Roundtable

Smithson once said “there is nothing natural in the Museum of Natural History.” Seeing the world on calendars and postcards colors one’s idea of nature, occludes any view of what it actually is. He was interested in sites without scenic meaning, unframed and hence “liberated” places. In April, 1970, taking out a twenty-year lease (at one hundred dollars a year) on a piece of unsurveyed land on the bed of the Great Salt Lake just north of Rozell Point, Utah, he hired a foreman, two dump trucks, a tractor and a front loader, and began scooping up from the shore massive basalt rocks and earth that he tipped into the lake. Over the course of six days, Smithson extended the earthwork fifteen hundred feet by fifteen feet wide, coiling it into itself three times. He then left it for further development with the mud and the salt and the sun. This is Spiral Jetty. What I am driving north to see.

Sixty-five miles beyond Salt Lake City I exit at Corinne, pull over, and consult the directions to Spiral Jetty. The site is maintained by the Dia Art Foundation in New York, which is clearly taking no chances with city folk getting lost in the high plains:

LAST GAS before Spiral Jetty is in Corinne at the Sinclair truck stop. Past Corinne, continue heading west and veer left on Highway 83 for 17.7 miles. Turn left onto "Golden Spike Road" and continue 7.7 miles up the east side of Promontory Pass to the Golden Spike National Historic Site (GSNHS). Spiral Jetty is located approximately 15.5 miles beyond GSNHS. Upon leaving GSNHS, roads are unpaved and high clearance or four-wheel drive vehicles are strongly recommended. In inclement weather, roads can become impassable. Guests are advised to bring water. LAST BATHROOMS before Spiral Jetty are at the Golden Spike National Historic Site’s Visitors Center.

I check the fuel gauge and the tire tread on my car, then I look beneath it, wondering what, exactly, constitutes “high clearance.” No matter. Over the last ten years I have studied photographs of the Jetty, read about it, made little models of it on every beach I’ve lain on. If I have to walk the last fifteen miles to reach it, I’ll do that too. I only wish I had brought a compass. Forcing my vehicle hard for the next twenty-five miles, up and over Promontory Pass, I pull into the Visitor Center to refill the water bottles and check in with the park ranger.

The Visitor Center is a small brown hut at the end of the paved road. In front is a twelve-foot white spike with a placard describing the race from east and west to complete the transcontinental railroad. Inside, it is all business and trains, no mention of the Jetty except for a small pile of postcards with a shot of it from above. I pick up one and take it to the park ranger. It is only 9AM, but already she is behind the desk staving off the interrogations of a middle-aged man who wants to know the exact spot that the Golden Spike was driven. When I tell her that I am not here for the railroads but for the Jetty, her face falls. She went out to see it about six years ago. “It’s nice. It’s not really my kind of art, but…” she searches for a word, “I guess it’s not hurting anyone out there.” I tell her that I have directions to get out there, hoping to park on the side of the road and hike the last few miles in. “Is that permitted?” She looks at me with raised eyebrows. “I’m from New York,” I say, “I don’t get much in the way of fresh air.” She nods. “Just make sure you pull your vehicle all the way to the side. The ranchers are tired of people blocking their way and shooting their cows and stuff.”

Back at the car, I check the directions again:

From the Visitor Center, drive 5.6 miles west on the main gravel road to a fork in the road. Continue left, heading west.

Immediately you cross a cattle guard. Including this one, you cross four cattle guards before you reach Rozel Point and Spiral Jetty.

Drive 1.3 miles south to a second fork in the road. Turn right onto the southwest fork, and proceed 1.7 miles to cattle guard #2.

Continue southeast 1.2 miles to cattle guard #3.

Continue straight 2.8 miles south-southwest to cattle guard #4 and an iron-pipe gate. At this gate the Class D (gravel) road designation ends. From here, four-wheel drive, high clearance vehicles are strongly recommended.

