Goodbye

My time is hereby up.

There are some modest items added to the CLUI Unit inventory:

3 tea towels
1 dishwashing brush
1 pair of scissors

The dirty pots and pans tools come from a European habit that has never died. My stay has been vastly memorable and the clever comfort of the Unit not only luxurious but bathed in a functional cool, courtesy of Simparch. The desert solitude, being that it involves both a remote place and, in my case, personal isolation, inevitably carries its visions into the hallucinations of the imaginary. This blog (more than 12,238 words in all, not counting the cut and paste) has probably been an indulgent mirror, and undoubtedly a hazy mirage from that other remote found here, of that situation. Please do stop by Wendover in the next year and see for yourself what all these words and the -- until then invisible -- work has amounted to.

Best,

Are Flagan

CLUI Resident, with thanks, May 1 to May 25, 2003.

Project: Crossing the Line and Coming Full Circle

I have been tracing the thick blue line of I-80 across the country in anticipation of the 2400 miles or so I have to cover in order to retrace my route from there to here and back again. It’s not a bad place to end -- at the start of this long vector of travel -- by summing up some more of the ideas for the project and some, and only some, thoughts on what lines were crossed to get to where I am now with it.

Having already posted what on a second read amounts to somewhat dithering resolve, it’ll suffice to say that this dichotomy of land as being either a gathering, unitary force, to which we both turn and return (nature), and an exclusionary grid of parcels that shuts some out for the benefits of others (culture) is always an interesting one to start with. Of course, land has already had its day, allegedly at least, in the social and economic realm, as the 17th and 18th centuries saw, with the birth of industrial capitalism, the transfer of (the power of) discipline and profit extraction from the land to the laboring body. Michel Foucault has written extensively about this change, from a focus on wealth and commodities, of the land, to the institutions and procedures of a disciplining power seeking to exploit the body. Later, in his Power/Knowledge interviews, it was jumped upon by Edward Soja, the postmodern geographer extraordinaire, that Foucalt attributed, after all, this nexus not so much to a one-directional shift toward culture away from nature, from sovereign land to the dispersed cultural apparatus, but in a particular “geography,” a marked, social space composed of competing forces.

I know this is scattered, and piecemeal, but in my mind there is a thread running through it that starts to knit the project into an orderly nest. Considering in tandem with this the alienation that industrial society has brought and wrought, for the conveyor belt worker as well as the urbanite lost in mass-produced homogeneity, the land as “nature” has emerged in the form of an environmentally friendly counterweight to this remove, this constant distancing, spacing and inclusion/exclusion. Truth be told, the premise of this greenish movement aspires to a sort of sovereign right of this “nature” to prevail, above and beyond, and apart from, the discursive laws and rules that occupy the land. It is quite ironic that this oppositional drive, if not already lost in crimson postcards of Half Dome, has gotten its own fenced and policed playpens of wilderness where people live out this dream of being one (with nature). Nature of the capital type is really a fascist theology, to sum it up with little heed for its more positive effects and certainly with no words minced.

The struggle then becomes one of working this belligerent difference in a way that goes beyond both the divides that obviously alienate and the sovereign principle of a unity that really offers little to overcome it. (Yes, that’s indeed Yellowstone in August.) Many have worked on this type of resolve, as it involves, of course and by some clinical measure, any configuration of the mind and body split and beyond. Hipsters like Burroughs and Gysin did it in The Third Mind (free of mescaline, hopefully, to hold up as theory) and Soja himself went down this trail in the follow-up to Postmodern Geographies, aptly titled Third Space. As sure as 1+1=3, these efforts posit a confluence of the land and its use, or any of the other twins birthed so far, as a “subject” open to a set of relations, yet strangely apart from them. (Critics of Derrida usually and mistakenly put his philosophy in the same camp.) But the question is if one can indeed “subjectify” these relations without, once more, simply dead-ending in a pointed totalitarian cycle that leads nowhere. Yet, by some stroke of luck, I was instead selfishly charged with the task of “objectifying” it, through photography.

