Grandpa didn’t get it. He stared intently, touching his hearing aid as we told him where we were going. Spiral Jetty. A 1500-foot long and 15-foot wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the Great Salk Lake, considered to be the masterwork of American sculptor Robert Smithson. Like texting or wikipedia, I’m sure he filed it the category of things he doesn’t need to understand.
But it was not his hearing aid.
Pulling out of his driveway with a back seat full of Vitamin Water and Pepperidge Farms cookies, essentials for any adventure, I smiled at his confusion and turned on the radio.
The whole thing was Danielle’s idea. In need of an adventure and painfully bound in country by work and intenrships, we decided to pay homage to a monument to contemporary art in our own back yard. After twenty miles of gravel roads, we pulled off to the side of the road and hiked the last mile or two, leaving my black Nissan Altima glinting in the desert.
We ventured off the path onto the dry salt beds surrounding the jetty with the trepidation of early man witnessing fire or Neil Armstrong taking his first tentative step on virgin lunar soil. My Aesics splintered the caramelized crust of salt deposits, sinking almost imperceptibly into the lake’s gelatinous underbelly. Trepidation turned to childish fascination at the footsteps blossoming then swelling with water behind me. Bending at the waist to bring my nose closer, I inspected salt crystals forming where water once lapped against the shallow shore. Rising to take in the caustic smell of salt and the expanse of the Great Salt Lake disappearing into a rim of mountains in the distance I could have been no more at home on the face of Jupiter.
The jetty sprouts seamlessly from the rocky shore, a contradictory fusion of nature and geometry. Tufts of green struggle from under the blackened, pockmarked rocks and a lizard flashed beneath my feet. At the second ring, however, life disappears as arctic winter descends, covering rocks and suffocated weeds with white, salty foam. Dipping my hand into the peaked foam along the jetty’s outer rim the weightless clouds dissolved to grit in my fingers, to which a quick rinse in the calm water turned amethyst by the setting sun did nothing but coat with a thin, waxy film.
Of course my battery was dead. Like a rose plucked from the ground or a butterfly pinned and suffocating under glass, capturing it would have only killed it—the spiral floating in its own reflection and the translucent water thick as honey.
This is my photograph.
