by Terry Tempest Williams
Great Salt Lake was wild with wind and waves breaking on shore before dawn. It was the Spring Equinox in 2022, and a dozen people formed a circle on the edge of the lake. Two elders from the Ute Nation led us in prayer. This lake is a holy presence, a place where Indigenous people have gathered for generations to collect and trade salt to tan hides, to preserve meat, to honor a baby’s first laugh, and to be used in ceremonies.
They see Great Salt Lake as entity to be respected, praised, and protected. On this day, it was a time for songs and prayers.
The sky was the color of steel, clouds gathered and blackened. Temperatures dropped. As the first song was cried out, a flock of pintails circled above, then landed on the waters close to the singers as if they knew that song, had heard that song and were called down to hear that familiar song again. The singing of prayers intermingled on the wind -- seven bison appeared.
The Elders brought out braided sweetgrass to seal the prayers. As they lit the sweetgrass, the winds blew it out – again and again, they tried and tried – the men huddled together to block the wind, but no flame would stay. The men turned to the women to see if they could light the sweetgrass. They knelt closely on the ground, as one woman struck the match and others quickly circled the flame with their hands, the sweetgrass lit for a few seconds, then went cold. The women crouched closer, whispered their own prayers that conjured sparks, but the sparks fell short of fire. Finally, the Elders said, the sparks would do for now, that their ancestors heard their prayers, but hard times were ahead – great works would be required from all directions. Great Salt Lake would need our prayers again and again and the blessings would come – but it would take time.
A poet was among them and she told a story:
“On Saturday, February 19, 2022, more than a hundred people gathered on Antelope Island to read all 1,706 lines compiled at that point. Twenty poets read their verses
one by one, and then all who had assembled read every last word of praise. We read simultaneously, but not in unison. Diverse voices swelled into chorus. We read facing her… an offering was made. The lake beckoned us and we came.”
Great Salt Lake is irreplaceable – the communal poem is called “irreplaceable.” The Elders listened, the people who gathered in the circle listened and in that moment it became clear that Great Salt Lake is a poem, a parable, a presence among us – just as we are Great Salt Lake with saltwater running through our veins.
Rain began to fall. The pintails flew. The bison wandered closer to the water and stopped, becoming boulders of tenacity in the storm. The group voiced their gratitude to the Elders and made vows to carry on. Then the people scattered and returned to their homes.
But the poet stayed.
* * *
In your hands, you hold a loving text brought into being by Nan Seymour, Poet-in- Residence on Antelope Island, through her devotion to Great Salt Lake in this time of crisis and drought. She invited dozens of poets to join her to read 1,706 lines as each of them faced Great Salt Lake.
In so doing, their offering was made in the name of kinship. Their lives and the lives supported by Great Salt Lake depend on it. These poets are making waves. The power of poetry is not to be underestimated. It is a field force of devotion in the restoration of our Mother Lake.
* * *
Here are the facts: On July 3, 2022, Great Salt Lake retreated to its historic low of 4190 feet occupying less than 1000 square miles in the Great Basin. Four months later in November, 2022, our inland sea dropped again to a record-breaking low of 4188.5 feet, creating red water in the northern part of the lake that looked like a blood-letting due to the extreme salinity saturated with halophiles, salt-loving bacteria, creating the crimson waters.
In 1987, at its historic high of 4212 feet, Great Salt Lake’s liquid hand extended 3300 square miles. The equation of Great Salt Lake’s fluctuations is straightforward because it is a terminal basin lake with no outlet to the sea: if rainfall and the inflow of water from Utah’s creeks and rivers draining into Great Salt Lake exceeds evaporation,
the lake rises; if evaporation exceeds the inflow, the lake recedes. Great Salt Lake is receding before our eyes. Stand on Antelope Island and look northeast and for as far as you can see – it is a horizon of salt.
Climate collapse and the megadrought in the American Southwest not seen in 1200 years is in part responsible for Great Salt Lake’s decline. But so is the historic diversion of water from the lake, most significantly taken from Bear River for agriculture and development.