Do such bookish thoughts enter my mind while carting a rucksack of equipment around the extended neighborhood, or while burning rubber on the bike in the terrain? They are certainly there somewhere, just behind the persistent bubbles about another trail-mix bar, in turn interrupted by voices of gargling water. It’s fair to say that for the last three weeks, I have mostly been chasing fences with a rather worrying and contradictory sense of joy when encountering one that outlines promises for an image. “Nice fence” is an internal expletive I never thought would see much use after the wall came down. (Some fences were inevitably caught in the golden hour, which prompted the curious proprietor of the E6 lab in SLC to exclaim “nice stuff” over my shoulder while ignoring the rather strange reoccurrence, in the perused sample, of posts and wires. The ubiquitous “nice” power of 6x24 panoramas shot on Fuji Velvia can, I honestly believe, surpass subject matter entirely in certain photography circles.) Sure, the fence line is a very old and rusty subject but my line for its defense would be how it’s done -- in a way that defies description, being, in a cheeky verb, objectified. It is also not without reason that the fence has become such a popular metaphor; we jump it or sit on it, seemingly unable to accept its actual purpose.

Other interests and points of focus have flirted with ideas of the control of flows across landscape lines. (McKenzie Wark: please forgive me for the vector I have sought.) Examples of this are everywhere, notably in the evaporation ponds and ditches, even the causeway between the north/south parts of the Great Salt Lake serves to shore up a difference. Some shots have been fired to burst this scene, but in total far less than the more landlocked images. Partly because the probing viewpoint has tried to speak to the problems of experiencing the land either as wholesomely whole or horribly divided, introducing a little of both, mixing the picturesque and sweeping with the boundaries of ends and means, “landscape” with “documentary” and so on. Strategies could easily be compiled in another few pages of a thesis, but it usually falls mute and always seems superfluous once the process has worked through its options and reached a series of instances already caught quite conclusively on film.

(The broader issue of state-sponsored borders/divides versus a globalized unity could be the subject of an entire book -- and it already is, for several dozen -- and hence only gets a parenthesis here. Think of all the no-border movements, globalization and the birthing of the so-called digital multitudes, seen and heard quite loudly on February 15, 2003 for example. The same problems encountered in how to fashion an undifferentiated, or the compromise of a more justly differentiated, experience, as a progressive social and political experiment, are haunting these movements, projects and events. Meanwhile, Wendover is a telling little microcosm of all this; they even proposed to knock down the invisible wall by moving the state line into a little excursion, from its 300 mile record of going straight, to unite the two halves. Of course, West Wendover, the comparatively affluent Nevada side, was not sold on the idea.)

The end result of some twenty-five rolls of film, thousands of miles of driving, possibly more than a hundred miles of cycling, and quite a few miles walking, will be, in one incarnation, some 10-12 images suited for the Exhibit Hall. If those numbers add up to anything, it should say something about land use.

The Meow Update

Not that I don't have other concerns (then again, the only emails I have had about the blog have been about the cats), but there are in fact TWO kittens and I have not seen the mother for awhile. The dry Whiskas I put out, however, has all been devoured. Water does not seem to be of the same priority. There's more supermarket fair on the plate now but the kittens don't seem to eat it (they're very young), so the mother is probably around. If you meow authentically, they respond and come out, otherwise they're dead quiet around any sort of movement. I'll leave some food after the weekend and a note for DS and the rest.

The Uranium Ball or Land Use Globally

So Congress voted to repeal the ban on the production and testing of nuclear weapons. Great. Here's a story from recent findings in Afghanistan, just to back up the whole told-you-so thingie. Time to start thinking about and protesting "land use" on a global scale.


Afghans' uranium levels spark alert

By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent

A small sample of Afghan civilians have shown "astonishing" levels of uranium in their urine, an independent scientist says.


Critics suspect new weapons were used in Afghanistan

He said they had the same symptoms as some veterans of the 1991 Gulf war.

But he found no trace of the depleted uranium (DU) some scientists believe is implicated in Gulf War syndrome.

Other researchers suggest new types of radioactive weapons may have been used in Afghanistan.

The scientist is Dr Asaf Durakovic, of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) based in Washington DC.

Dr Durakovic, a former US army colonel who is now a professor of medicine, said in 2000 he had found "significant" DU levels in two-thirds of the 17 Gulf veterans he had tested.

In May 2002 he sent a team to Afghanistan to interview and examine civilians there.

The UMRC says: "Independent monitoring of the weapon types and delivery systems indicate that radioactive, toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads were being used by the coalition forces."


Shock results

It says Nangarhar province was a strategic target zone during the Afghan conflict for the deployment of a new generation of deep-penetrating "cave-busting" and seismic shock warheads.

The UMRC says its team identified several hundred people suffering from illnesses and conditions similar to those of Gulf veterans, probably because they had inhaled uranium dust.


Bomb damage was widespread

To test its hypothesis that some form of uranium weapon had been used, the UMRC sent urine specimens from 17 Afghans for analysis at an independent UK laboratory.

