Lance Larsen
Looking
for Spiral Jetty
1.
I first
came across Robert SmithsonÕs Spiral Jetty (1970) as most people do, in an art
history book. There it was, fifteen feet wide, 1600 feet longÑa giant
stone-and-gravel earth work coiled in on itself, lying in a lake, a frozen vortex.
Though I was a little suspiciousÑwasnÕt art supposed to hang in
museums?Ñsomething about it intrigued me. Its scale for one thing, not to
mention SmithsonÕs audacity. WhatÕs more, it seemed old from the moment
it was created, almost as if the Great Salt Lake had been brooding over a
favorite archetype for aeons and had just recently allowed it to hatch and
surface. This was in the early 1980s. During the next twenty years,
whenever I flew into or out of the Salt Lake Airport, I always scanned the
water from the plane. Never mind that the jetty was completely submerged,
and had been since 1972. Never mind that I was searching the wrong end of
the lake. I believed if I zenned myself into tranquility, and willed the
lake into cooperation, I might get lucky and glimpse the jetty. Maybe it
really was the gigantic snake it resembled and, under the cover of water, moved
at will. I saw nothing. But seeing nothing, I thought of
Atlantis. Which left me sad and exhilarated and wanting to believe in mystery.
2.
Spiral Jetty is commonly referred to as the most infrequently seen major
contemporary art work in the world. Recently, broad prevailing climatic
patterns conspired to change that. By fall 2002, after five years of Utah
drought, the Great Salt Lake was at its lowest level in thirty years. And
Spiral Jetty was once again visible. After a friendÕs rhapsodic
recommendation, I decided to see for myself. I had on my side a delicious
Saturday in October and a short two-hour drive from my home. I had a map
and detailed directions pulled off the Internet. I had my artist wife
Jacqui to serve as guide, and our two children, Derek (12) and Brooke (9), to provide
color and commentary. I had the devoteeÕs sense of pilgrimage, the
adventurerÕs sense of wanderlust and let-happen-what-will-happen.
3.
Between the third and fourth drafts of this essay, I grew weary of italicizing
Spiral Jetty. It was more than the inconvenience of reaching over to
click the mouse. Italics seemed to lie, or at least distort.
Certainly Spiral Jetty was art, but increasingly Spiral Jetty was place, and at
times spiral jetty felt like land form. I can see my quandariness taking
me far afield into abbreviation, pet names, neologism, so I have made a pact
with myself: to be of three minds only. Sometimes ambivalence marks
affection.
4.
I drive I-15 regularly and manage, during most trips, to ignore what I
see. But this trip, with Spiral Jetty as destination, even the most
mundane objects stood out, multiplied for once by their secret life as
art. A cheaply-made, white brick church: worship inside a nautilus.
An inflated stegosaurus overseeing an end-of-month used-car blitzkrieg:
mysteries of the past. A labyrinthine corn maze: a manifestation of the
collective unconscious. Even the freight train heading south, graffitied
with illegible ballooned up names, seemed apropos. Here was the work of a
graffitti artist or lonely hearts poet, who, like Smithson, intuited the pull
of the conceptual: sending a piece of oneself on tour, entering hundreds of
cities on the sly, interrupting a dazed fieldhand outside Abilene or an
under-aged couple necking at a railroad crossing in Peoria. It was as if
Spiral Jetty were magnetic north, causing everything in its wake to vibrate with
newly charged ions.
5.
jetty \je-te\ n, pl jetties. Ñn. 1: a structure of stones, piles, or the
like, projecting into the sea or other body of water to protect a harbor, deflect
the current etc. 2: a wharf or landing pier. 3: a protecting frame
of a pier. 4: a part of a building that projects beyond the rest.
5: a protecting outwork: bastion, bulwark. [1375-1425; late ME get(t)ey
< OF jetee, lit., something thrown out, a projection, to throw]
6.
Just past the halfway mark to Spiral Jetty, Jacqui pointed out the window: ÒSee
the B?Ó Half a mile away, a white, concrete letter seventy feet high
emblazoned the foothills of the Wasatch Front. I suppose Westerners began
this tradition of placing initials above their settlements out of pride.
