Antelope Island

On an island that is no longer an island, in a shrinking lake more like an inland sea, lies an empty ranch. A loose assortment of outbuildings hold shearing chutes and a herder's wagon for sheep that are long gone. A rusted grain silo rises over a pasture, from which horses trot over to us, looking for hay.It's late February, on an afternoon fading to evening. Pewter clouds turn the blue sky piebald, and the air shimmers with snow.My husband and children and I are here on a visit from back East. We've given ourselves nine days to drive through the red spires of Canyonlands National Park up along the Wasatch range, past the bluffs of southeast Idaho and into the Tetons and back. My husband is focused on the ski resorts stacked along the canyons. I want to see the Great Salt Lake.It's been on my list since my father returned from a conference when I was eight, handed me a crystal the size of my palm, and told me it precipitated out of an enormous lake. It seemed impossible, that this shining white rock could have solidified from water. When he wasn't looking, I licked it, to verify that it was salt. Then I licked it because it was salt, sneakily, from the back and bottom. I wanted to have my rock and eat it too.The awe I felt as I handled it only somewhat mollified my jealousy. I wanted to see the white-flecked waters for myself. I wanted to see everything.I was born in Big Sky country. As the name implies, the circle drawn by those horizons encompasses a lot of territory. On a clear day in the abandoned homestead towns just north of where I grew up, I could see the avalanche paths in the Beartooths, 80 miles to the southwest, the peaks of the Crazy Mountains 90 miles to the west, the long ridge of the Snowies 80 miles north. For most people there, that's enough. But there are some for whom the spill of land looks like an invitation, each bend in the road a beckoning finger. I always want to see what's next.My family is a restless bunch. We tend not to stay where we're put more than a generation or two, traveling across oceans of water and oceans of grass, pushing farther and farther west, then turning east again.I got it more than most. For a while I moved every year or two, hopping between states, cities, and continents. I still travel relentlessly, preferring the new and unexpected, trying to paint the blank spaces in the map with memories.It doesn't mean I don't yearn for what I've left behind. After seventeen years in Vermont I'm used to shortened sightlines, but as we drove north from the Salt Lake airport into open country I finally felt I could breathe. Things soothing to an easterner—farms and patchwork fields, trees and close hills and the ever-present, encircling wall of green—feel claustrophobic to me. I'm drawn to the West's open geometries and austerity of form, the way history etches itself indelibly in the land. I like the way self-reliance blends with community in truly rural places, people helping each other while maintaining a certain distance. I like that roping and riding are still useful skills, that boots and hats and dusters are equipment, not a sartorial statement.Living outside the West feels like living in exile. But every time I think about going back for good I get hung up on how and where. Many of the towns I might once have considered have flooded with the kind of people who spend $15,000 on a mountain bike, and everywhere else is complicated, at best. The past stays close there—my own, and everyone else's.In a lull between ski days, we thread a web of Interstates and access ramps, cutting between motels and gas stations, health clinics and banks, as clouds brood over the mountain ranges to our left and right.The development falls away. We pass a fenced-off lot, a gravel pit, cattle pasture, and, finally, reeds. The GPS app on my phone shows us traveling along a causeway, surrounded by blue lake. But land laps the road and spills out to the blurred horizon, rimed with something that could be ice or salt or snow. I study the white crust, hoping to find crystals like the one my father gave me, but it's too far away, too indistinct. I don't think to stop the car to trek out there, even though no one else is on the road.We do stop at a marker that extolls the merits of the lake's ecosystem with a zeal that suggests that these virtues might not instantly appear to the casual observer. From what I can tell, this isn't an obvious destination for families wishing to while away a summer afternoon. Marsh grasses and mud line many of the banks, making swimming difficult in places. In summer, brine flies hatch in the billions, getting in people's eyes and tangling in their hair. The water stinks of sulfur and rot.Four rivers flow into the basin. None flow out. Minerals pool there, concentrating a little more with each year. Certain bays are ten times more saline than the ocean. Morton's has set up a factory on the south end.A little salt keeps you alive. Too much will dehydrate your tissues and cause your cells to shrink. It can kill you, fast or slowly, depending on how much you swallow.The local tribes revered this place, which supports ten million birds and forms a central node in one of the great American flyways. The tribes collected salt and medicinal plants, and used the waters for healing and hunting. The Northern Shoshones’ creation story is based here.White residents were less enamored when they arrived. The water can't nourish fields or cattle, can't