Vale:
noun: vale; plural noun: vales
1. a valley (used in place names or as a poetic term).
2. the world, or mortal or earthly life
“This vale of tears”
exclamation (archaic): vale; exclamation: válete
1. a written or spoken farewell.
“She was a gentle woman. Vale!”
2. from Latin, literally ‘be well!, be strong!’, imperative of valere.
—Adapted from Oxford Language Dictionary
Valer:
verb
1. To be worth it: “Vale la pena”
2. To be valid, or allowed: “Se vale”
—Adapted from Cambridge Spanish Dictionary
View from Northside of Great Salt Lake. Photo by Joel Long.
I look up at the hundred-foot-high ripples that trace the bench of this Salt Lake Valley, imprints in the sandstone bluffs, granite cliffs, vegetal hillsides, of an ancient lake, and attempt to trace them in my field of vision. It is difficult to absorb the scope of what once was water. With our human eyes, we cannot follow these ancient shorelines to where they might have met in space the outer border of a body that, at its fullest, spanned 325 miles by 100 miles. These shoreline fragments are an echo of our history, invitations to imagine a fullness, a circuitry that connects wholly, antithetical to our modern ruptures. Our buttes, our clay banks, our boulders are scored by the memory of a water body. Wherever we stand in the Salt Lake Valley was once underwater, and we land creatures could not have breathed here without gills, could not have moved without fins or roots to anchor us to the sandy bed of the Great Bonneville, the largest of the Pleistocene-era lakes, 980 feet at the deepest. Ironic, we now struggle to breathe in the smog bowl of our city—our winters marked by the number of “red air days” when kids are kept inside, when folks with asthma are told to hole up indoors or wear protective masks, when our governor prays for wind and rain but does little to legislate on gas emissions. We are bipedal terrestrials where once we were amphibians, fish, mollusks, gastropods. How are we—all of us soft-bodied human beings who make home here—scored by the memory of water? (Image highlighted in paragraph: Outline of ancient Lake Bonneville and associated modern features. Courtesy of Utah Geological Survey: https://geology.utah.gov/popular/great-salt-lake/)
The land carries her memories in and on her body, a palimpsest—each geological event and era visible and storied—but only if we know how to look. Terraces formed by the ancient shoreline stack topographically like rings of a tree, tattooing time onto the valley. Like stretch marks, they reflect naturally occurring change, transformations of an ecosystem over thousands of years. There is a difference between scored and scarred, between stretched and severed. Kennecott Copper Mine, the largest human-made excavation and the deepest open-pit mine in the world, active since 1906, expands each year—a puncture, a wound of exposed red earth clearly visible from satellite images. The pit is terraced, hard tracks cut into the Oquirrh Mountains at regular intervals, impressions that like the Bonneville shorelines tell us something about time, yet at a drastically different scale—human time, industrial time, capital time. They also tell us something about our consumptive appetites—rapid, rabid, unremorseful.
Crystal Formations Near Spiral Jetty, North Great Salt Lake. Photo by Stu Nolan.
Utah is a patchwork of diverse ecologies and mixed landscapes. To the south, red-rock desert and dramatic wind sculptures (human intervention addendum: uranium mines, oil and gas drilling). To the east, mountains and freshwater reservoirs (human intervention addendum: ski resorts and silver mines). To the west, Salt Lake and marsh and wetland (human intervention addendum: airport, prison, chemical mining, atomic testing sites). The southern red-rock desert—parceled into the national parks, into the Bureau of Land Management, and into ranchland—for her immense scale and contrast, we call dramatic, otherworldly, breathtaking. One of the many eastern ranges in the state, the Wasatch Mountains—managed by the US Forest Service and private owners—for her vistas and lush terrain and display of seasons, we call iconic, impressive, majestic. The Great Salt Lake and her surrounding wetlands, we call expendable, empty territory to expand into and punctuate with resource-extractive industries. The Mormon settler colonists who came into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, inhabited at the time by the Northwestern Shoshone, declared famously, “This is the place.” In so doing, they drove a stake into the tapestry of the land’s history. This is the place, implying a “for us,” as in, we have arrived, and with our arrival, history shall begin. Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, and Ute nations had storied and stewarded the lands of the Salt Lake Valley for thousands of years before this manifest destiny event.
