Winners of the second annual Common Ground Undergraduate Writing Contest, The Lake: Deeper
First Place: Spencer Woolley, "Mere of Tears"
At twilight a wild and thrilling spectacle . . . Dim and pale, the moon,
the ghost of a dead world, lifted above the distant Wasatch peaks
and stared at the acrid waters of a dead sea.
— Alfred Lambourne, from Our Inland Sea: The Story of a Homestead
Salt water betrays the essence of human life. Separately, both salt and water sustain the human body but when combined, they form an unholy libation, a false aqua vitae that brings thirst unto death, instead of life everlasting. Further, when a human being falls subject to pain or passion, they extrude salt water from the corners of their eyes, the body itself mixing a chemical perfidy that resonates with the agony of the flesh and the spirit. Exertion and stress squeeze salt water from the pores, causing stench, stickiness and the stagnation of effort as one pauses to wipe the sweat away. Every instinctual feeling, every developed behavior tells humanity to shun salt water as the draught of death; given those thoughts, both atavistic and learned, why then found a city, a New Jerusalem, next to one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet? To the founders of this, the city of the Great Salt Lake, the mere of tears represented the fulfillment of their long exodus, and their arrival in the Promised Land.
Modern, secular society struggles to comprehend the sacrifices and reasoning of those early settlers. Driven from state to state, they trekked into the unknown to find a place where tar and feathers found use as waterproofing and mattress stuffing, and hickory withes smoked meat rather than stung bare backs. Abandoning the flesh pots of the United States, they turned west, and began to transform themselves into modern Israel on exodus. In 1847, Brigham Young did not yet possesses the flowing, Old-Testament-prophet beard that would become his defining feature later in life; nevertheless, the Mormons viewed him as a new Moses, who would deliver them to a land of promise, where persecution would cease and they would be well. Brigham Young went so far as to name the expedition the “Camp of Israel” and the intrepid Saints sang around their camp fires that “all [was] well,” and would indeed improve when they reached their destination “far away, in the West.”
As the new Israelites exited Emigration Canyon, they discovered that the landscape they confronted bore a remarkable resemblance to ancient Canaan. As in Palestine, a freshwater lake (Utah Lake and the Lake of Galilee) connects by a river (the Jordan River, in both cases) to a lifeless, salt-water lake (the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake). The comparison is almost uncanny; but to pioneer eyes, the geographic similarity served yet more proof that the spirit of the ancient Hebrews received new birth in their modern souls. The lay of the land confirmed for them that this was indeed the place where God intended them to be.
Yet after a cursory examination of the Great Salt Lake, the Mormons abandoned the lake for almost all purposes except the salt they gathered from its shores, and the name that they applied to their city. Mormon thought and theology turned instead toward the mountains. At the first Mormon worship service in the valley, Orson Pratt did not even mention the lake; he spoke on a theme from the prophet Isaiah: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.” From that point forward, the Mormons ignored and avoided the lake from which their New Jerusalem drew its name.
However, those who came before and after the Mormons felt differently about the Great Salt Lake. The lake received its first view by men of European descent when in 1824, both Jim Bridger and Etienne Provost, independently of one another, caught view of the lake. Jim Bridger floated down the Bear River on a buffalo skin raft, and arrived on the northern shores of “a vast body of water.” He thought that he had reached the Pacific Ocean, until he tasted the silent waters, far more salty than any ocean. In 1850, a mapmaking expedition led by Howard Stansbury recorded the eerie silence of a dead lake: “Save the dashing of the waves against the shore absolutely nothing is heard. Not the jumping of a fish, the chirp of an insect, nor any of the least thing betokening life, unless it be that very rarely a solitary gull is disturbed in his midnight rumination and flys screaming away. All is stillness and solitude profound.”