even support fish. The only things swimming there—apart from microbes and phytoplankton and the ubiquitous brine flies—are brine shrimp, less than half an inch long, too small to eat.Even these might not tolerate the salinity much longer. Irrigation for farms and ranches, water siphoned for development, and drought have dropped inflows to a third of what they used to be. The lake's drying up, killing the creatures that live in it and the birds that depend on it for survival. Even after several years of abundant snowpack, over fifty percent of the lakebed lies exposed. News articles report that avian carcasses litter the shores.The causeway ends at Antelope, one of the biggest of the ever-changing number of islands. Over the last few years, falling water levels have turned it into a peninsula.Once used by the Ute, it was taken over by the Mormons a year or two after their arrival as pasture for the herds that supported their Perpetual Emigration Fund. A hundred and thirty years later, the state bought whatever acreage it didn't already own and turned the whole place into a park.The kids scramble across the rocks that roughen the shoreline, squinting against a sudden snow squall. We pile back into the car and drive across tan bluffs, keeping one eye out for bison and another for the turn-off for the historic ranch.We find it eventually. Behind an empty parking lot, a low-slung building made of whitewashed adobe bricks stands next to a cottonwood grove. Built by a Mormon widower in the 1850s, the house hosted multiple families over the next century or so.The kitchen remains as it was when the last residents left in the early 1970s: enameled stove, a short counter, a line of multipaned windows that let in the underwater light of the dying afternoon. The surfaces are white and hard.We find a park brochure online. It calls this the Fielding Garr Ranch, after the man who built it. It lists a string of other men who brought families to it, but names just one woman, JoAnn Hunt, who with her husband was the last person to live here. I want to know who the other women were, but there is no one to ask.The outbuildings are set up for tourists, with the usual jumble of farm equipment and branding irons, saddles and barbed wire laid out for display. But no one's here, tourists or guides—no one except us, the hopeful horses, and the magpies shifting between the bare limbs of the cottonwoods.The house itself doesn't feel like a museum. It feels like the family got up one day, walked out the door, and never came back.Houses in Chernobyl look like that. So do apartments abandoned under missile barrage or contamination from mines. But across the West, frame buildings stand witness to more private catastrophes. Cross the prairie to an old farmhouse slowly collapsing beside a dead poplar. Inside, a bulbous refrigerator might list atop half-rotten floorboards. Wallpaper bubbles in damp corners. Some shallow closets still hold clothes dusted with spiderwebs.It's a brutal place to try to farm. The notion that a family could live on a 160-acre homestead—thin grass sitting on a scratch of soil—was about as far-fetched as the promise that rain would follow the plow. Settlers rode in, busted sod and felled trees, then, a few years later, washed out, leaving cheat grass and fractured ecosystems in their wake, along with the wreck of whatever buildings or equipment they'd managed to acquire through the years.We wander into the dining room. A Monopoly game rests on the table, close to the woodstove. A radio sits by the window. It could feel homey, if I didn't know the how the wind keens over open spaces, the way silence crackles and hums in an empty room.It feels like we're a long way from anywhere. As the crow flies, Salt Lake City lies only a few miles to the southwest, but the resale shops and fast food joints fade into the light off the lake, the blue blur of the mountains edging the far horizon. To the west, bald hills lift to sky.I wonder what they thought about, those women unnamed by the brochure, as they wrung out laundry in the white kitchen. Did they look at the crusted lake and dream of fresh water? Did they long for the sharp, bright air of the mountains? Or did they miss the city that, even then, sprawled along the mountains’ base?Many women went out of their minds with loneliness in the remote corners of the pioneer West. Used to bustling towns, houses from whose kitchens they could watch people come and go, families that sprawled across hillsides and river bottoms—these women now lived in one-room cabins far from any road. Their husbands drove to market, rode herd, hunted, while the women stayed close to their four walls, dirt sifting endlessly from sod roofs or blowing through chinks between cabin logs, alone against coyotes and mountain lions and rattlers and broiling sun or cold so deep each breath speared their lungs, alone except for children growing wilder with each year.There are legends of women who couldn't take it, who snatched up knives and did violence against themselves or their families, but they're hard to pin down, changing as the storytellers change. Sometimes the only records are the names of the places they lived in or traveled through: Crazy Mountains and Crazy Woman Creek; Skull Valley, Bitter Creek, Froze-to-Death.As a child, I used to wonder at these stories. I liked the stillness of the prairies, leaned into the constant wind. I understood what a horse meant by a cocked hoof or