I recently got back from a five-day trip to the desert, a pilgrimage to the salt. This sounds weirder than it is. I drove 500 miles from Laramie, Wyoming to Salt Lake City, Utah to spend time at Bonneville Salt Flats and the Great Salt Lake. My mission was to take photos for my current project, an exploration of the agency of salt. I was nervous about doing this on my own: I’ve never camped solo and going new places during COVID felt risky. But I was stalled with my writing, and I desperately needed to get out of my routine to prime my creative engines. I pictured days by myself in the wilderness to commune with the spirit and essence of the places on my itinerary, to really get to know my subject in its element. The adventure I got, however, wasn’t the adventure I’d sought.
Epiphany #1: There is no wilderness in the I-80 corridor. I should have seen this one coming. I-80 bisects Bonneville Salt Flats. It is a high-speed, semi-laden, raised berm transecting mostly high-saline dried mud, a razor-straight cut through its breadth. The stark, white, salt-cake zone of it is extremely popular with tourists, even in late October. Tourists love selfies, bicycles, off-roading, and 4-wheeling. The internet made it sound like I’d really be roughing it by camping in the middle of nowhere on the back side of the flats off Leppy Pass Rd., and, later, on Stansbury Island. In both places, I had to try pretty hard to find places to pitch the tent where there was enough privacy to pee behind a bush (and the bushes in salt country do well to reach knee-height…).
Epiphany #2: There is no sanctity on BLM land. See afore-mentioned re: off-roading and 4-wheeling (also, dirt bikes that don’t give a damn about your pee-bush privacy). Nota bene, I, too, gleefully desecrated the landscape I’d ostensibly looked to as a spiritual haven when I revved the Suburban up to speed on that blisteringly white anarchic washboard and zoomed towards a horizon of mirage-floating hills that never seemed to get any closer.
People abounded, and people’s activities: their tire tracks, their trash, their abandoned socks (the whole scene was downright Seussical: “And you’re so lucky, so, so lucky you’re not a left sock, left behind by mistake in the Kaverns of Krock!”),
and their noise. This is perhaps what struck me most throughout the trip: the inability to access quiet. Even after the recreational motors cut out, there was the steady shrush of the freeway at Bonneville, the all-night generators of the brine shrimp fishery off Stansbury, and the arguments and laughter in the campground on Antelope Island. I could barely hear the coyote at a stone’s throw checking in with its pack down the beach over the campground chatter. Even my tent was loud as the rainfly popped and snapped in the wind. I could control my field of vision, and the framing of my camera lens, to eliminate the human if I chose, but my ears were caught in a 360° net of relentless anthropism.
Epiphany #3: I caught myself out in precisely the fallacy I was trying to debunk. I’d mistakenly gone out in search of the sublime: sweeping vistas, impressive geology, deep time written into the land. I’d gone out to find an environment free from human influence. I wanted to feel the in-itself-ness of salt, of forces to which we are a blip in time and space. I think I wanted to feel small, or maybe just to feel, which gets a little swept under the domestic rug of routine. Instead, I was everywhere, we were everywhere, people embedded in all of it, which is just what I ought to have been after from the moment I left my doorstep. The thesis I was meant to be pursuing is that the Nature/Culture divide is an artifice and illusion, that Nature capital-N is a dangerous concept that privileges an idea of unchangeable, awe-inspiring otherness at the expense of the everyday marvel of dandelions and cement and the squirrels that chew on my insulation, just as Culture is a wrong-headed notion that sets humans apart as sole possessors of subjectivity, as though there were no other actors in the universe, like the massive salt pan that had been an ocean, life included, and was now entering my bloodstream with the granules I held on my tongue, to power my neurons and generate the thought that I’d been a thoroughgoing dunderhead.
So, Epiphany #4: I came back humbled, but not by sublime nature worship. I came back humbled that my backyard is as much a marvel and a haven as 30,000 acres of solid salt, that no more and no less peace or wonder exist right here. I’m glad I went. I needed to go. I confess, I wasn’t ready to come back just yet, and I may have to make it a habit to disentangle my self from the mundane to see more rightly. It’s a curious paradox, to be a staunch advocate of an end to solipsism, but yet to have found self-reliance so nourishing. But then again, there’s no better starting point than a good ol’ juicy paradox!
(P.S. Epiphany #5: Do not in any circumstances get water from the Great Salt Lake up your nose. Saltier than the sea, it’s like inhaling kerosene with a match chaser!)
Life in the Multiverse 