At first glance, one might misperceive the Great Salt Lake as a barren place: flat, monochrome, unadorned. If we suspend aesthetic assumptions, our demands for what beauty ought to look like in landscapes, if we pause long enough to widen our attention, to bear witness, we can recognize her as anything but barren. Across every square inch are crickets frozen in salt, crystal-encrusted feathers, bones that map a passage, swarms of brine flies, muskrat footprints, mud sinks, sandbanks, and so many rich microecologies. To call her a lake requires a stretching of the static lazuli shape that many people imagine; required is a slanting of what we think of as a sea. Our archetypes are insufficient when we are confronted with the fullness of her, and in this way, loving the lake feels like a practice in queerness. We may acknowledge the strangeness of her, suspend ourselves in the surprise of discovery, offer space for her to shift in uncertain ways. We may open ourselves wide enough to embrace complexity, dissonance, diversity. Living within a culture of late-capitalist colonialism, our vision, like our hungers, have atrophied; we crave the certainty of sweet and salt, less the bitter, the sour, the brackish. Our connections to our own desires and tastes, to one another, to our natural environments, have been fractured, fracked, forgone. Because we have forgotten the existence of alternate ways of being in relation, ways that offer more fullness and fluidity, to time, to landscape, to story, we have also forgotten to grieve this loss.
Salt Encrusted Grasshopper, North Great Salt Lake. Photo by Stu Nolan.
This ancient lake that once spanned this land, big enough to be a sea but for a matter of semantics, has not disappeared into ether; she, Lake Bonneville, is not past tense. At least, not fully, not yet. Her salts and minerals, her ancient atoms, all distilled into a shallow organ whose veins reach and merge with the tributaries of further water bodies, fresh ones carrying snowmelt from mountain ranges toward the north and east. The evolution of Lake Bonneville into Great Salt Lake over the course of two thousand years as the result of natural climate-change events is a stark difference from the transformation of Great Salt Lake that is occurring now. Through heavy diversion of critical freshwater tributaries toward new housing developments, to more consistent and extreme heat causing water evaporation, to damming and industry extraction, the Great Salt Lake is shrinking at a rate that, while alarming, is unsurprising to local scientists and environmentalists who have warned of this issue for over a decade. Thirty miles south of the lake stretch the Oquirrh Mountains, into which is carved the Kennecott Copper Mine—a glaring display of geology laid bare, erosion, and a scarring over of what was mountain. Our impact on the lake is not one of drilling or digging but of denial, a violence of neglect. Her suffering, seemingly more subtle and spread over time: suffocation. From Lake Bonneville to the Great Salt Lake, or as the Western Goshute call her, Pi’a-pa (Big Water), to what? What name do we use for a water body whose form is no longer? Whose substance has been stripped?
In their beautiful obituary for Great Salt Lake published in Catalyst Magazine, Dr. Bonnie Baxter and Jami K. Butler write of the Lake: “She had the best memory, holding on to every mineral, pollutant, and sediment she ever encountered. . . . A nonconformist, Great Salt Lake was infamous for wearing a palette of intriguing colors, not the usual blue of other lakes. Her wardrobe was steeped in lemonade pink, photosynthetic green and sandy taupe. Her salty shorelines were ruffled and rugged.” Doesn’t she sound like someone you want to dance with? To sit on her shores and soak up all her stories, her songs, her recipes, her histories? Some of these stories are carried from as far south as Costa Rica by migrating white pelicans who seek refuge at the lake in the summers. Some stories are carried from the northernmost tip of Alaska, from trumpeter swans refueling at the lake in the winters. Some stories are not from afar in distance, but in depth and time—from the slink and slick of mud, thousands of years of decay. Losing the lake would be not only the loss of a sovereign being, a refuge for millions of migratory birds and billions of brine flies and shrimps, an important salt-harvesting grounds for indigenous groups, but also the loss of her ancient predecessor, Lake Bonneville. It would be the loss of a place richly stored with tradition, memory, life. It would be the loss of our own connection to a storied land, to our responsibility as stewards, to our senses, our sensitivities, and sensibilities.
Great Blue Heron at Bear River Refuge. Photo by Joel Long.
