You may come to the Great Salt Lake for the violently peachy sunsets.
Or you may be drawn by the ever-changing sky, magically mirrored in the vast placid lake face.
Maybe you come to the Great Salt Lake to see the chocolate-colored bison grazing, shaggy heads bowed low.
More likely you come to try your bird luck.
You know you’ll see gulls, ducks, coots -
Will serendipity reward you with swallows? Stilts? Swans?
You come for the birds
but, the birds come for us.

People don’t come to the lake for flies.
We’re the reason they stay away.
As guardians of the lake, we don’t really mind.
We’re the living fortification the lake gives birth to - to shield herself.
These beaches are no haven for drunken revelries with forgotten beer cans or bloated camp-outs with brightly colored granola bar wrappers blown into the silvery sage.
Who do you think you have to thank for that?
This glorious place is too sacred to leave unprotected.

Before your artists knew what stained glass was, we flew with delicate iridescent wings, lined with perfect veins, the colors catching the sun, flicking the light from sky to lake.
Before your ecologists drew too-simple lines creating food chains, we were the bedrock of this place.
Before you invented numbers, we were legions - countless, feeding hungry migrants.
Before you had language, we sang shore choruses.

Come to the lake edge and catch the whisper of our song.
Translation for human ears: something like swish, something like swoop. No, you won’t be able to hear the words.
But there are secrets revealed in our dance, if you look closely enough.

While you’re here, we’ll continue to stand guard,
Dancing, feeding, undulating like the water that we come from.
It’s too salty for you to drink.

You won’t quench your thirst from the briny water that we’re born from.
But, we aren’t stingy with this bounty.
We say again, look closer.

Christy Bills likes worms, words and wandering all over Utah. If you go for a walk with her, she’ll want to tell you the names of all the living things she knows, and learn what you know too.