It says: "Without exception, every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium internal contamination.

"The results were astounding: the donors presented concentrations of toxic and radioactive uranium isotopes between 100 and 400 times greater than in the Gulf veterans tested in 1999.

"If UMRC's Nangarhar findings are corroborated in other communities across Afghanistan, the country faces a severe public health disaster... Every subsequent generation is at risk."

It says troops who fought in Afghanistan and the staff of aid agencies based in Afghanistan are also at risk.


Scientific acceptance

Dr Durakovic's team used as a control group three Afghans who showed no signs of contamination. They averaged 9.4 nanograms of uranium per litre of urine.

The average for his 17 "randomly-selected" patients was 315.5 nanograms, he said. Some were from Jalalabad, and others from Kabul, Tora Bora, and Mazar-e-Sharif. A 12-year-old boy living near Kabul had 2,031 nanograms.


Troops and aid workers could be at risk

The maximum permissible level for members of the public in the US is 12 nanograms per litre, Dr Durakovic said.

A second UMRC visit to Afghanistan in September 2002 found "a potentially much broader area and larger population of contamination". It collected 25 more urine samples, which bore out the findings from the earlier group.

Dr Durakovic said he was "stunned" by the results he had found, which are to be published shortly in several scientific journals.


Identical outcome

He told BBC News Online: "In Afghanistan there were no oil fires, no pesticides, nobody had been vaccinated - all explanations suggested for the Gulf veterans' condition.

"But people had exactly the same symptoms. I'm certainly not saying Afghanistan was a vast experiment with new uranium weapons. But use your common sense."

The UK Defence Ministry says it used no DU weapons in Afghanistan, nor any others containing uranium in any form.

A spokesman for the US Department of Defense told BBC News Online the US had not used DU weapons there.

He could not comment on Dr Durakovic's findings of elevated uranium levels in Afghan civilians.

The Animal Dungeon

There are quite a few semi-permanent residents around this Unit now. For almost three weeks, I have watched the neighbor’s dog chained to the base fence, day in and day out, night after night. Slipping him a snack on a couple of occasions, more to break the monotony than to aid subsistence, I have noticed that the pet yard, that is to say about 6 feet of rope and a tiny plastic igloo (what a sad, sad joke with summer coming), is simply cleaned by tossing the poop across to the other side of the fence. A dog’s life does not quite cover the existence of this creature.

A couple of days ago, I spotted a new arrival. A stray (it’s shy to say the least) cat and its struggling, if straggly means struggling, kitten have found a home in the wheel housing of the trailer. There’s a metal platform there that presumably makes them feel safe. I have put out some water and will get some food when I go to the supermarket. Maybe future residents can fill the bowls; it would be sad to sit here and watch them die.

Lakeside is Booming

Phew. Just got back in after a morning of walking around in the environs of Pilot Peak. No doubt, summer is here; the temps are probably in the 90s now and no wind brings that air con feel to the outdoors. In other words – it’s siesta time, until this evening. (How many gallons of water can you carry without drowning? I once hiked for a few days in Canyonlands at the peak and heat of summer -- 100+ -- and realized that the hydration question is an evil spiral: the more water you carry the more you sweat.) Yesterday, I ventured out to Lakeside, located at the very tip of the peninsula that stretches out from I-80 to the Great Salt Lake. It’s where the Lucin Cutoff on the railroad line makes a brief landfall across the waters.

It turned out that there was precious little room to roam without trespassing, either on private property or, and this is even less advisable, the military testing grounds. Lakeside itself is essentially a large stone quarry, owned and very actively operating, and Strongs Knob, at the very tip, is the property of the Salt Lake Mineral Company. I did venture out on this road of no return upon sunset and there’s a smoking processing plant located way out into the lake; it looks quite spectacular but I did not dare to go all the way to the gate and snap any shots. It’s a time consuming process with the need for a tripod -- and trespassing is one thing, being caught trespassing and photographing their property is probably another.

So between the area where the army fence posts end (the road runs as a stay-on-the-roadway corridor through this land) and the earth-shattering blasts from the quarry start, there’s a pocket of private land that is less frequented and thus more “open.” Drove down to the eastern side of the mountains and actually biked along the shore, proper mountain-biking for once, all the way up to the army fence. The amount of driftwood ashore from, I presume, the construction of the railroad trestle was quite impressive. Once snug against the fence, and its neon red signs of WARNING!, I did not have to linger for long before the explosive disposal unit just across the hillside blasted off one of their treaty concessions (probably conveniently getting rid of stuff no longer needed, to free up space for more).