Pride for a town, or a high schoolÑin this case Bountiful, which the highway
mercifully skirted. ÒWhen Lee Biggs was in his seventies, he used to walk
up there every morning,Ó Jacqui said. Lee Biggs was her
grandfather. She always called him by both namesÑa formality that made
him more skinny and cantankerous and down-home wise, especially now that he was
dead six years. ÒHeÕd walk up to the B, then over to the V,Ó Jacqui
said. ÒThree miles in all.Ó It took me a while to find the V.
ÒWhatÕs the V for? Some school mascotÑ Vandals, Varmints,
Vagrants?Ó ÒNo idea,Ó Jacqui said. The letters were ludicrous and
charming, and grew more so the longer you looked at them. Perhaps the
Chamber of Commerce wanted to extend an invitation to very high-flying, very
literate Canadian geese. Or lay down verbal clues against a case of
collective amnesia sweeping the town, rendering everyone forgetful of where
they lived. What would these letters have meant to Lee Biggs? Their
prominence was not unlike a beautifully useless jetty on a saline lake.
The difference: Lee Biggs and 37,000 Bountifulites knew what B and V stood
for. The difference: few observers would call the B and V sublime.
7.
Jacqui read aloud a Smithson essay sheÕd brought along. His work in 1968
with salt lakes in California, spurred by interest in Bolivian saline lakes
stained red by micro bacteria, led him eventually to Rozel Point, on the north
end of Great Salt Lake, where he discovered water Òthe color of tomato
soup.Ó Here, on a shoreline dotted with industrial debris and machinery
left over from attempts to extract oil from the lake, he had a vision of sorts:
As I looked at the site,
it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while
flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant
earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation
without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an
immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of
the Spiral Jetty. This passage was followed by patches of extraordinary
purple prose. Yes, Smithson was illuminating, chancy, richly suggestive,
but also abstract. Abstract and overreaching. Our drive north
became a study in contrasts. Outside the car, a predictable suburban
landscape of tract housing, trailer parks, strip malls. Inside, a torrent
of descriptions so dense and bizarre, so torqued with technical and
hallucinogenic language that I felt I was inside one of those fast food salad
containers that has been violently shaken until every sentence drips with too
much dressing.
8.
Perhaps IÕm just as guilty as Smithson. Two days before our trip I found
myself trying to explain Ihab HassanÕs ÒToward a Concept of PostmodernismÓ to
sleepy English majors. One student was completely baffled. ÒOkay,Ó
I said, ÒletÕs try an example.Ó I wrote Robert SmithsonÕs name on the
board. ÒAnyone heard of him?Ó No one raised a hand. ÒHow
about Spiral Jetty?Ó Three hands went up. ÒAn earth work created in
1970,Ó I said, Òin the Great Salt Lake,Ó then I sketched in relevant
background. On the blackboard I rendered Spiral Jetty the best I couldÑa
bass clef with a bad case of inner turmoil. I mentioned Cristo and his
two-and-half-mile fabric fence in Marin County, and Walter de MariaÕs New
Mexico field filled with lightning rods. Then I launched into a series of
questions. ÒHow is this piece different from a painting? Where does
its meaning inhereÑin conceptual framework or execution? In putting
together enough funding to move several tons of the earthÕs surface from one
location to another? In Smithson running along it and looking up at a
helicopter? In the black-and-white photo that graces dozens of art
history books? In being underwater for thirty years, then
reappearing? In afficionados flying in from all over the world to view
it, as theyÕve been doing in great numbers this fall? In a professor like
me asking questions he canÕt answer about a piece of art heÕs never
seen?Ó
9.
At Promontory, Utah, ten miles shy of Spiral Jetty, where the Union Pacific
Railroad met the Central Pacific in 1869, where immigrants and former slaves
put down their picks for thirty-five minutes so Leland Stanford could drive a
golden spike, we stopped for a restroom break. Afterwards, we approached
the counter at the VisitorsÕ Center.
ÒCan I help you?Ó
The park attendant, mid forties, had the croakiest smokerÕs voice IÕd ever
heard.
