EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the ninth in an ongoing series of features highlighting authors and new books published by Torrey House Press in Utah.
In the first quarter of this century, Utah’s population grew by more than 55%. Just as remarkable is the long trend of ethnic and racial diversification in Utah’s composition which has increased steadily over the last 60 years. Nearly one in four (24%) Utahns identifies as a racial or ethnic minority, according to a 2024 report by the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. One out of every three of the state’s youngest residents is a member of a racial or ethnic minority demographic.
In Sylvia Torti’s essay, The Once and Future Lake, which is among the contributions by 36 writers in the anthology which carries the same title, her story about her son and his experiences of his participation in a documentary filmmaking course, along with the interaction with her friend, Jeff, who eventually died of cancer, becomes a profound contemplation of the idea of shifting baselines. Torti, now the president of Westminster University, writes about shifting baselines: “how we, in our generation, don’t feel loss because we don’t know what existed before, and how, in turn, our children can’t feel the loss of space or species because they know no difference.” She later adds, “[W]hat we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would consider to be degraded, and what we judge to be degraded now, the next generation will consider to be healthy or normal. According to this academic psychological research, we’re doomed.”
In this essay, Torti describes how her son has developed “his own personal carbon ethic, carefully deciding where and when he’ll travel.” She adds that her son is part of a collective that has produced artistic reflections on Great Salt Lake, along with a car-cleaning business that uses significantly less water than usual, and he has leveraged his environmental studies degree for plant cultivation. “Baselines shift, sometimes quickly and permanently. One day, Jeff was on the other end of my emails, Then he was not. Still, he hasn’t left the room,” she writes. “His lessons live on, not just in my son, but in me. His energy has driven this essay, and I’m reminded that not all shifts are permanent. It’s a matter of time and scale.”
Near the end of her essay, Torti encapsulates the anthology’s immediate theme: “This year, there’s more determined conversation about the connections between the lake, its ecology and our environmental health. The young people are paying attention. They’re getting involved.”
In An Invitation to a More Just World, by Muskan Walia as told to Quinn Luther, the work of Utah Youth Environmental Solutions (UYES) is highlighted. “The disappearing Great Salt Lake is often framed as a recreational or an economic issue, so we wanted to jump on and highlight the fate of the lake as a justice issue,” Walia explains, adding how UYES was established a decade ago to overcome the fact that “our political education is gridlocked by the state.” She writes, “People are affected disproportionately by the threats posed to, and by, the lake due to the placement of our homes and our communities. We felt that if we could lead the way forward in terms of protecting Great Salt Lake, it could benefit our own communities as well.”
As her fellow contributors to The Once and Future Lake: Stories for Great Salt Lake anthology, which was edited by Michael McLane and published earlier this year by Torrey House Press, note in their own words, saving the Great Salt Lake from irreversible collapse is more than just getting water to it.
The anthology makes the case that the lake’s survival and rehabilitation are not disconnected issues encased in distinct silos. “Everybody who lives by the lake will tell you a different, but specific way that Great Salt Lake disappearing affects their lives,” Walia writes. “If we are able to commit to a justice-oriented approach to saving the lake, it will lay the groundwork for our approach to future environmental and political concerns.”
McLane, a Utahn who now lives in New Zealand, did yeoman’s work as editor, curating prosaic and poetic selections which cumulatively give the reader a definitive 360-degree perspective about the lake’s existential crisis.
When read in companion with a viewing of Abby Ellis’s documentary film, The Lake (which premiered at this year’s Sundance), The Once and Future Lake rounds out the relevant argument. Utah will need New Deal levels of spending and multi-partisan cooperation to address the challenges of reclamation and renewables for all the stakeholders, if the lake is to be rescued from a total collapse that could occur as early as the end of the current decade.