Twenty-first century Utahans value the Great Salt Lake most for the fine, powdery snow that the lake germinates and the clouds dump upon our mountains. Occasionally people will travel out to its shores, trying to sink in the heavy water or to muck about in the mineral-rich mud. Yet for most part the lake inconveniences our lives, when its saline, sulfuric smell penetrates into the suburbs, or when it eats at the moorings of Interstate 80 as it did during the early 1980’s. But such views deny the complexity of living next to an inland sea of salt. In Palestine, prophets like Abraham and military commanders like Lucius Flavius Silva condemned the Dead Sea and the surrounding countryside as smitten by the hand of God. However, Brigham Young and John Wesley Powell saw the lake as proof of resilience; if people can prosper in a valley next to a lake shadowed by death, then truly the desert has blossomed as a rose. The mere filled with tears testifies to the sorrows of life; our thriving next to it demonstrates that joy couples with sorrow to form a greater whole that enriches our own humanity.
Second Place: Jennifer Niedfeldt, "Transgression"
It is March and as I step off my front porch I feel slight, weightless shards of snow settle onto my skin. I should have grabbed a jacket. Some thirty miles away, an un-bagged, impatient Boreas screams across the surface of the Great Salt Lake, taking deep scoops of water. A snowflake falls frozen onto my forearm here in Millcreek. Melts. We rationalize it as lake-effect snow—rabbit’s foot of the Wasatch Range—but I can’t help feeling tormented by old gods as I scrape my windshield clear.
This caprice belongs to the lake. Snow/Spring. Impossible life. Desert/Water. Roland Barthes drones in S/Z, on page twenty-seven:
The antithesis is the battle between two plentitudes set ritually face to face like two fully armed warriors . Every joining of two antithetical terms . . . every conciliation . . . every passage through the wall of the Antithesis thus constitutes a transgression. Paradoxism. (Or alliance of words).
He did not know he was speaking of the Great Salt Lake. This is forgivable, considering he was 5,000 miles away. The lake is more than an alliance of words, though, mere or no. It allies concepts. Barthes meant this—words as concepts—but here it is especially and physically illuminated. The Salt Lake operates complexly and dualistically, a living woman on her deathbed. She collects all of life’s sediments, knowingly and eventually terminal.
The antithetical dualism of the Great Salt Lake is exacting. Its salinity renders it non-potable, lethal to most aquatic dwellers. To tender aesthetic sensibilities, it is dry, malodorous. Threatening. Its uniqueness invites potential exploitation—limited crude oil production, brine shrimp harvesting, salt and mineral extraction. We could play its executioner, and edge closer to this black mask with every ounce of water we redirect away from its shallow depths, every thought of what ”better use” the water may have to budding suburban communities.
Herein lies the importance of remembering to invert. We look to one hypothetical side to see
Death
Putridity
Desolation.
In this two-dimensional plane, the lake is a resource, a conventionally unattractive one at that. Minerals, brine shrimp, tourism, knowledge. Across the way, to land, to the East, to progress and dewy Eos, are utilities and economies that tower monolithically. These demand fulfillment of their needs. Without considering contrary viewpoints, the rationality defending the realization of human wants goes ethically, ecologically and economically unchallenged. Water being water, land being land, history has dictated acceptable uses of the environment by humans, governed by conservation and a Progressive Era ethic of man’s ability to improve nature through control. It says, plug and extract. Slowly.
But within the Great Salt Lake, water is not merely water nor land merely land. Water is fatality, desert, air—it denies your pleas to quench your thirst; it holds your meat-and-bones body aloft like a basket-less Moses in the reeds. Its land’s sand is oolitic; it is Spiral Jetty. Land is marshland home to millions of migratory birds. Water is May snow ambush. Land is island and lakebed and shore. Conceptually it is equally as much
Life
Fecundity
Community
as it is their antonyms. Its halophiles lead us to Mars as well as home, connected extremities in which life still defies intemperate odds. Long-billed curlews, American Avocets and thousands of others kiss the lake water. Brine shrimp cysts coast in benign, red tides.
These are collectively the transgression mentioned by Barthes—a transgression which, through its civil disobedience, weds dualisms. Any life in this seemingly somber system serves to mend the disparate concepts of wasteland and wilderness and urges the lake’s preservation, demanding some degree of respect of non-human life and a Leopoldian Lake Ethic that dog-ears its interests in our consciousness. Monolithic social needs are no longer the only ones to consider.