a twitching ear, and how to negotiate rock ledges where I might find a rattlesnake or a black widow spider. It was people—those towns the women mourned—that frightened me.In a school obsessed with Guess and Esprit, I dressed in clothes from Goodwill. Unlike nearly everyone else, I wasn't Baptist or Catholic or Mormon; I was a godless tree-hugging liberal, surely bound for Hell, who cared more about dogs than Madonna. The other girls spoke a foreign language, lading their words with secondary meanings and inflecting them with body language I'd never learned. Boys were a whole other country.Kids notice difference. Sometimes it's innocent curiosity. This was closer to the impulse that leads a flock of birds to peck out the eyes of a straggler. There were rules for things, brutally enforced. Matthew Shephard, born just three months after me a few hours south, was pistol-whipped at twenty-one and strung up on a fencepost for the crime of being gay. As he shivered in a coma from which he would never recover, his White attackers drove back to town and jumped two Latino teenagers. This is the world I grew up in.No one ever laid a hand on me. Being cis and Anglo and well off (despite my clothes) might have stood for something, since no one even tried. Or maybe I was just lucky. Certainly the possibility of danger lingered like a breath on the back of my neck.It was the wilderness I turned to, when town seemed like nothing more than a catalogue of fears, or when the loneliness made it hard to breathe. The countryside and the animals that lived there were my community, my refuge. I wanted to live off the land, and so went around tasting plants more or less at random, somehow managing not to poison myself in the process. I wanted to belong to it, so read stories about Coyote and Magpie and longed to count myself their relative, like the Plains tribes did.It's an awkward thing to love a land your people have stolen. My family didn't join the army for the Indian Wars, but they worked the western Colorado mines that still bleed chemicals into mountain rivers. They set up mercantiles, supplying farmers with the tools to bust sod. They killed buffalo when America had seized on that as a way to obliterate the Plains tribes. My relatives, and thousands like them, tipped the balance on the prairie I loved, sending it out of true.I knew this as a child, and yet I read just as many homesteader accounts as native myths. The narratives are full of grit and determination, setbacks and persistence, the ordinary heroism of sticking it out against impossible odds. The settlers were living off the land as I longed to do. Except they did it with imported steel and foreign seeds and a religion and economy crafted in and for a different place, and the certainty that despite that displacement, their techniques must serve the highest and best use of the land.It breeds a kind of ruthless practicality in the survivors, this attempt to force European agriculture on a landscape fundamentally unsuited to it. Farmers whose crops are withering are not going to let fresh water rush into a salt basin where not even fish can live. If the only thing between a man and destitution is a steadily dwindling herd, he'll kill every coyote that comes near just in case it might steal a calf. My mother's taken pictures of desiccated coyote carcasses strung along Wyoming fenceposts like some kind of medieval gibbet.People here value things according to their use, or their danger. Ranchers lace mountain meadows with herbicide lest the native locoweed poison their imported cattle. They kill wolves and lobby to reduce the Yellowstone bison herds. A new housing development, clearcut, or mine will always win over an endangered species, unless that species starts making them money, and sometimes even if it does. People who look like them will always win out over people who look and sound different. But maybe that's less a legacy of the West than of colonialism, and an economy that parcels out rewards based on what it decides we're all worth.I glance at the magpies, vilified as cattle killers not so long ago, with a bounty on their heads. They call raucously to one another, supremely unconcerned with our opinion of them or anything else. Ecologists would argue that, in contrast to their reputation, they actually help agriculture, by eating pests and clearing carrion. They argue, too, that the Great Salt Lake is crucial to birds, to the weather systems that drop snow in the canyons across the city, to seal in the toxic dust that decades of pollution have buried in the lakebed. and in a language that and the can But I wonder what it would take to live in a country in which the magpies and the lake are for not because they are useful or even but because the world is more with them in it, brine flies and and it would take to a community in which people are not for how well they in, but for how much they help everyone else to some but I from the names of a few of the women who lived at the Fielding Garr do not have the names of the who worked the or the who traveled across the or the and and who here the Mormons them the name of the man who on the one hundred years a few of the bison to turn them to in a Their nearly hundred grass near the road as we drive back the rocks line the fading to in the distance. The lake in the endlessly to as and as The road is leaving us nearly alone in a of and see a as we drive off the island, but of the for which the place was