Driving in, I had seen a couple of trucks loaded with great green cargo at the geographically adjacent gate and this was most likely that load being lightened. The boom itself was not too impressive. Disposal being disposal, the explosives are probably set to dismantle the mechanism rather than add to the power already there. For the longest time afterward, however, great big stacks of smoke were billowing from above, gradually seeping onto the lake, like a low cloud. At first, this cumulus look-alike was blending in with the other clouds, but gradually it turned a very sinister dark and did not budge much, apart from slowly thinning all the way across to the Promontory Mountains. Around sunset, several hours after the modest bang, it looked like local thunder drifting in, yet the blue was a reddish brown. One can only wonder what composition this heavenly addition was made of.

A few more interesting and more close-up landmarks from the same creator were parked amidst the rocks at the quarry. Four tanks, of what type I am not sure (older than the A-1 Abrams), were left hatches-open for exploration. A couple had “Runs 03 18 03” spray-painted on them, so the temptation of joy, if that’s indeed the right word, riding a little was certainly there. The insides were reasonably fresh, with instrumentation intact and the turret ready to fire its 105mm shells, although the storage racks were empty. Space is not exactly a plentiful commodity for the crew.

All in all, Lakeside, as its resort-inspired name implies, is booming.

Project Outline: Borders

As my time here is nearing completion, if one is indeed ever done processing experience (Freud would argue never), it is time to take stock and outline some thoughts on the photographic project that has taken place below all this blabbering on blogging. It deals as a premise with the experience of land along borderlines, of difference in and crucially as the landscape. The treatise conjured here will be rather incomplete but quite honest, in that it has no direct recourse to quote research, only memory.

Observing and traversing this land, it is evident that it is divided into areas of use -- some fenced, others posted; some private, others public; some even secret and apparently nonexistent, at least off limits entirely. On the ground, it is sometimes hard to move without breaking a law or disobeying a posted order, if one does not, that is, just follow in the paved corridors of permitted travel. As such, land has in the experiential realm a disciplining function that divides it to also, in the same instance, define you by dictating access, usage, fees and so on. It is therefore a social and economical mechanism perpetuating staked out differences. Basically, it is hard to get around this idea, as it is firmly based on experience -- and even more so since it is anchored in the history of western metaphysics and often topped with barbed wire.

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the many, many thinkers on difference (cogito ergo sum, thinking is difference with a dominance of thought, at least since Decartes), remarked that vision is division. Speaking from the viewpoint of an instrumental perception, in a book called The Logic of Practice, he sought to elucidate how this view, of vision as division, sought to structure practice in its broadest sense. What he arrived at was a world where taxonomic frontiers or “nomos” -- leaving the nomothete aside -- institute what unites and separates people, despite both a biological kinship, even more so after the genetic code has brought us closer together racially, and a planet that is undeniably round, and hence without a privileged point. This world, as we then know it, is thus founded upon a classification system of difference that is binary at its root.

Much can be said and repeated about this view of vision as division, as difference, and it will mostly have to remain outside the scope of this limited blog space. Foremost in the intellectual critique of difference, however, one would have to put the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Arguing that difference, the binary, is not only a precondition for western metaphysics, but that this binary always works to award privilege, the preference of one over the other, speech over writing, man over woman and so on. From a social standpoint, assuming by classification schemes, names, the inevitable polarities, it is clear that this working of difference then becomes an instrument that serves to exercise the functions and distributions of power and crucially its perks.

Derrida has pursued his deconstruction for decades, focusing relentlessly on revealing the differential workings that are always already there and often quite playfully wreak mild, some say severe, havoc on the presumptions that make us think and act the way we, in the west at least, do. But while Derrida, for example, has taken on difference, others, much earlier, were concerned with the taxonomic divisions and the nomenclature, as itself. Taxonomy as the sole persuasive way of describing the world, under the auspices of a natural philosophy, arguably came to an end in the decades following 1800 when God no longer was able to completely contain a stable and fixed universe. Part of the blame must be put on the fossil record, a time outside of neatly tabulated time, but the problem also arose around the arbitrariness of divisions. Why that border and not another? Why that name and not another? Must a spade be called a spade by some natural necessity? In other words, than these apparently, the grid of difference had to draw the line somewhere, but where?