Another essay, Stolen Time: Prisons, Profits, and Pollutability, by Madi Sudweeks couples exactly with Walia’s vision of environmental and social justice. If we are to achieve meaningful progress in recovery and renewal of our natural resources and lakes, according to Sudweeks, then we must rethink our current approaches to punishment, imprisonment, policing and surveillance. Published before the uproar over the proposed Project Stratos data center in Utah erupted so strongly that it grabbed global attention, Sudweeks’ essay is prescient and instructive.
As Larry D. Curtis, a lifelong Salt Lake City resident and former local journalist who was a Republican up until the MAGA movement took over the party, told High Country News last June, “‘Vote them all out’ has been in the mouths of Democrats and Republicans over the data center. In my lifetime, I’ve rarely seen such a universal level of community response to any one thing.”
In a time where distrust of ICE, BigTech, AI and Flock cameras, among other issues. is not exclusive to a specific partisan point on the political spectrum, Sudweeks’ call to abolishing our current system and replacing it with “lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment focused on community care, love, accountability and support” likely will find a greater expanse of supportive readers than what one might have anticipated before the Project Stratos uproar.
“An abolitionist framework does not pit environmental concerns about the health of the wetlands, and its bird populations against the dignity of the lives of those incarcerated,” Sudweeks notes. “Instead, it helps us see how those lives are inextricable from each other. Evolution challenges the idea that anyone, human or beyond, is disposable.”
It’s an effective message framing whose time has come.
“A Noise Like Thunder”: Great Basin Experiments in Scale and Time by Sarah L. Fox laments the conspicuous absence of Indigenous peoples from the advisory board of the Great Salt Lake Trust. Expanding upon Walia’s line of thinking, Fox links the history of Downwinders and the radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing to the concerns about toxic dust clouds resulting from a dying lake.
“Grappling with the result of the settler experiment on the edges of Great Salt Lake will require all the wisdom that can be brought to bear,” Fox articulates precisely. “In the post World War II orgy of nuclear weapons production here, Indigenous communities and white settler communities were both consigned to be collateral damage in the pursuit of national security and global nuclear hegemony. Today both are once again vulnerable to another environmental justice crisis: the toxic dust of the disappearing Great Salt Lake.”
The creative nonfiction pieces are sharp and concise, such as Teri Harman’s A Morning at the Inlet. It is a compelling case study about confluence and the natural connections between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake. Emerging from her inlet tour, she writes, “Chasing over the hazy blue swath of my home lake, I considered power and priorities. A pump station is a powerful tool, but the distribution of that potential depends on cultural values. Since construction of the first Jordan River Dam, Utah has largely commodified flow and forgotten natural connections.”
GSL’s survival is contingent upon its connections with all tributaries. “When nearly every drop of Utah Lake’s water is already claimed, committing yearly acre-feet compels a redistribution of power and priorities,” Harman concludes, “Promising to restore the wild-made interrelation of these two lakes requires conservation and adjustment. It also courageously declares that the confluence matters to Utah’s past, present and future.”
There are useful prosaic guideposts which emphasize and inspire readers to meditate upon the wisdom of the poems interspersed among the essay narratives. In That Which Passes Through, Andy Hoffman writes, “Poetry is the shadow realm of the wild, irrevocably unsettled in its beautiful and grim behaviors.” In Still-Life with Birds, Rob Carney expounds upon the ecumenical considerations of creative and scientific disciplines represented in the anthology: “I’m not an ornithologist, but I still know how to ask: if moored boats are practically dry-docked in their slips, then what does that mean for all the migratory birds, depending on the wetlands?”
Return of Water, a poem by Rachel White, extends the epiphany of Harman’s essay: Perhaps, if we return a part/of what belongs to the land,/in thanks, start to recognize / we live— as we all things/alive— in relation,/ rain will return, replenish/ the reservoir of deep time,/waters that connect us/ to the people of the past,/millennia upon millennia/of intercontinental/migrations, like great rivers converging in the flyways/of millions to this vestige/of prehistoric lakes…
Terry Tempest Williams’s foreword, The Parable of the Pelicans, cites the work of Dr. William H. Behle, a University of Utah ornithologist, who noted in 1935 the precarious situation of the lake’s bird population and whose predictions unfortunately have come true. The parable of the pelican is our future foretold,” she writes. “Just as the pelicans of Great Salt Lake were vulnerable and left. We are vulnerable… Will we too be forced to leave an untenable situation, in our case, the dusting of our bodies in arsenic? The pelicans are showing us the way forward. We can show them the way back by bringing forth the waters to a whole and holy Great Salt Lake—now.”
