The story my body wants to tell is that my body and the body of Earth are one.
Terry Tempest Williams
Antelope Island as viewed from our home in Woodland Hills at the extreme south end of Utah Valley. The photo looks north across Utah Lake and through the gap at the point of the mountain. Stansbury Island is also visible to the left of Antelope Island.
My task today is to drive north to Provo to pick up four of my grandchildren and to convey us to Antelope Island where their father has spent the day talking with Terry Tempest Williams and her Harvard Divinity School students about the science of Great Salt Lake. Ben is an ecologist, lead author of a report that alerted the public to emergency measures needed to save the saline lake from its ongoing collapse. Over-consumption of the water that ought to be flowing into the lake is the primary issue, Ben and his co-authors argue. After reading the report, Williams published a powerful piece in The New York Times calling for measures to save the lake. “Utah is my home,” she wrote. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints raised me to care about community in the fullness of Creation. We were taught through sacred texts . . .: ‘For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth.’ Great Salt Lake had a spirit before she had a body. Brine shrimp have a spirit. White pelicans and eared grebes have a spirit. They are loved by God as we are loved.’” This week she has brought her students on a pilgrimage to this sacred place.
We are on a pilgrimage as well.
Snaking through Salt Lake City on I-15 at rush hour reminds me of the self-flagellating stage of a medieval pilgrimage. When sleet and driving rain begin to add their assault to that of the heavy traffic my fists tighten on the steering wheel and ever-more-elaborate curses populate my mind (fortunately, they don’t pass my grandfatherly lips).
The heavy rain continues as we turn up the Legacy Parkway in north Salt Lake, built between I-15 and Great Salt Lake to ease traffic density on the freeway. I’m grateful for that today, even as I know that I’m driving over the wetlands that caused an environmental uproar. In a public meeting, a leading proponent of the parkway got fed up with the environmentalists’ testimony and thundered: “You keep talking about wetlands; this is nothing but a damn swamp!”
Outside of Farmington, new subdivisions crowd the Parkway and extend, in places, out into the swampy environs of Great Salt Lake. The developers have obviously forgotten or are ignoring historically high-water years. 1983, for recent instance. A flock of seagulls rises and wheels in the wind over a pasture. I ask Henry if he knows the name of our state bird. He’ll find the name funny when I tell him. His smirk tells me he knows this already: “the California seagull.” I address a question to my young audience: What do you remember from your last trip to Antelope Island? They answer in chorus: BRINE FLIES! CLOUDS OF BRINE FLIES!
There will be no brine flies this early in the season. And by the time we’re driving on the causeway leading to Antelope Island, the rain mercifully ceases.
Ben greets us as we drive up to the three tiny houses in the Bridger Bay Campground where Terry and Brooke and the fifteen Harvard students are living in very close quarters this week. Ben is wearing a new crimson Harvard hat that makes my Princeton persona twitch. The others are resting or out walking or working on projects.
Bundling up, we set out on a tour of our own, surrounded and embraced by vast saline waters. Ben leads us up a ridge overlooking White Rock Bay.
He points out the horizontal lines on the hillside to the south. Those are shorelines from ancient Lake Bonneville, he says. The massive lake filled several immense basins in this region, leaving traces of its shorelines along surrounding foothills. All the shorelines, as one would expect, are at the same altitude. Except, that is, for the lines here on the island, which are higher than on surrounding hillsides. In 1890 G. K. Gilbert published a study of the geology of the Pleistocene-era lake he named after an early explorer, fur trapper, and U.S. Army officer. Gilbert explained the anomaly as the result of the island rising when the lake drained, relieved of the nearly thousand feet of overbearing water.
This, I explain to my grandchildren, is why I love to hang out with scientists.
There are more bison than antelope visible on the island today. Several encounters with them both delight us and remind us to be wary. Caspian isn’t quite wary enough. I tell him that when the buffalo chips are much drier, they can feed a good campfire. He looks at me skeptically.
Ingrid’s photographic attention to the solitary bison standing against the cloudy sky reminds me of some thinking I’ve been doing about the small human figure standing vertically against the horizontal waterline and cloudy sky in Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea / Mönch am Meer(1808-1810).
When confronted by the insistent backs of subjects contemplating nature, viewers of paintings by Friedrich can’t help but wonder what his figures are thinking? What are they feeling? Are they awed by the landscape? Is their experience what Kant and Burke called sublime (nature threatens or overawes and the human mind responds by structuring, conceptualizing, making sense)? About the same time Friedrich was painting, nature philosopher Shelling posited that nature is visible mind or spirit (Geist) and spirit is invisible nature. His claim heals Descartes’ mind/body split, moves beyond Kant’s separation of the perceiving mind from the thing in-and-of itself and, today, heightens my experience in the vast presence of Great Salt Lake.
Young Woman by Great Salt Lake / Fräulein am Meer (2024)
My granddaughter. Seeing. Feeling. Reflecting. The sight of her vertical figure against the horizontal lines of the lake and its sky, the questions the sight evokes about her thoughts and feelings in this moment, the shared silence . . . together they guide me into myself, lead me out of myself. Witnessing her contemplation here and now quiets, deepens, and slows me.
I recall lines from Peter Handke’s ode “To Duration”:
Duration, my peace.
Duration, my place of rest. . . .
Braced by duration,
I, a fleeting being,
carry my predecessors and posterity on my
shoulders,
a load that lifts. . . .
Duration does not enrapture,
it forms me anew.
From the bright light of daily activity
I flee, determined, into the uncertain camp
of duration.
(my translation)
It is dark when we leave the gracious hospitality of Terry, Brooke, and the Harvard pilgrims crowded into one of the tiny houses for dinner. By the time we reach Salt Lake City snow is falling, lightly at first, heavier as we drive south. Climbing to the Bonneville Shoreline gap at the Point of the Mountain the snow thickens on the road, splats from spinning tires onto windshields, blinds as it reflects headlights. My grandchildren are asleep. Their trust lifts me, focuses me, leads me carefully through the stormy night. Nature is visible spirit, I intone. Spirit is invisible nature. This uncertain drive forms me anew. I will bring my posterity home.
Scott Abbott
Photos by the author and by Ingrid A.
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