ÒYes,Ó I said. ÒWhat can you tell me about Spiral Jetty?Ó
She reached for a photocopy of a New York Times piece from a few weeks before,
and handed it to me. ÒNow that itÕs reached masterpiece statusÓÑshe
paused to make quotation marks in the airÑÒeveryone wants to see it.Ó
She went on to explain the impact since late August. Thousands of people
pouring in from New York. Frantic long distance calls asking which
airport to fly into, though thereÕs only one. Visitors getting run off
the road. ÒThose New Yorkers waiting till November to book a flight are
taking a chance. If we get an early snow, the county will just close down
the road.Ó
She looked hard at me. ÒYou need to know there are no facilities down
there, no fresh water. And the salt, itÕs dangerous. If you fall
down it cuts like broken glass.Ó
It wasnÕt until this point in the conversation that she let slip that she
herself hadnÕt seen Spiral Jetty.
ÒReally?Ó Jacqui said. ÒItÕs only ten miles away.Ó
ÒDonÕt get me wrong,Ó the attendant said. ÒI want to see it. And
our supervisor, heÕs seen it. We might go as a staff at the end of the
month.Ó
10.
In the near-empty parking lot, I started up our Toyota van, then slowly drove
the perimeter, in a giant circle, cranking the steering wheel a little more
tightly to the left with each revolution. Derek and Brooke put their
hands up and leaning did the wave. Finally, we came to a dead stop, as if
we had located some cosmic epicenter and expected to be beamed up into a
celestial pleasure bus.
ÒWhat was that about?Ó Jacqui
said.
ÒGetting us in the mood.Ó
11.
Immediately after Promontory, the road turned primitive. We navigated by
cattle guard, fence line, and broken corral. And because our car was
originally from Canada, we multiplied dirt road and dead sunflowers and
anthills by .61 to convert map miles into car kilometers. We dodged
boulders, slid carefully over potholes, and thanked the shaky hand that painted
SPIRL JETTY and an arrow to the right on a rotting piece of wood.
Twenty-five minutes later, we parked beside an abandoned and preposterously
pink mobile home, one side torn open. This, according to our directions,
was the final landmark.
12.
ÒWas this in a war?Ó my daughter asked. She rubbed a cluster of bullet
holes in the chassis of an amphibious vehicle the size of a tank. WeÕd
pulled off to the side of the road, gathered our supplies into two backpacks
for the walk down to the shore, and locked the car. This vehicle and the
spent carcass of a Dodge truck beside it resembled dinosaurs that might have
pulled themselves from the saline muck and expired. I wanted to say,
Depends what you mean by war.
ÒProbably not,Ó I said. ÒJust someone taking target practice.Ó
13.
ÒWhereÕs the jetty?Ó This time it was my son. I hate it when he
gives voice to my own questions. Here we were, but where was it?
Between us and the lake, which he was dutifully scanning, lay a cornucopia of
rusted machines and oil barrels, car parts, cable, and from a seepy hole beside
the lake, a stench so rank Brooke plugged her nose. Directly in front of
us lay a jettyÑone used to transport drilling equipment, but no spiral to
it, no curve at all. From the end of the jetty, and running parallel to
the shore, a line of ancient timbers stuck up from the water.
SmithsonÕs perspective was dead on: shoreline as modern wasteland. Yet
there was something beautiful in the bleakness, not unlike a post-nuclear
landscape in an Andrei Tarkovsky film. YouÕre trapped by the camera into
slowing down. And in slowing down, you go inside yourself.
14.
We picked our way along the shore, everything masquerading as what it
wasnÕt. Dirty sand: salt. Snowdrifts that have melted and
re-frozen: salt. Patchy pieces of ice: more salt. The dirt in the
snow drifts: millions of dead flies. A broken kite: a dead pelican.
A kidÕs matchbox car striped yellow: a decomposing Jerusalem cricket. My
son lifted it in his hand. It was huge for a cricket, and
terrifying. He wanted to take it home till he felt how mushy it had
turned. When we reached an especially white patch of salt, I picked up a
crystal the size of a rice grain and tasted the world. As bitter as it
was clean. A couple hundred yards away, a series of white bumps extended into
the lake.
15.
Yes, Spiral JettyÑand above the lake line, but only in places. Most of it
buried in six to eighteen inches of water. Every inch of every exposed
rock coated in thirty years of salt, and wherever we cast our shadows, shadowy
blue. The jetty seemed worn out, art hardened back into landscape.