If you choose to continue, drive south for another 2.7 miles, and around the east side of Rozel Point, you will see the Lake and a jetty (not Spiral Jetty) left by oil drilling explorations that ended in the 1980s.

Southwest beyond the site of the oil jetty, turn right onto a two-track trail that contours above the oil-drilling debris below. Travel slowly—the road is narrow, brush might scratch your vehicle, and the rocks, if not properly negotiated, could high center your vehicle or blow out your tires. Don't hesitate to park and walk. Spiral Jetty is just around the corner.

Drive or walk 6/10th of a mile west around Rozel Point and look toward the Lake. Spiral Jetty may be in sight. The lake’s levels vary several feet from year-to-year and from season to season, so Spiral Jetty is not always visible above the water line.

As promised, the road turns to gravel beyond the Visitor Center. A cloud of dust rises up and obscures everything behind me; ahead there is nothing but blue sky. It is so flat here I can’t even make out the horizon. I am in the high plains, driving across a blank valley hemmed in by bald hills to my left. No trees, no water, no birds, not a cow in sight. I bump along at twenty-five miles per hour, crossing one cattle guard after the next, until the road becomes a two track trail. I pull over, lock the car and set out on foot for the last two miles. It is almost 10AM.

I decide to walk because I want time to prepare myself for seeing the Jetty, to approach it slowly and thoughtfully rather than jostling my way up in the vehicle. I stop for a moment and look up, trying to get my bearings. If Smithson was seeking a place “liberated from scenic meaning,” he certainly found it here. The desolation is unspeakable. Rozell Point rises up miserably to my right, a pathetic hill with some basalt outcroppings poking from its crown. The lake is beginning to appear in front of me. But it is so stagnant, so flat and colorless, that I find it hard to tell where the mudbed ends and the water begins. To my left, those same hills close down the valley in what feels to me to be a trap. The sun is splattering down in the dirt, a wind is blowing around Rozell Point. I can’t make out if I am cold or hot. I am wearing a wool coat, which I button against the wind, only to find that I am sweating. Am I ill? Am I coming down with ague, the bane of pilgrims? A single thought keeps bouncing about inside my head: “The difference between something and nothing is nothing.” I have no idea what that means or where I read it, and I am not in the mood right now to attempt to puzzle it out. It doesn’t seem,how to put this, “appropriate” to the task at hand. But I don’t want to just daydream my way toward the jetty. I attempt to awaken the memory of sacred reverence by recalling another artwork before which I stood in awe.

A Jackson Pollock comes to mind. I had gone to MoMA to see one of his enormous drip paintings. The museum was jammed with bodies, but I positioned myself before the canvas at a distance of five or six feet, so that it filled my vision to the periphery. And then I waited. At first, just a tangled, untraceable skein of lines. No order, no assurance, just an unholy, chaotic mess. And then, slowly, faintly, a pulse began to appear. A single thread of paint stood out, and I followed it across others which in turn began to beat and thrum. The canvas began to swell, an orchestra of arcs and drips competing here and harmonizing there, layering down to a whisper in certain places and up to a shout in others. And then, the large pools of paint on the canvas: silent repositories of pure energy. My vision telescoped into one of them; I lost my balance; I felt as though I might fall into it. What is happening there? That pool is…it is still wet. Pollock had painted this fifty years ago and the thing was still wet. It was alive. It was breathing.

I have been walking at a good clip for half an hour now, my head down and my eyes on the ground, picking my way along the track and trying to avoid a nasty fall. A plane flies overhead—the first evidence of life since the Visitor Center an hour and a half ago—I look up and there, there is Spiral Jetty.

The lake is low and the Jetty is beached below me, reaching out across the cracked mud to the edge of the water before turning and curling back into itself three times. The basalt of which it is made is black, very black in this mid-morning light. Against the bleached mud it does not even count as a color; it lies there rather like negative space. From this vantage point it looks puny and somewhat sad, broken down, a study in enervation. I had expected it to announce itself more dramatically, not with a bang exactly, but with something more than a whimper. It is not beautiful; it is not sublime; it is not even pretty. It is an ugly, ruined thing in an ugly, ruined landscape. There is nothing sacred about it.