Culturally, we are trained to look at ourselves in mirrors, to scrutinize the reflections of our bodies, that we are taught starts and stops with our skin. Far less often do we hold up a critical lens to our environments, to notice with the same attention what is present and what is absent in the reflection. Far less often do we appreciate that our bodies are a dynamic interaction between our internal and external environments. Is this the only way, though, we can be taught to recognize the sovereignty of another being, to first see ourselves reflected in the other? Through what lens may we begin to form a connection to that which is unfamiliar to us? A connection born not just of bearing witness but of honoring the precious life that is unique to all beings. Like the lake, we too have bugs in our body, and microbes, and tributary riverways in the form of arteries and veins. Humans are up to 70 percent water! We have 140 grams of sulfur in us, composing about 0.3 percent of our body mass—enough sodium to fill at least three saltshakers. We, too, carry the physical memory of our ancestors; we, too, shrink and expand in size over the course of a life; we, too, rise with breath and are moved by wind. Can we embrace this embodied metaphor as a tether back to our sacred kinships? We are composite creatures, connected to complicated ecosystems that branch far beyond us, and in our greedy drive to accumulate resources, we fail to fully grasp this. How do we take accountability, hold the weight of responsibility, for our oversized impact in changing the trajectory of natural ecologies? How do we acknowledge the Anthropocene without centering ourselves and, in so doing, suppressing all other forms of being, knowing, relating. How do we mourn a departure without resigning to past tense, consigning to memory? I ask again, how are we scored by the memory of water? What would it look like to honor the lake, an ancient body, a living ecology, and an evaporating reality, without writing her out of her own story?
There is a slippage between elegy and eulogy, and I want to move in that messy middle ground, play with the perceived polarity between presence and absence, float in fluid boundaries, the flitting embrace between light and shadow, the mile-wide ripples breathed by wind, cast by moon magnet. How do we envision a map that honors ecological time, fluid boundaries, that traces new shapes? How do we commit to the value, the inherent worth of the lake ecosystem without dressing her worth in the extractive-resource-driven language of economy? Without romanticizing her to the point of abstraction?
I am unwilling to say farewell to Great Salt Lake. Instead of signing a departure, I will say vale in recognition of her retreat, to precipitate a necessary process of grief, to acknowledge ongoing and impending loss. Yet, I also wish to say vale as in “may your worth be respected; may you be allowed to survive, to thrive, and to be valued.” Vale as a call to action, an imperative, an aspiration to respiration: “be well, be strong!”
NOTES
Image Credits:
Featured image, “Sunset from the Eastside of Great Salt Lake.” Photo by Stu Nolan.
“View from Northside of Great Salt Lake.” Photo by Joel Long. Joel Long is an author and photographer from Salt Lake City. He graciously gives permission for his photos included in this essay.
“Outline of ancient Lake Bonneville and associated modern features.” Courtesy of Utah Geological Survey: https://geology.utah.gov/popular/great-salt-lake/.
“Crystal Formations Near Spiral Jetty, North Great Salt Lake.” Photo by Stu Nolan.
“Salt Encrusted Grasshopper, North Great Salt Lake.” Photo by Stu Nolan.
“Great Blue Heron at Bear River Refuge.” Photo by Joel Long. Joel Long is an author and photographer from Salt Lake City. He graciously gives permission for his photos included in this essay.
Works Consulted and in Conversation With:
Baxter, Bonnie, and Jami K. Butler. “Obituary For The Great Salt Lake: Even Lakes Are Not Immortal” Catalyst Magazine, November 30, 2020. https://catalystmagazine.net/obituary-for-great-salt-lake-even-lakes-are-not-immortal/.
Bitsóí, Alastair Lee. “Salt of the Earth: Preserving the Great Salt Lake.” Atmos, March 15, 2023. https://atmos.earth/great-salt-lake-utah-indigenous/.
Pollan, Michael. Desire, Sweetness: Plant, the Apple.” In The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2002.
Trumpeter Swan Society. Swan Range Maps. 2015. https://www.trumpeterswansociety.org/swan-information/swan-library/swan-library/trumpeter-swan-range-maps.html.
Tempest, Terry Williams. “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake.” New York Times, March 30, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/opinion/great-salt-lake-drought-utah-climate-change.html.
Learn more about the ongoing efforts to protect the Great Salt Lake by checking out these organizations:
Save Our Great Salt Lake
Great Salt Lake Collaborative
Manomet Conservation Sciences
