that when they were children, they also used to wait for sunrise and sunset in cactus fields. The sun covered the cactus in a layer of orange-red fuzz, even brighter than the sun itself.

The main destination for the day was a place called Slab City. Two or three years ago I had heard my roommate mention that she had visited it—a gathering place for dispersed artists. Nearby is a large installation artwork called Salvation Mountain. When I was in high school I listened obsessively to an album whose cover featured Salvation Mountain. I had played that album again and again. Now, by coincidence, I found myself standing right in front of the mountain.

A man named Leonard spent twenty-eight years building it. He piled the earth by hand, mound by mound, and covered it with sixteen layers of paint. The occasional desert rain and the footsteps of visitors slowly cause the mountain to crumble. Sometimes volunteers fence it off and gradually rebuild it. Like monks tending a 枯山水 (dry landscape garden) in a temple courtyard—it feels like a kind of ritual of faith.

Slab City used to be a naval training base. After 1960 it was abandoned, and the government demolished the buildings. What remained were the broken concrete slabs from the destroyed structures. Slowly the government forgot about the land. More and more drifters moved in. There are no paved roads, no government, no hospital—nothing at all. People arrive from every direction. You can pick an empty patch of land and settle there. There is no water supply, no heating, no electricity—and of course, no bills.

Because I had camped the night before, I hadn’t showered. I thought about finding a hot spring to soak in. There is one near Slab City. When I looked it up online, people said the water was murky and the road there was rough. Local people told me that apparently a few bodies had floated up in the spring several years ago. Then I forgot about my idea of getting a good soak in the hot spring.

I had just arrived at the entrance of Slab City.

There was a small shop selling souvenirs. Wind chimes made of aluminum cans hung at the door. The shop itself was built from wood and the black or green tarps you often see at construction sites. Inside were salt-and-pepper containers that looked dusty and well-traveled, rings made from dull gemstones wrapped in metal wire, old local photographs that seemed to be slowly waking from layers of desert dust. There were bookmarks with a rough texture, like cheap Mother’s Day cards.

They reminded me of sand paintings from my childhood. In a nearly bankrupt mall, vendors would sometimes set up small stalls where children could make sand paintings, glue paintings, or color plaster figurines. The sand painting sheets were adhesive paper with different sections you could peel off. Children would remove the sticker covering a section, pour colored sand onto it, and fill in the shapes. Filling in the colors was fun, but my favorite part was touching the finished picture. The sand felt rough and real—just like the Slab City in front of me.

I’m the kind of person who needs navigation wherever I drive. Slab City isn’t big, but I still set my GPS to guide me to every “attraction” marked on the map.

I drove to an installation where abandoned car hoods were stuck nose-down into the ground. The leather or fabric seats were gone; the cup holders now sheltered tiny desert ecosystems. Next I was supposed to go to a Trading Post. The GPS directed me up a steep dirt slope—about thirty degrees. I thought about it. If it were my own car, I would have driven up. But this was a rental, and I felt a little protective of it.

Earlier that day I had planned to find a place to donate the blanket my friend had given me (from my desert trip the night before). I would be flying home that evening, and I couldn’t take the blanket with me. At the trading post, signs hung in different languages. The Chinese one read: “交换贸易”—exchange trade.

“Does that mean bartering?” I asked the man who seemed to be running the place.

“Yes.”

“Anything can be exchanged? For example, I have some energy bars. Could I trade those?”

“Anything can be exchanged—as long as those energy bars aren’t your lunch.”

I laughed.

There were many things at the trading post, but not much I wanted: wool hats covered with lint balls, scarves that seemed too warm for this weather, and worn sneakers placed inside a microwave with no glass door. The only things that caught my eye were a jewelry rack and some pale green plastic gummy-bear.

“Lots of girls like those gummy bears,” he said. “I don’t know why. Ah, do you like jewelry? I have some jewelry-making tools somewhere. Let me find them.”

He bent down and pulled out a white plastic basket. I could smell him; he probably hadn’t showered in a while.

“All the tools are here. Go ahead,” he said.

“But… I don’t know how to make jewelry,” I said.

“You can use them however you want. Just don’t take the tools—other people might need them.”

“You know, this used to be the sea,” he continued. “The pearls and corals on that rack—people picked them up from the desert.”

I looked at the perfectly round pearls, half-believing him.

“You must be thirsty. Want some white grape juice?” he asked.

I nodded. He poured a full cup into a dusty stainless-steel mug.

I thought about a friend far away and made her a pair of earrings.

Then I handed him the blanket—that was my item for trade.

He looked at me with confusion and concern.

“Are you sure the energy is balanced? Here—take the gummy bears too. If there’s anything else you like, take it.”

I smiled, nodded, and said goodbye.

I kept walking until I reached an installation art park. An old man came out to greet me. His nose was sunburned red, and he had a beard like Santa Claus.

“Been here before? If not—welcome, my friend! Everything here comes from more than two thousand artists. It might feel noisy—two thousand egos all competing for your attention! If you get hurt while playing here, we’re not responsible. Some of these pieces are old. Hug them and they might fall apart. But we don’t really mind,” he said.

I laughed and gave him a hug.

I explored the playground of art. Abandoned cars were covered with Barbie dolls. A boat appeared in the middle of the desert. Jesus lay inside a pile of old tires. Three plastic deer heads seemed to be devouring a mannequin torso. There was a wall of televisions painted with red letters.

One woman had about seven abandoned vehicles, each with a different theme. Most were RVs, and one was an old school bus. The bus had been turned into a giant double wardrobe filled with clothes. Another vehicle was filled with books. The windows were gone, so sunlight poured in, wind blew through, and perhaps rain and snow too. I briefly considered taking a copy of “Brave New World” from the shelf, but then I changed my mind.

One vehicle had an underwater theme, complete with an open-air swimming pool where yellow algae floated. A friend of the woman had found a large Buddhist shrine on the streets of Los Angeles. It now held glass bottles, starfish, and bottles of seasoning.

In one corner I noticed cactus skeletons. She said she planned to paint them pink so they would look like coral. They weren’t easy to find, she said—she might have to hike far into the desert to collect more.

I still had to catch a flight that night, and there were other places in my plan to visit. As I left, I saw the back of Slab City’s welcome sign. It read:

“Welcome back to reality.”

Those words fermented in my mind for a long time. A month later, I wrote them down.

I want to write more.
I want to create more.
I want to move closer to myself.