The Anthropocene Reviewed(50)
For some reason, I really like casinos. I recognize that they prey on vulnerable people and enable addiction, and that they’re loud and smoky and gross and horrible. But I can’t help myself. I like sitting at a table and playing cards with strangers. On the evening in question, I was playing with a woman from the Texas panhandle named Marjorie. She told me that she’d been married for sixty-one years. I asked her what the secret was, and she said, “Separate checking accounts.”
I asked her what brought her to Wendover, and she said she wanted to see the salt flats. And the casino, of course. She and her husband gambled one weekend a year. I asked her how it was going, and she said, “You ask a lot of questions.”
Which I do, when I’m gambling. In every other environment, I am extremely averse to encounters with strangers. I don’t tend to chat with airplane seatmates or cab drivers, and I am an awkward and strained conversationalist in most situations. But put me at a blackjack table with Marjorie, and suddenly I’m Perry Mason.
The other person at my table, eighty-seven-year-old Anne from central Oregon, also wasn’t much of a talker, so I turned to the dealer, who was required to talk to me as a condition of his employment. He had a handlebar mustache, and a name tag identifying him as James. I couldn’t tell if he was twenty-one or forty-one. I asked him if he was from Wendover.
“Born and bred,” he answered.
I asked him what he thought of it, and he told me it was a nice place. Lots of hiking. Great if you like hunting and fishing. And the salt flats were cool, of course, if you liked fast cars, which he did.
After a moment he said, “Not a great place for kids, though.”
“Do you have kids?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But I was one.”
There’s a certain way I talk about the things I don’t talk about. Maybe that’s true for all of us. We have ways of closing off the conversation so that we don’t ever get directly asked what we can’t bear to answer. The silence that followed James’s comment about having been a kid reminded me of that, and reminded me that I had also been a kid. Of course, it’s possible that James was only referring to Wendover’s shortage of playgrounds—but I doubted it. I started sweating. The casino’s noises—the dinging of slot machines, the shouts at the craps table—were suddenly overwhelming. I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of. I played out the hand, tipped the dealer, thanked the table for the conversation, and cashed out my remaining chips.
The next morning, I drove out to the Bonneville Salt Flats with Sarah and a few of her colleagues. Until 14,500 years ago, what is now Wendover was deep underwater in Lake Bonneville, a vast salty lake that covered nineteen thousand square miles, nearly the size of Lake Michigan today. Lake Bonneville has disappeared and re-formed a couple dozen times over the last five hundred million years; what remains of it at the moment is known as the Great Salt Lake, although it’s less than a tenth as great as Lake Bonneville once was. The lake’s most recent retreat left behind the salt flats, a thirty-thousand-acre expanse, utterly empty and far flatter than a pancake.
The snow-white ground was cracked like dried lips and crunched under my feet. I could smell the salt. I kept trying to think of what it looked like, but my brain could only find highly figurative similes. It looks like driving alone at night feels. It looks like everything you’re scared to say out loud. It looks like the moment the water retreats from the shore just before a wave rolls in.
Herman Melville called white “a colorless, all-color.” He wrote that white “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe.” And the Bonneville Salt Flats are very, very white.
Of course, everything on Earth is geological, but at the salt flats you feel the geology. It is not hard to believe that this land was once five hundred feet underwater. You feel like the briny, green-black water might rush back in at any moment, drowning you and your traumas and the town and the hangar where the Enola Gay waited for its atomic bomb.
Looking up toward the looming mountain ranges in the distance, I was reminded of what nature is always telling me: Humans are not the protagonists of this planet’s story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight. But in the age of the Anthropocene, humans tend to believe, despite all available evidence, that the world is here for our benefit. So the Bonneville Salt Flats must have a human use; why else would they exist? Nothing can grow in that dry, salty soil, but we find uses for it anyway. For the last hundred years, the flats have been mined for potash, which is used in fertilizer. And a long stretch of the flats has gained fame as a kind of drag-racing strip. A land-speed record was set there in 1965 when a turbojet car driven by Craig Breedlove traveled over six hundred miles per hour.
Racing season can still attract thousands of people to the flats, but most days the landscape is, above all else, a backdrop—for movies from Independence Day to The Last Jedi, and for fashion photo shoots and Instagram posts. While I was at the flats, I was one of several people trying to angle a selfie to make it look like I was alone in that emptiness.
But after walking for a while, away from the road that dead-ends into the flats, I started to feel really alone. At one point, I thought I saw a shimmering pool of water in the distance, but as I approached, it proved to be a mirage—an actual one. I’d always thought they were just fictional devices. As I kept walking, I thought about that blackjack dealer, and how bone-deep terrifying it is to be a child and know that you cannot decide what adults do to you.