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Joyce Kiefer |
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of ANTELOPE ISLAND  There's a special quality of the light on the island in the Great Salt Lake, what 1848 surveyor Howard Stansbury called "a great and peculiar beauty.” |
The serenity of the place
where time stands still
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
United Flight 706 could be skimming the surface of Pluto. Bare, white mountains rise from the ice that floats on a vast lake with strange chemistry. The world below the luminous white sky forbids warmth or comfort.
In reality I am descending over the Great Salt Lake to celebrate my grandson Adam’s first birthday with him and his parents–my daughter Julie and her husband Rich. Once I land, the desolation vanishes though the snow remains. The kids’ century-old house, bricks painted sea-green, is nestled next to a huge Deodor pine. The kitchen window gives off an inviting light, which will draw me, moth-like, a few days later when I walk from the store in a snow storm with a birthday balloon for Adam. I am familiar with this neighborhood in Salt Lake City because my husband and I lived there the first two years of our marriage.
When I arrive from the airport, I lug a suitcase filled with oranges from the garden where Julie grew up in California. Adam loves to eat them, peeled and cut up by his mom and served on his high-chair tray. Julie and I discuss what we will do together: attend his Little Gym class, take him to the Children’s Discovery Museum, bake cupcakes for his birthday. It’s hard to believe that the emotional impact of Plutonian desolation will rival the warmth of Julie’s domestic scene but it does.
The next day we drive to Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake. I have never been there.
The brightness of the previous day has been absorbed by a deep overcast. The temperature is 34 degrees. Weather reports promise a snowstorm. We drive north on Interstate 15 past oil refineries, factories, and treeless tracts of big new homes. As one billboard says, under a little girl’s smirking face, each house has room for growth.
The scene changes as we drive the causeway that links the mainland to the island. Thick rolls of fog stretch barrier-like across the road. We go through, relieved to see the tips of the hills. As we gain elevation above a small harbor, the landscape reverts to Pluto. The sky, the inlets, the hills–each a whiter shade of pale. The sun begins to shine a peach-colored light through the screen of clouds. A reflection of the hills forms a faint outline in the lake. The stink of stagnant water along the causeway has dispersed. There is no scent at all, no wind, only bone-chilling cold and silence.
Utah writer Terry Tempest Williams writes: “Everything about the Great Salt Lake is exaggerated–the heat, the cold, the salt and the brine. It is a landscape so surreal, one can never know what it is for certain.”
In 1848 Army surveyor Howard Stansbury
called it a “great and peculiar beauty.”
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to a rock that's 2.7 billion years old. |
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We take refuge in the Visitor’s Center. Adam goes for the rock exhibit. He likes the striped boulder, 2.7 billion years old, older than the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Rocks like these comprise the southern two-thirds of the island. We are in one of the oldest places on earth.
As we watch a film and change Adam’s diaper–we are alone–someone bursts in to tell us the buffalo are outside the door. We dash out to find about 16 beasts nuzzling the snow for dry plants. They move in ripples. A flock of chukar partridges rises from their path. The state park service maintains a herd of about 600 bison. It rounds them up each fall, vaccinates them, and auctions off the extras.
Some
of the island's 600 bison graze on the small plants on the snow-dotted
land.
We want to see more of the island. The vistas beckon because their monochromatic simplicity is the opposite of the fiery desert landscape we seek out in the southern part of the state. In the film I think it was Terry Tempest Williams who reminds us, “The broader the vista, the more it affects the soul.” Entering the scene itself, you learn to savor the peculiar and perhaps painful beauty it possesses. In “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” she writes alternately about the floods of the Great Salt Lake in 1983 and her mother’s battle with cancer. The juxtaposition makes sense. Personal experience imposes itself on impersonal nature. I think of my husband’s coming radiation treatment for prostate cancer.
We drive up a hill and Julie obligingly
stops for me to take another picture. Rocks crop out into a series
of inlets below. The Wasatch Mountains frame the horizon. No
sight of a built environment anywhere from this spot. This time
I think closer to home –Alaska, yes, that’s what it
looks like and I’ve been there. Then I look down the slope.
A herd of buffalo stretches from one end to the other. The sight
takes my breath away.
©2007 by Joyce Kiefer. The photos are the property of the author. All rights reserved. This column first posted Jan. 22, 2007.
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