The Great Salt Lake is both conciliation and sphinx, answer and question (like any good enigma). Despite a backdrop of ecological study, it still resists complete reification within our biosphere. It connects, say the mountains in need of snow and birds in need of marsh. We may simply not know all its ramifications. We know it was once the leviathan Lake Bonneville; that it is now an exhausted, final sweat drop of that inland sea. It has three veins: the Jordan, Bear and Weber. The structure of its ecology is delicate and multiplicative. The discarded casings of its brine shrimp nauplii stick and dry to your legs after swimming there in summer. This knowledge, incomplete, is the lake-effect snowflake on my arm. A metonymy for that which we do not yet know.
It is March, and it is beginning to snow. I should have remembered a jacket. I raise my arm to my lips and touch the liquid to my tongue, imagining the taste of salt.
Third Place: Robert Sylvester, "Salty Spring Amid a
Great Salt Lake"
Many times I have been to the Great Salt Lake, many times I have left with some new awareness and appreciation for this strange place. Unique and vast, the Salt Lake has something for any curious soul. A steady flat byway brings you onto the land of Antelope Island. Strange and familiar things come to your awareness. Rolling down your window midway, you are shocked by an unfamiliar inland smell, the sea. Reassurance comes with buffalo grazing the sage-covered hills; you are still in Utah. Upon the island, you look back to see the massive Wasatch Mountains reflect over the Lake, double vision and haze play with your emotions. Calming and tranquil, the soft sky and haze mesh the two landscapes to create a palate of pastel blues. What a place this is, a place where you feel you are in two different worlds at once.
Today I seek a new discovery, Egg Island. I park my car and pull out my binoculars; focusing, I see my destination. Not too far away, I am still unsure about my path there and the chance of interruption by water—today I forgot my boots. I set out on a dirt trail that is surrounded by sagebrush and some of the oldest exposed rocks on earth. The winter sun is strong today, the air is warm. I stop and sit on a rock, extending my torso to enhance the surface area through which the sun penetrates my dark sweatshirt. Relaxation takes over, as I hear … nothing. I will stay here for several minutes. Physical tension and life stress leave my body and I am finally transitioned into the present.
Off the trail and onto flatter land I begin to see my destination is nearing; there is water between us. I am not disappointed, there appears to be a copious number of birds on Egg Island; perhaps interrupting them would not be advised. I walk to the edge of the flat land, where the solid ground begins to give way to the soft ground below. The mottled surface of rock and water makes it so you can venture out further. I have reached as far as I can go. I stand there, looking at Egg Island and the hundreds of birds who are there to nest. I close my eyes and imagine I am standing on the edge of the sea; the smell is reassuring. Silence is broken by the sounds of birds soaring overhead. The sun is strong: winter has never felt so good.
Turning around, I head back to my car, believing this is the end of my journey. I carefully hop to the solid surfaces amid the soft lake floor. As I walk back, I scan the landscape: breathtaking. The sun makes sharp reflections on the water’s surface; the land is full of surprises such as shells and fossils of new and ancient creatures. Mountain and Sea, Mountain and Lake … my thoughts are disrupted, I see something new, a spring.
Many times I have been to the Great Salt Lake; this time I have found a spring. It is a small area, about one hundred square feet, raised above the surrounding land. I circle the area many times, questioning, though mostly in awe. I have found nothing like this before on this island, a spring, in a lake. I locate the spot where the water is erupting from the ground; it is crystal clear. I am anxious to discover what is troubling my thoughts, salty or not? I submerge my finger into the water: it is cold. Finger to mouth, salty. A salty spring amid a Great Salt Lake, my thoughts run wild. I watch as algae floats in tiny waterways, the banks supported by soft rock. Over the edge of the soft cliffs are miniature waterfalls; the surrounding land has dwarfed this separate landscape. I wish I were smaller, on a boat perhaps, floating in these waterways.
As the sun descends low into the horizon the air becomes cooler, the tiny landscape within the vast surroundings now stained orange and purple form the setting sun. It is time to leave. Today I have found something new, something I haven’t noticed before. I wonder how many people know of it. I leave feeling filled with wonder, my soul fed today. Finding such a unique place allows me to visit it over and over again in my mind. I wonder what I will find during my next visit to The Great Salt Lake, as old discoveries intrigue me to find new ones.
2.gif)