Leibniz struggled fruitfully with this as early as the 17th century. (Interestingly he devised his general language based on binary notation around the same time; see my website http://www.transcodex.net for a 9000 word essay on the topic.) The concern that divisions were arbitrary, however, was sidelined by the fact that they were undoubtedly functional; they impose a set of strict relations and differences with very real consequences. Jose Luis Borges once made a very funny remark on this structuralism-out-of-thin-air conundrum in his Chinese Encyclopedia, drawing attention to the quagmire of taxonomy by classifying “dogs” as “belonging to the emperor” and “bigger than flies” and so on and on to greater and greater hilarity, as the links became increasingly absurd -- or did they?

Within this scheme of things, we can also immediately recognize the contours of the land in use. Crisscrossed by demarcations, named and partitioned, it truly reflects the world we theoretically inhabit on a metaphysical plane, but with some reservations (not of the Native American kind). There is also the “land,” of course, a nominal placeholder for innocent and undifferentiated space, epistemologically very much resembling the infinite salt flats on a dry and sunny day, that is to say, white and infinite. Here we have a vast group of romantics to blame, who aspired to become one with a certain unadulterated nature. Rousseau and his noble savage is arguably the upright Neanderthal of this movement, which later inspired great poet wanderers in the US such as Thoreau and Whitman, all seeking out the wilderness in search of the pure and true reflected in themselves. (Pure and true has frequently turned out, and not exactly by accident, grand and majestic.) This lineage has been excellently traced in The Idea of Wilderness, a book possibly on every syllabus in environmental philosophy classes. Slowly taming the myth of the wild over hundreds of pages, it does not seriously start to issue paid-for passes and erect fences until postmodernism sets in. By that time, however, the Golden Eagle Pass had allowed flights of fancy into this enclosed idea of nature for some time, and every SUV add still sparkles with the same snow capped peaks you see twinkle in the eyes of the devoted Sierra Club member. Land, as a pristine home for the noble savage, is still a marketable concept with a pretty decent turnover.

What we have then, for our first-hand use and exploration, is twofold: land that is wholesome and complete and land that is divisive and exclusionary. This is the situation I have been interested in exploring and will return to in a future post for a report on the progress and the resolutions.

Desert Signage

You know the tiny lettering found at the bottom of slightly distorted side mirrors on cars -- objects appear further away than they are? Well, I propose one sign bearing the related inscription “objects appear closer than they are” for every mile in the desert. Yesterday I set off in the afternoon to capture some views in the Reilly compound right next door. The plan was to bike on past the FAA radio facility, some miles down the road, and turn onto various dirt tracks in search for what I was ironically hoping to find. As the hours ticked by, there appeared to be just that one more little dot on the horizon ahead that exuded the promise of being “it.” Inevitably, it was either a sizeable bush, in which I had scant interest, or a conspiracy between sky and ground that dissolved with the viewing angle. So I kept pedaling against the fading light in hope of finding some reason to set up before it got dark and too late. The miles kept passing by quite unnoticed.

At sunset, having already turned back west, I found myself deep in the sand dunes next to an otherwise quite photogenic piece of giant, rusty machinery, a crane of sorts. Taking a few minutes to savor my failure, I was starting to feel the cramps after more than 4 hours, at this point, of pretty steady pushing and pulling. In the twilight I set out to reach the frontage road again, and by the time I was back on the broken pavement, the red sign at the gas station at mile marker 4 was shining ahead, in the mounting dark. At this point the lack of glucose was competing with the plentiful lactic acid; Wendover seemed so close yet so far away, which was a familiar sensation by now.

Now that glowing red ahead made me feel a little bullish all the way. Every so often over the next few miles, I would kick up a gear or two and pedal feverishly, as if to get there, almost here now, in a fit of fitness that was obviously fading. The next step, should you ever decide to follow this program, of expending energy on a day you have eaten little to fuel up is sleepiness; it’s like you’re brain is singing one big lullaby. So, for the next hour or so, I was spinning my legs and snoozing, sleep-cycling if you like. Problem is that you do not feel particularly rested, just in danger of weering off the yellow line and crossing the white one.

Eventually I pulled into the Unit and stumbled off to bed. All the film was still in its wrappers and my legs felt like they were in casts. If only there had been persistent warning signs along the entire route -- objects appear closer then they are.

The Point of Eternal Return

I’d like to, if I may, rename Spiral Jetty Submarine Jetty, as it appears to have been submerged for much of its existence. Making this my stop for the night this past Thursday, I had a glowing sunset view of a few stones poking above the surface of the lake, just about enough terra firma to give away the spiraling shape of what I had seen previously in sketches and photographs.