A smooth segue, McLane’s introduction magnifies the seminal significance of Williams’ 1991 book, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. “It is not a stretch to say that, without Williams, Refuge, and her myriad other essays and work dealing with Great Salt Lake, the book [The Once and Future Lake] you now hold would not exist or at least it would be radically different.”
There is a literary choir in the anthology which affirms that the creative and artistic sectors “have always been ahead of the curve,” when it comes to championing the lake for its collective “cultural, economic, and ecological wonders” This point is made in the essay Welcome to Great Salt Lake by Holly Simonsen and Lynn de Freitas.
Lake Woman Leaving: after the Inuit legend of Fox Woman by Nan Seymour frames the warning and consequences of underappreciating the lake’s estimation in plainspoken terms: “Only two traces of lake woman remained: the outline of a great body imprinted in the bed and a fine dust hanging in the air, ubiquitous. They cried out into the night, pleading for her to come back. Their pleas would go unanswered. They were too late, and it was not enough.”
The anthology’s breadth and depth of interdisciplinary perspective are outstanding. Two essays, in particular, add important historical context. Antelope Island’s ‘Last Great Buffalo Hunt’ by Scott Morris highlights the shifting of values in two major events: a widely advertised bison hunt in 1926 and the more recent establishment of Antelope Island State Park.
In both circumstances, Morris explains, “recreation boosters and officials offered a packaged opportunity to relive an atavistic fantasy about cowboys and horsemen in the Wild West.” However, in the current century, another significant shift has occurred in how we perceive the value of bison. Morris adds that it has been “reclaimed by tribal governments as an opportunity to exercise sovereignty, and provide for the spiritual and economic sustenance of their members, with support and collaboration from state and federal land management agencies.” But in a hotter, drier future where the lake continues to evaporate and collapse, “the bison herd will need to be evacuated and relocated, and the entire eco-region will be ecologically and culturally poorer with the loss.”
Touching in part upon the 1863 Bear River Massacre, the essay Healing Generational Trauma for a Thriving Great Lake by Darren Parry, as told to Brooke Larsen, is about apologizing for decoupling profound bonds that once were forged from ecological and cultural values rooted in Indigenous wisdom and spiritualism.
Parry, a sixth generation Shoshone Mormon who served a church mission to England, explains that definitions of kin and kinship cannot be shifted. Recalling how his grandmother picked choke cherries from trees without damaging or removing the leaves, Parry says the lesson was that “if we treated our environment and non-human kinfolk the way we treat our human relatives, Great Salt Lake wouldn’t need saving in the first place.”
Parry also hits on an important lesson about breaking gridlock through the grace of apology. He recalls how a Mormon bishop interrupted him to say that church members didn’t kill anybody in the Bear River Massacre. Parry reminds him that it was their presence in Cache Valley which set the stage for the tragedy.
“I think people want to see the church apologize when they make mistakes, but I never hold my breath for that,” he explains. “Institutionally, they’ve made it a policy to not apologize, and that’s sad to me because I grew up in their religion. I was taught by the church that when I make a mistake, I repent, and I say ‘I’m sorry.’ I follow this process because that is part of the doctrine, and the fact that the leaders can’t do it themselves is a huge problem.”
But Parry says times also have changed from his grandmother’s days when no one, with the exception of graduate students or scholars, wanted to hear the stories of Indigenous peoples. “Marginalized voices in our communities are finally starting to be heard as a storyteller,” he adds. “I’ve always felt a huge responsibility to deliver every time. Seeing how many groups are engaged in the fight brings me a lot of hope. The fact that they want to listen to a tired old Indian tell a story or two… that brings me hope. I always hope I’m able to do so much more.”
