![]() The billboards advertised Bibles and services you could pay for to deal with local plagues (‘‘FIRE WATER MOLD STORM’’). We passed defunct factories that, with their silos and peaks, resembled the Mormon churches we could see in the distance, isolated and chalk white against the brown mountainsides in which they were embedded. We passed an abandoned amusement park, the roller coaster coiling like a train track yanked skyward by a tornado. Nature didn’t interest them as much as civilization and its inhabitants did. But the crows are predominantly city creatures. I urged them to look out the car windows rather than at their phones, and confirm that they were totally undone by the awesomeness. The crows had never witnessed a landscape like this save once when tiny, they had never been west of the East. There is something indecent about such staring.’’Īn underwater artwork is the perfect remedy for indecency. While in Rome, in 1961, surrounded by art tourists, he wrote in a letter to Nancy Holt (who would later become his wife): ‘‘People want to stare with aggressive eagerness or they feel they must stare in order to grant approval. He constructed it during a drought in 1970 he knew the water would someday rise. The natural obstacles on and around which the jetty was built, along with Smithson’s prolific writings, suggest he designed the jetty to be both difficult to reach and difficult to see. ‘‘I don’t think you’ll be able to see it,’’ he said. ![]() ![]() We rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle because my husband, calling ahead to a ranger at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, where the asphalt ends and the dirt begins, had been warned that the road to the jetty was ‘‘pretty bad.’’ We received a similarly grim prognosis from the rental agent, who, on learning our destination, asked us whether we had checked the water levels. Within a few months, the time in my hand would finish changing states, conclude its vanishing act and disappear. Exposed to the air, and possibly to the dryness of California, he guessed, the salt formation was evaporating. ‘‘It’s half the size that it used to be,’’ I remember James saying. The salt formation was the size of my fist and weighty, warm and damp. ‘‘Time turns metaphors into things,’’ Smithson wrote. This was how I came to hold not a piece of the jetty, exactly, so much as a commemoration - the material accrual - of its disappearance. He took one of the salt formations - cracked free from the rock to which it had been affixed - home as a souvenir. James arrived to find that the jetty’s black rocks, following their lengthy submersion, had become coated in pinkish-white salt formations like barnacles affixed to the hull of a sunken ship. People like James could get in their trucks and drive thousands of highway miles and then through the cow fields and out to the Great Salt Lake, where the coastline ‘‘reverberated out to the horizons,’’ according to Smithson, ‘‘only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake.’’ Around 1999, the lake’s water started to recede (because of drought) so that by 2002 the jetty could, again, be seen people, again, could walk it. Because, for almost three decades - roughly since the death of its creator, at age 35, in a plane crash - the jetty, except for a few brief reappearances, was submerged. My friend, Christopher James, an artist and Smithson admirer, had been tracking the water levels around the jetty for years. Unlike me, the crows had not once held a piece of the jetty in their hands. I told them that, for more than a decade, I’d wanted to visit ‘‘Spiral Jetty,’’ as though these years of compressed desire had become a diamond that I could flash in their faces, my little crows. I appealed, finally, to their desire to see me happy, a strategy that, thus far in our lives, had failed 100 percent of the time. And even if we were, what we traveled so far to see might not be visible. Where we were headed, in other words, we might not be able to reach. The lake’s water levels, too, needed to be below 4,195 feet for us to see it, and those levels were partly dependent on snowfall (this winter there was lots) and how much of that snow, by the time we arrived, had melted and sluiced down the mountains - water that also, en route to the lake, could turn the 16 miles of unpaved roads into impassable mush. Adding to the excitement I presumed we now shared: The road conditions near the jetty were highly variable, which was to say not always roads.
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