With close to a thousand acres of lakebed now exposed, Great Salt Lake is on life support. We cannot look away. Our health is intrinsically tied to the health of this ancient remnant of Lake Bonneville, a late Pleistocene paleolake, who filled this region some 30,000 years ago and stretched over 20,000 square miles of the Great Basin Desert.
Great Salt Lake has not been taken seriously by most of us for decades, nor respected or seen for who it is – a dynamic body of water in the desert. It has been an oddity, undrinkable, a saline mirage of no particular use ever since Jim Bridger “discovered” it in 1824. John C. Fremont mapped it between 1843 - 1845. Mormon settlers inhabited Ute lands in 1847 and colonized the Wasatch Front that we know now as the Salt Lake Valley. Industry surrounding the Great Salt Lake has left a legacy of heavy metals and toxic chemicals - arsenic, cadmium, lithium, colbalt and copper - that have settled on the lake bed. These toxins now whipped up by dust devils and carried along the Wasatch Front not only threaten the air quality for the most vulnerable among us, but for all its 2,000,000 inhabitants.
Great Salt Lake is in crisis. Every part of the lake’s complex ecosystem is also threatened. In truth, the entire watershed is at risk affecting the economic and ecological health of the Wasatch Front from the ski industry to the brine shrimp industry to our own wellbeing.
Who cares?
The brine shrimp care. The brine flies care. Wilson’s phalaropes and eared grebes care. The white pelicans who left their nesting sites on Gunnison Island in June, 2023, care. The millions of migrating birds care, winging their way to Great Salt Lake to breed and nest and gain sustenance for their southern and northern journeys each spring and fall. Great Salt Lake is the burning white center of connectivity for all migratory species in the Western Hemisphere – 338 species depend on Great Salt Lake for their survival.
A shrinking Great Salt Lake means a shrinking population of brine shrimp, brine flies, as do the microbialites who provide breeding grounds for these creatures a kin to these saline waters. If these populations crash, the shorebird and waterfowl populations crash creating a catastrophic cascade of avian trauma to the Western Hemisphere. This is not just a local or state issue, but a global one. Saline lakes and
seas are disappearing around the world forcing whole communities, human and wild, to move elsewhere, displaced and disoriented.
This could be our future.
It is not too late to change the narrative of a shrinking Great Salt Lake. It is not too late to acknowledge what the Ute Elders predicted: hard times are ahead. We can
band together with a common cause – the health and wellbeing of Great Salt Lake. We can inspire and work to effect enlightened and impassioned leadership from the state legislature and federal agencies, local businesses, and our communities at large, on behalf of the sustaining grace of this inland sea. We can decide collectively that Great Salt Lake deserves our attention and actions.
On March 28, 2024, a petition on behalf of the Wilson’s phalarope to be protected under the Endangered Species Act was sent to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. This was an act of love.
We can halt the harebrained idea of the Bear River Development Project that would dam and divert more of the Bear River, water that would otherwise naturally flow
into Great Salt Lake. We can use restraint. We can conserve water. Green lawns can be replaced with native and drought resistant plants. We can educate ourselves as consumers of water and monitor our water usage. We can come together as citizens and recognize Great Salt Lake as the presence she is: a sentient being who deserves her own sovereign rights and privileges to not only exist, but flourish.
Every place needs its poets to survive the loss of memory that inevitably comes with progress. Poetry reminds us that beauty is not optional, but a strategy for survival.
Poetry is the meadowlark’s song heralding spring. Poetry is the repeating stanza of a molten sunset mirrored in Great Salt Lake. What is more lyrical than the spiraling of white pelicans above Gunnison Island? More awe-inspiring than a million eared grebes flashing their golden face feathers and ruby eyes in summer light as they feed on Great Salt Lake’s steamy waters? And who can deny the divinity of 10,000 tundra swans, their bright wings against a crisp blue November sky ensuring the presence of angels?
irreplaceable is a prayer. May these poems, line by line, called forth and curated by Nan Seymour, not only move us to act powerfully on behalf of Great Salt Lake, but remind us of the power of prayer in times of drought, especially in drought, to bring forth rain.