Every poetic interlude connects to a specific narrative in the anthology. For example, Feather tracts seen, a poem by Sarah May, augments Seymour’s brief narrative based on an Inuit legend: You have been deemed unlovable by many/but your beauty and holiness never diminish/ you continue to shapeshift/ death as transformation/ the greatest gift you have given to me.
Another poem by May, Covered in Feathers, resonates with Parry’s optimism that many more people finally want to hear the Indigenous perspectives. May’s verse is beautifully crafted: I want you to tell the world about me/to address the world as you address me/with the same reverence and adoration/ I know you are afraid that they will not see you/but trust that the right people will hear you…
Karin Anderson’s essay Abide also ties together the sentiments of fellow contributors Walia, Sudweeks and Parry. She finds common ground that would sit well with surprisingly more people than what we might initially perceive: “I want to live here in this Valley, despite the mess and the crowd and the politics, despite the heritage I can’t come to terms with, the cultural smugness and blithe political screw-ups and the hard personal history and the stupid, stupid mistakes I’ve made in this place. I want home, with its strange water and salt and turbulent basin air, to abide.”
There also are essays and poems about brine shrimp, brine flies, pelicans and bison. Everyone Wants to Be a Brine Shrimp by Nicole Walker, whose books include Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster, puts the science in clear readability. Walker recalls her lifelong fascination with the tiniest creatures and objects. “The smallest of babies struck me as miraculous,” she writes. “I loved small things then and now: miniature tea cups, miniature pigs made of marzipan and miniature bears the size of miniature toy poodles.”
A master of clarifying comparisons and proportions, she adds, “An embryo at six weeks of growth still smaller than an adult brine shrimp. It also might look a bit like a brine shrimp, with its tail a bit like a tadpole.”
Walker also erects a scaffold for a point that pops up periodically in the anthology. As she notes, Williams was criticized for personifying Great Salt Lake as human and especially as a mother in a 2023 New York Times essay. “I too have trouble with the gender of lakes and nature, but not for the same reason. If you name it ‘she,’ it will suffer at the hands of ‘he,’ Walker explains. “Maybe if we called things Father Lake, Father Nature, we’d be cowed into carefulness. If the Earth had been a father, not a mother, maybe we wouldn’t have depleted her like a fetus depletes the calcium of her host’s bones.”
Other contributors, however, stay with the lake’s feminine personhood. Dayna Patterson’s poem Our Lady of Great Salt Lake reinforces Williams’ personification: the lake is a mother who won’t say no/ a vessel veined— woven— webbed with blue thread/she unravels till she’s a barren bowl.
The 100 very short chapters in Brooke Williams’ Cantos for Great Salt Lake make the case for its legal personhood, cementing the assertion that his wife [Terry Tempest Williams] made previously. In Canto 33, he delineates the positive and negative framing of the lake’s feminine gendering:
By using feminine pronouns while referring to Great Salt Lake, Brigham Young was not personifying her. Rather, he included Great Salt Lake under the heading of feminine with his wives and daughters and all women which he considered resources, objects. Brigham Young was clear that a woman was to bear and raise the children, be subservient to her husband and honor the Priesthood which he held, and she didn’t (and still doesn’t). Brigham did support women moving beyond their roles as wives and mothers to more professional work, but only when necessary to compete with the growing economic and political influence of non-Mormons. Women. The feminine as resource. Object to be owned, used, and manipulated.
In Cantos 95 and 97, as he wraps up the case for personhood and the attendant enlightenment for Utah Mormons and non-Mormons alike, he writes that the lake is “a subject to interact with; not an object to manipulate and use… She is hurting. We should help her as we would any hurting person. Stop the cause. Support healing. Maintain contact. Support. Love unconditionally.”