I resolve to walk it at least once. This takes some effort. The boulders along the edge of the jetty are jagged and covered in a filthy, salty rime. They are making a go of it, trying to act like a bulwark, but it is a half-hearted attempt. They know the salt will win. It is just a matter of time. Along the center of the Jetty, smaller, even spikier rocks poke up with a grim, if ultimately futile, determination to get noticed. I trail out along the Jetty, aimlessly following its shape, one curve, then another, then the third, until I reach the center of the spiral, where I meet—nothing. An oppressive, totalitarian silence, not just the absence of sound, but the denial of its very possibility.

When Smithson finished making Spiral Jetty, he stood at its center, looked in all directions, and recorded what he saw: “mud, salt crystals, rocks, water.” The view hasn’t changed in thirty-nine years. There is still nothing to see here, nothing to inspire. I am an idiot on a fool’s errand and running out of water. I should just leave.

Making my way back along the Jetty I notice that someone has wedged a bench seat—the kind you used to find in large cars from the 1970s—into the boulders on the slope above it. It sits there, torn up and bleached white as a bone. I climb up to it, peer in and around it, looking for scorpions or snakes. Am I a tourist or a pilgrim? The tourist doesn’t understand that sacred experience operates at a low frequency. It takes effort to create one, not just a matter of showing up, kicking a few stones about, walking around and scratching your initials in the mud. The Jetty is not Mt. Rushmore; it is not even Stonehenge. It doesn’t reveal itself just because you got here. It takes time, and time is the one thing the tourist doesn’t have. I will not be a tourist, I tell myself; I will not move along. I will be a pilgrim, if a recalcitrant one. I will wait this sucker out, settle down, and look at the Jetty once more.

My gaze is met with indifference. It lies there “yearning,” as Smithson would later write, “for the assurance of geometry. The spiral is, after all, along with the circle and the triangle, one of the perfect forms, but its existence at this site is inverted. Jetties are supposed to prevent loss and erosion, and this one is a study in and of those very forces. It holds nothing back and protects no one from anything. It is sinking into the lakebed. Everything is eroding here: all movement, all travel, every pilgrimage blowing away into dust. I have traveled three thousand miles on a journey that was supposed to be one of renewal and spiritual refreshment, and now that I am here all I can think of is death.

A little girl skips down the boulders to my right and dances out onto the Jetty. Then her parents pick their way down through the rocks and venture out. When I catch up with them, the girl, Mia, tells me she loves this place. It smells like the sea. She shakes her head, blond curls bouncing, and rushes back toward the car, mother in tow. Her father, Nathan, invites me to walk the Jetty with him. He is thirty-three; he has a beautiful wife and daughter; and he looks at me carefully, generously, through untroubled, limpid blues eyes. “The spiral creates a focal point,” he tells me, “remote and accessible at the same time. It puts me in touch with the earth; it makes me aware of this moment and this place.” We are standing at the center of the Jetty now. It is 3PM. The salt lake stretches away to the west, sparkling and forbidden. I tell him how uneasy I feel here, as though I am trapped in a room that operates on a geological scale with the sole intention of crushing and erasing every vestige of the human. I came here to experience the transcendent, the sublime, and right now I feel about as large as a gnat. Even the Jetty, the sole human signature in the landscape, is being erased. Nathan looks at me and smiles. “That is the sublime,” he says. “It is terrifying,” I say to him.

Just then, a voice to my left on the outside edge of the Jetty: “Well that’s true. There is terror in the sublime.” A woman is sitting there on a rock, holding a ball of string and looking into the sky. She is flying a kite. Nathan bids me a hasty goodbye and I approach her. “I love the shape of the delta kite,” she continues. “It is so simple, and it flies so well.”

