I NEED TO PUT ON SUNGLASSES.
The temperature outside is in the mid-40s, brisk and dry, and the road ahead of us is straight as a sunbeam. Salt Lake City is sixty, seventy miles behind us, and the Nevada border is another fifty miles ahead. I take off my regular glasses, pass them to Pia, and for a moment I am squinting and driving into a blurry field of color and light. Then I manage to get my sunglasses on: the world comes back into focus, sepia-toned and clear. Not a moment too soon. The taupes and tans of the desert around us bleach and flatten, and suddenly we are racing across the surface of the moon.
The Great Salt Lake is all that remains of Lake Bonneville, an ancient freshwater lake that once covered nearly a quarter of Utah. It first formed some 25,000 years ago. At its maximum level, the prehistoric lake crossed into southeastern Idaho and broke through a natural dam that had been holding it back. What followed was nothing short of cataclysm: a thousand cubic miles of water passing through Red Rock Pass in less than a year. The flood reconfigured hundreds of square miles of geology in an instant, carving deep gashes into the canyon walls, scattering car-sized boulders all over the Snake River Canyon, and ripping vast pits into the canyon floor. The marks of this ancient apocalypse are still readily visible today; in geologic time, they have not even had a chance to begin scabbing over.
Where we are, however, shows none of this melodrama. That flood-scarred landscape of southern Idaho is two hundred miles to our north. Instead what greets us through the bug-splattered windshield is the quiet residue of that prehistoric lake: thousands of tons of salt, left behind over ancient millennia as Lake Bonneville evaporated into thin air. Former shorelines from that vanished lake cut plateaus across the blasted flanks of mountain ranges that were once archipelagos. Here, over these blinding salt flats, the lake would have been a thousand feet deep. I squint into the haze and try to overlay past and present, imagining that we are driving at the bottom of an inland sea. Sunlight doesn’t get through a thousand feet of water. I’d have to take my sunglasses off again.
We pull off the highway at a rest stop with an art-deco-adjacent swooping concrete shelter. A sign welcomes us to the streaked white expanse beyond it; nearby, a much more no-nonsense sign reading FOOT WASH gives motorists somewhere to rinse the salt from their shoes. Briefly I entertain turning on the spigot, if only for a moment, thinking it how symbolic and meaningful it’d be. I decide not to—I can’t quite resolve how, exactly, such an action would be symbolic, and besides, it’s too cold. Both Pia and I have our hands jammed into our coat pockets to warm up. We get back into the car, rub sanitizer over our numb hands, and merge back onto the freeway. We’re low on gas. Luckily, there’s a gas station a few miles down the road, by the exit ramp for Bonneville Speedway; unluckily, immorally, unforgivably, however, they’re charging nearly five dollars per gallon. I remark to Pia that these prices are highway robbery. “And,” I add, “it’s literally by a highway! So it really is highway robbery!” (My wit, as always, proves lightning-quick and razor-sharp.) Grudgingly I put twenty bucks of gas into the Chevy and get back in the car, muttering that we’ll have to get gas again in a bit, somewhere with more reasonable prices.
“Uh huh,” Pia says.
As we drive now I find myself thinking back to the foot wash at the rest stop. I wonder where the water for it comes from. It seems unlikely that they’d pipe in water all the way from Salt Lake City, which gets its water from a few streams and reservoirs up in the Wasatch Mountains. I figure it’s probably water from Wendover, that small border city coming up in a few exits. Wendover gets their water from a thirty-mile-pipe that runs out of town up to a spring in the Pequop Mountains. The Army Air Corps (now the Air Force) built the pipe while they were sourcing water for the airfield at Wendover during World War II; now it provides water for a population of about five thousand, as well as a little foot wash by what remains of Lake Bonneville.
Always the past is structuring the present.