Returning to Parry’s articulation of kinfolk, the idea of the lake as a legal person is not an idle intellectual exercise. As Aissa Dearing notes in an article published elsewhere, while the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sanford that African Americans, regardless of whether or not they were enslaved, could not stand in court as a legal person, that social construct changed after the U.S. Civil War when the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed.
The legally binding language is conceivable and the ideas are not new. Bolivia, Ecuador, New Zealand and Spain have set legal precedents. In the U.S. Supreme Court case of Sierra Club v. Morton (1972), Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a dissenting opinion:
This anthology is the essential primer for every Utahn who wants to grasp the lake’s existential crisis without feeling overwhelmed. More than a handful of essays touch upon the writer’s experiences in overcoming their own hesitations about wading into the lake‘s waters, for instance. Or, to discover its most impressive ecological features, despite what they heard previously from those who found visiting the lake an underwhelming experience.
Perhaps the most edifying example in the anthology is The Silent Sibling by Ayja Bounous, who hosts the Snow + Salt podcast. She was past thirty when she finally decided to step into the lake’s waters. One marvelous passage captures the theme in its spectrum of possibilities:
At my feet, bird bones lay still in the salty shallows. The water stretched endlessly toward the horizons, blending with a cerulean sky. It was undeniably peaceful. afterwards, I sat in the sand next to a poet who gestured at the mountains and said, ‘the slogan, Life Elevated [Utah’s official tourism and branding slogan], makes us, as a culture, believe that everything worth caring about is up, at the higher elevations.’ She shifted her gaze to the birds wheeling over our heads, to the serene water at our side. ‘We aren’t taught to value the lowest point of the Valley.’
Float by Claire Wahmanholm, an author who lives in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, is as vivid and relevant as Bounous’ contribution. “Many of the things on my list have taken longer to accomplish than a trip to Great Salt Lake,” she explains. Wahmanholm is thinking about this during a session in a spa’s floating tank. “And so I worry, we didn’t go see the lake not because we were too busy but because we just didn’t think it was worth seeing.The longer we lived there the more the lake’s allure receded. It became less of an idea and more of a real place, which required real time, gas, planning. It had lost its mythic proportions. It had moved from hyperreal to real. It was just a lake.”
One terrific essay that ties together the sentiments explained in several contributions, especially those by Bounous, Wahmanholm and Eli McCann’s The Great Sassy, Salty Lake is “It was as though, for a time, I didn’t exist”: Great Salt Lake & Carnival of Souls by McLane. He refers to a cult horror classic film from the early 1960s that was filmed at the abandoned second iteration of the Saltair amusement pavilion eight years before it was destroyed by fire.
Directed by Herk Harvey, Carnival of Souls centers on the character of Mary Henry, a church organist who relocated after an auto accident and is being haunted by an enigmatic man. Nina Zumel astutely described it as a “strange film, kind of a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone, crossed with a Fritz Lang silent movie, crossed with a public service short.”
The film rests on themes of alienation and McLane elegantly traces the parallels between the film’s protagonist and Great Salt Lake. “It’s easier to exploit a place forgotten,” he writes. Just as Bounous mentioned in her essay, Utah’s official tourism slogan Life Elevated, McLane explains, “is Alpine, is peak views and pristine streams, or lake effect storms and perfect powder.” He adds, “It is not life in the valleys, in the wetlands or the desert flats. The realities of life in a delicate and difficult system are laid bare at Great Salt Lake.”
Within this context, McLane writes how “Henry’s character offers an unsettling parallel for Great Salt Lake while the film’s dialogue is emblematic of attitudes and treatments of Great Salt Lake that were already well established by the time of its release [1962] and were so embedded by the onset of the 21st-century that they threatened to facilitate the death of Great Salt Lake in a few short years.”
However, like the impressive body of writers who also contributed to this anthology, McLane holds onto hope. “But that hope exists not so much in the film’s bleak ending, but by the rereading and reinterpretation of several generations of viewers, in the place its story now occupies.”
A remarkable review. A review essay that would have made a good preface.
Truly. This is beautifully done. Rich and thorough. Thank you, Les Roka and the Utah Review.