Where was the early 70s jetty, the jetty IÕd been carrying around in my head,
the one I could run from beginning to end, with my own feet, just as IÕd
seen flesh-and-blood Smithson do. Or as flesh-and-blood as video allows:
Smithson running the backbone of his creation. Or not running, but
hopping from rock to rock since the jetty even then was uneven, bigger boulders
on the edges to anchor the smaller ones. Over the broken surface he goes,
a helicopter capturing all this from above. Smithson, looking back over
his shoulder, shoulder-length hair streaming. Is he being chased?
Is this his celebration run after being marooned? Smithson hurrying now,
turning inward, left, always to the left. Smithson stopping finally at
the center, where thereÕs no where else to go.
16.
Nothing prepares you for the color of the water. Like tomato soup,
Smithson says, thanks to micro bacteria. Yes, but tomato soup made not
with water, or milk, but cream. A salmony color youÕd be happy to find in
front of you in an Indian restaurant, thick with chunks of tandoori
chicken. An eerie, beautiful color licking salt-white boulders. I
kept expecting to see a freshly slaughtered whale nearby. And
glaciers. I kept expecting to feel cold.
17.
More than see Spiral Jetty, I wanted to walk it. To walk it, to run
it, to hop from rock to rock as Smithson had, to circle inward, and find myself
at the end of something, winded and surrounded by water. Yes, we had
brought extra shoes, as my friend had recommended, but I didnÕt think IÕd need
to wade the entire jetty. I put on ancient Nikes, Jacqui and Brooke
pulled on snow boots, and Derek surprised us all by staying on shore to look
for Jerusalem crickets. At first we tried to keep dry, but there was
danger in rock hopping, and soon the rocks would be too far apart, so we
splashed into the cold water, and began slogging through the salt. With
each step, our feet sank a little. The jetty was a white underwater path,
marked by the darker water on either sideÑred and murky and ominous.
Ominous? How ridiculous, I thought. If I fall in, I fall in.
Sure IÕd get wet, but the water was only four feet deep, if that. This
was the pep talk I gave, first to myself, then to Brooke. The sensation
kept creeping back: weÕre in the Arctic. The further we walked out on the
jetty, the more ice flows we saw. No, pieces of salt floating.
18.
Throughout the afternoon, lines from ÒAnecdote of the JarÓ kept slipping into
my mind. ÒIt made the slovenly wilderness surround that hillÓ and ÒThe
wilderness rose up to it, and sprawled around, no longer wild.Ó A Wallace
Stevens poem I didnÕt much care for as a student, though itÕs grown on me
since. A poem of liminal spaces and transformation. Which is how I
think of Spiral Jetty: a jar Smithson and crew placed in a Tennessee called
Utah, though somehow that gives too much agency to Smithson. Since
arriving, I had come to think of Spiral Jetty less as SmithsonÕs brain child,
and more as lovely devastationÑan odd, corkscrewing piece of civilization
turned wild. And this tiny section of Great Salt Lake a natural place
made richer and more problematic by human incursion.
19.
ÒLike wading in jewels,Ó Jacqui said.
Which was a romantic and beautiful way to say it, except that the smaller
jewels kept getting in our shoes. Grittier than sand.
ÒThey hurt my feet,Ó Brooke said.
So weÕd stop periodically, sit down on a rock and wash the salt crystals out of
our shoes by sloshing them in water many times brinier than the ocean.
20.
I stopped at the outside rim of the spiral. Water wherever I
looked. Smithson, staring at the same water, had conceived of Spiral Jetty.
An immobile cyclone. Flickering light. A landscape that
appeared to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering
stillness. A spinning sensation without movement. A rotary that
enclosed itself in an immense roundness. Though I distrusted his tendency
to skate for paragraphs from one abstract epiphany to another, largely leaving
behind the landscape and a contextualizing eye, I did not distrust his
underlying intuition. There was a fluttering stillness here. I
scanned the horizon, cataloguing where it was I was. To the east, beyond
the shore, the highway that had brought us here, and beyond that, the Wasatch
Front. To the south: Antelope Island, too far away to see, where early
settlers ran cattle, and which was now home to a herd of buffalo, herded once a
year into a corral where a man with a portable computer read the microchip in
each left ear. To the west, the Salt Flats, where daredevils and
engineers gathered yearly to squeeze a few more miles per hour out of rockets
strapped to cars in hopes of breaking the land speed record. But those
places were far away. I had to take them on faith. For now I was on
the edge of a landlocked ocean, the remnant of Lake Bonneville. Wispy
clouds helped to delineate the sky. All I could hear was wind and the
licking of water.
