by nan seymour
I’ve slept in her bed for nearly 50 years. She made her imprint long ago, in the Pleistocene epoch. The earth still traces the shape of her graceful and colossal body.
Now I reside a mile south and downslope from her ancient shoreline on the unceded homeland of Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, and Ute people. This is also the unceded home of Great Salt Lake herself. The lake is the heart of an essential ecosystem, a home for saline reefs composed of living rocks called microbialites, which sustain brine shrimp and brine flies, creating an irreplaceable island of refuge for twelve million migratory birds.
When I was seven, we moved here from California, to a home just west of an ancient shoreline. From our dinner table we could see water glimmering far away. Despite this evident beauty, I grew up in a culture of apathy and disdain for the Great Salt Lake. Stinky, people said. Too buggy, too far away. We believed them and never went. The lake was presented as peripheral; people were the center of things.
Every summer we drove north on I-15 to visit my grandparents. I barely noticed her presence as we skirted her shores heading towards the North fork of the Snake River—I was so eager to arrive in Idaho to greet familiar water and wings. My mother and her mother had taught me to love white-winged pelicans, great blue herons, and sandhill cranes. Red-winged and yellow-headed black birds swayed me with their raucous cries. I cherished the sights and sounds of these bird friends and thought they only lived in Idaho. I had no idea that we had passed their nesting grounds on the way there.
Eventually, the birds led me to Great Salt Lake and I began to frequent Farmington Bay. As the pandemic closed in, I spent more and more time there and grew intimate with ibises, curlews, and avocets. Although I noticed the waters withdrawing, I thought I was seeing an ebb that would lead to a flow. I didn’t know.
“Have you heard the RadioWest program about the state of the lake?” my friend Diana asked me in late July of 2021.
“It’s hard news,” she said gently. “But you might want to listen.”
It was her gentleness that scared me. It took me almost two months to muster up the courage. Somehow, I knew when I listened, I would be changed. Finally, I drove out to the shore near Saltair, faced the lake, and listened to the program. I heard Dr. Bonnie Baxter spell out how things will be if we let the lake die. She describes a “Mad Max” scenario. All the toxins we’ve been dumping in the water since my Mormon ancestors colonized this place will come back to haunt us in a perpetual, particulate storm.
“Is ‘dust bowl’ overstating it?” asks Doug Fabrizio in the interview. “No, ‘dustbowl’ is understating it.” Dr. Baxter is matter-of-fact.
“How close are we to a tipping point?” Doug asks. “It’s possible that we reach the tipping point by November of this year.” A long pause ensued and I drew in a sharp breath.
In response to this news, I began to write. I wrote to find out what the lake means to me. I wrote vigilantly. I wrote to listen. I studied up on microbialites. I learned the names of islands that are no longer islands. I went to the Division of Natural Resources map store and sought out a bathymetric map. When I had a hard time finding the lake map in the stack, I asked the clerk why it was so difficult to locate.
“Everyone underestimates the lake’s importance,” she said.
I began to dream of the lake every night. Sometimes just in images, sometimes with words. I often dreamt of water flowing into her great body. I dreamt hard as if by dreaming I could increase the flow of the influx. Words of praise for the lake floated through my dreams. I tried to focus my attention on the lake, remembering that what we attend to grows.
One morning I awoke with an invocation in my head—When praise begins to flow— and I felt I could help make that happen. Shortly after, I was writing with friends at the brutalist picnic table on Owl Hill at Farmington Bay. I gathered up our lines and dared to say aloud, “This will be the beginning of a collective praise poem over 1700 lines long.” I shook a bit in my boots when I said it. I knew the poem wanted to evoke the square mileage of a full Great Salt Lake. The poem wanted to be a prayer for her restoration.
When the thought of keeping a vigil came in the night, it arrived as an urgent invitation, dropped like a letter in the mail, already written, inviting me to stay with the lake from Wolf Moon to Snow Moon. I was surprised to receive it. When I looked up those dates, I saw that they coincided with the first month of the Utah State legislative session. When I was invited to pray the poem’s invocation with our lawmakers, I asked the lake to speak through me.
When the life of someone you love is at stake, you stay with them. The primary urge of the vigil was to be with the lake, to bear witness.
River Writers* and many others stepped forward, ensuring we could stay present with our beloved lake day and night through the entire legislative session. The lake beckoned us and we came. Rachel offered the use of her camper without blinking an eye, giving the vigil a physical home. Praise began to flow.
Verses found their way to the poem from all directions. One day, a man I had never met named Gary appeared at the campsite bearing lattes and waving a blue folder with a handwritten poem in it. When I asked him to read it, he turned away from me to face the lake and read the poem like a love letter.
Meanwhile, we kept gathering people and their lines, stitching together choruses. Folks came to take the long walk to the water, to silently watch the sunset together, to drum, to sing, and to write. Prayer flags appeared at the campsite with the shape of the lake hand-stitched on them. Words from the poem danced all day in water and wind.
On Saturday, February 19, 2022, more than a hundred people gathered on Antelope Island to read all the 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 the lake, just as Gary had. The words were not for us. An offering was made.
During our second winter vigil, just before a blizzard on March 4th of 2023, we gathered again by the shore with twenty more poets and hundreds of new lines. This second wave of praise brought our collective line-level up to well over 2500.
Now this prayer is in your hands. This book is both a petition and a location: a cry for full restoration and a place where we can meet to love the lake. It’s a place to grieve as well. Praise and lament are two names for love and forever intertwined.
I still sleep each night in the lake bed and each day I drink water melted from snow she made. We all live in relationship to the irreplaceable. We share a sacred obligation to attend to these relationships, to listen to our beyond-human kin with reverence and intimate tenderness.
Great Salt Lake was always the center, not the periphery; a creator, not a commodity. May we turn our hearts and faces towards her irrevocably. Love is right action, regardless of outcome.