Leslie looks to be about forty-five. She has thick red hair and wears dark glasses with gaudy gold frames. She comes here often, I learn. The impetus for today’s trip is the Biennial Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. “This weekend all the Mormon leaders are in town giving addresses and sort of laying things out for the faithful. My husband and I decided to drive up here and listen to it on the radio, and this is a good place to puzzle it all out for ourselves. You have to do that in the Mormon Church. They say a lot of things, and you have to puzzle them out for yourself. So I come here to get grounded.” She looks at me and laughs. “I know, I’m out here flying a kite and trying to get grounded.”

In her presence I forget myself. She is alive, full of vitality and contradiction and energy. I tell her that I have come here on a secular pilgrimage, with the belief that art objects such as the Jetty might hallow an otherwise inconsequential bit of burned-out land, but whatever holiness might be here is eluding me. “I like the fact that Smithson knew the Jetty would change over time,” she says. “To create something you can let go of, like Smithson did: That is the sublime. To avoid stasis, to let go. There’s a sublimeness there, and one as well in the way people respond to it. People come out here to be the best of themselves.” She lets some string out. “You too are here to find what is best in yourself, and take it home with you.”

What about the glacial coldness of this environment and the creeping despair I feel in response to it? “Well,” she says, “We do matter. You know about God being aware of the sparrow and all that. It’s important to remember that this earth is still new from God’s perspective.” I don’t believe in God, and I tell her that, but it doesn’t matter. I know that she is absolutely right.
Her husband, Paul, has been out on the mud flats shooting pictures. I watch him pack up his tripod, put his camera away and approach us. He is an intense, small man with cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He was an army chaplain for thirty-five years, and I get the sense that he has seen things that would make other men pray for blindness—in Vietnam, in Iraq, in the hospice in downtown Salt Lake where he now works. He apologizes at one point in our conversation when words elude him. “I have this depression, you see, and it has drilled a hole in my head, and I’ve lost words to it.”

Leslie introduces me. “This is Timothy,” she says. “He’s here on a pilgrimage. I thought you might want to speak with him.” Paul looks at me, taking my measure, then he removes his glasses and cleans them on a shirt-tail. “I have a friend,” he says. “We like to haunt the desert down south—and we are haunted by it. A pilgrimage is like that. It’s about longing, or yearning, or what we in the west call ‘the hunger for God.’ In the Mormon Church we don’t have the tradition of pilgrimage. The early Mormons came out here fleeing persecution. They were happy to find a place where no one else would bother them. It was a god-forsaken place.” He looks around. “It still is. So for us—and for you, I think—the pilgrimage is more like a rite of passage. And rites of passage alter the passenger. You climbed inside a metal tube, shot across the sky and four hours later appeared in this foreign land. You made a passage outside the normal and the familiar to this place. You made a pilgrimage. But that’s what life is. It’s a pilgrimage to becoming a new man, a transformed man. Otherwise you are just another sunburned tourist.”

It is 6PM; I have been at the Jetty all day. Walking back to the car, around Rozell Point, I look back at the Jetty once more. It is bathed in sunlight. Paul is back on the mud flats shooting pictures. Leslie is walking along the Jetty; she has reeled in her kite, and she is as distinct as an etching. Pulling away in the car, I look at my face in the rearview mirror; it is pink. The visitor’s center at Golden Spike is shuttered when I pass it, so I stop for water and a cold beer at the truck stop in Sinclair, the last sign of civilization on the way in and the first one on the way out. I hold the coldness of the bottles against my burning face as the young man behind the counter rings me up. “Sorry,” I say sheepishly, “I was out at Spiral Jetty all day and didn’t have any sunscreen.” “What? What is that? Spiral Jetty? Someone was in here earlier and asking for directions to it.” I tell him a bit about it, but not too much. “You should go, you should bring some food and water and spend the day out there. You know…make a pilgrimage.” “That sounds cool,” he says, “how much is it?” “Oh it’s free,” I tell him. “Cost you nothing but time.” “Are you serious?” He is laughing. We are both laughing. “Free? No shit—I’m going tomorrow.”