21.
Halfway toward the center of the jetty, we heard a hum from the
west. Jacqui picked out a small plane. When it passed over, dipping
its wing for a better view, we waved. After its fourth pass, Brooke said,
ÒIs he trying to get us in trouble?Ó
ÒNo,Ó Jacqui said, Òjust looking.Ó
Looking, but from far away. And here we were, wading. Wading and
complaining about salt crystals in our shoes and feeling found and then lost
again. How many works from art history let you walk all over them?
It struck me then that the people in the plane were completing a lazy museum
stroll, albeit from a private plane. And our waving was part of their
Spiral Jetty.
22.
Tired, bored, her feet hurting, Brooke sat down on a giant mushroom of salt to
wait. There were fewer boulders now to mark the edges. Jacqui
and I walked along without her, keeping to the salt path. All at once,
dark water on three sides instead of two. We stopped. Part of me
wanted to step into the deep. Jacqui kissed me.
ÒWhat was that for?Ó
ÒBragging rights,Ó she said.
23.
I am tempted now, as I wasnÕt then, to draw conclusions. To say that
Spiral Jetty is like Crick and WatsonÕs double helix. Like YeatsÕ falcon,
turning and turning in a widening gyre. Like HitchcockÕs
Vertigo. Like the whiteout my father experienced on a highway in an Idaho
snow storm, so disoriented he pulled over and closed his eyes to prove he
wasnÕt moving. Like a journey that takes you where you want to go by
going somewhere else. Smithson himself said it was like the portrait
Brancusi drew of James Joyce as nautilus shell. It took twenty-five
minutes to wade to the end of the jetty (or was it the beginning?), fifteen to
wade back to shore. Spiral Jetty is like all these things, and none of
them. As Emily Dickinson said, ÒWe both believe, and disbelieve a
hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.Ó
24.
ÒLook, Ó Derek said, as we neared shore. He pointed to a giant smiley
face heÕd drawn in salt and beside it his own spiral jetty. Then at
a rock. ÒBefore, it had feathers sticking out from under it, so I started
digging. Underneath I found another dead pelican. I buried it
again, but deeper. Now no one can tell.Ó ÒAny other creatures?Ó I
asked. ÒNope,Ó he said. ÒToo salty.Ó
25.
We rinsed off our legs the best we could with drinking water and changed our
shoes. Or rather, Jacqui and Brooke changed theirs. I kept my
squishy Nikes on. We drank some juice, then began the hike up the hill to
see the jetty from above. I held myself back from looking, willing myself
forward another fifty yards, a hundred yards. I liked the restraint,
seeing by looking away. We followed a horse trail, dodging manure, and
kept climbing through the bitter hot smell of sagebrush. We stopped and
turned around. We were seeing the same picture we had just been a part
of, the same picture we had shown the kids a week before, at breakfast, when we
explained the trip. Our younger son, five, whom we had left home, had
seen the picture from across the table. He thought it was a giant
question mark in the sky. When he learned a jetty sits in water, he
cried. Most things, I wanted to tell him, just Òsit in water,Ó until
inflected by context. By wet feet and hunger, by legs itchy with dried
salt and by a giant question mark touching down from the sky like a tornado and
by Derek yelling, ÒI almost got him,Ó then running toward us with his thumb and
finger lifted, as if in blessing. In his hand he held a piece of lizard
tail the color of earth, twitching still, as if it had a mind of its own.
Lance LarsenÕs most
recent collection of poems is Landscape for Several Pairs of Hands (University
of Tampa Press 2004). His poems have appeared recently in Paris Review,
Southern Review, Grand Street and Agni, and new poems are forthcoming in Orion,
River Styx, and Many Mountains Moving. His essay ÒLooking for Spiral
JettyÓ placed first in the 2003 Writers at Work nonfiction competition.
Professor of English at BYU, he is married to mixed-media artist Jacqui
Larsen.