Indeed, the journey here from the Golden Spike (where I never paid the 7 bucks to enter the enclosure where East and West met along the railroad tracks) was already one of literary imaginations. I had read Tacita Dean’s very beautiful and eloquent version of her pilgrimage, in search, as has become her pursuit, of the idiosyncratically missing. Artforum also, around the same time a couple of years back, sent a New York pundit to sample the remarkable remains (if it was a he, I am not sure). Both accounts had a sense of adventure about them, a hinterland journey in the very real dust the land art archive. Dean, however, was intensely personal and philosophical, while the Artforum ride bumped along on the Oh and Ah wagon it usually pushes. Since then, I have come across a couple of projects that have also tried to make work out of trying to find this work. It’s a strangely insular pursuit, fitting for a spiraling jetty.

The chosen path to the Spiral Jetty is marked by signs supplied by the Utah State: it’s black on white from leaving the pavement to the last post, with the subtitle End of the Road, some 50 yards uphill from the covering water. This last arrow very helpfully points (no longer at a fork in the road) at the stretch of coastline where the Spiral Jetty sets out. The only sense of added isolation and adventure is the increased number of obstacles and potholes encountered along the route. Toward the very end, the last, say, 500 yards, it’s potentially quite damaging to a low clearance vehicle. By now you have passed the landmarks noted by Dean, for example, the derelict trailer, rusty amphibious vehicle and abandoned oil jetty. Most would wisely already have parked.

The afternoon and night I spent around the area (I found something to photograph for the next morning on the nearby Rozel Flats) was only interrupted by two other cars. Accompanying me in, but eventually way ahead, was the biggest Astrovan around, the live-in kind that literally leaves no air between its chassis and the ground despite its lofty name. The driver was incredibly doing about 50 mph amidst rocks that reached halfway up his wheels. From a distance, it looked like one of those simulation rides that imitate a roller coaster with an internal screening of the track and an external army of hydraulic ups and downs. When I caught up with him at Rozel Point, he confided, somewhat baffled actually, that he had “done some damage” on the way in. We asserted that nothing serious was missing. By that time, he had already documented the oil jetty and was ready to leave. The other car, which rolled in late in the afternoon and which I observed stretched out on top of the hill above, also cut its journey short at the oil jetty with customary photographs. I presume that both parties were probably in pursuit of the spiral, not the line, but were not privy to Smithson’s original pencil sketch or later documentations. Both illustrations are pretty much devoid of scale, and looking at the oil jetty, which extends about five times as far into the lake as the Spiral Jetty, it is entirely possible to envisage that it starts turning at the very tip, spiraling further into the deeper waters of the unknown. Sad as it may seem, these acts of mistaken identity -- choosing the still grand and majestic over submerged notoriety -- actually seemed equally poetic, considering also the ancient nature of the spiral symbol, compared to the journeys undertaken to actually find, and document, a rather nondescript connect-the-dots circle of rocks. I only wonder what they thought of Smithson, the environmental pig, since the piles of twisted metal and machinery, mountains of rusty barrels and pumps, that were left behind made for a very unfinished work of art.

Having some spare time due to the position of the sun (using a 120mm lens, for 8x10 coverage, without a hood gives plenty of angles for flare), I decided to set bare feet on the jetty, after having come all this way. Wading about 2/3 of the way out to where the initial straight starts turning, the water was threatening to reach well above the knee and not having much spare water to rinse off the layers of salt, I retreated after covering a mere fraction of this constructed sediment in the quest for infinity. It was a rather wobbly walk due to the amount of slippery and tilting rocks underfoot. The water, a deep red, also got quite murky at the deeper sections, making it hard to see where to thread. (Unfortunately, I suffered a cut and have enjoyed an infected clump foot unfit for shoes the last couple of days. I’m now luckily down to a tight size 16.) Still, it’s thoroughly recommended to complete any pilgrimage with some flagellation at the end. Later, I went through the scrap trailer down the road and found a pair of brand new rubber boots with a handwritten note in them. Dave had left them behind this very April for others to use when walking in, rather than on, as would be more fitting in terms of the journey’s aspirations, water. He asked for any takers to return them to the trailer once the scramble around eternity was complete. As attractive as dry feet sounded, there is something to be said for actually getting your feet wet, especially if you want to get anywhere near the end of the spiral.

Watching the sun setting over an entirely still salt lake -- extending all the way across to the Newfoundland mountains -- there were gaps in the horizon where water met sky along a straight-line axis that appeared to curve ever so slightly in all directions. Below, the oil jetty, built on money and ownership and politics, retained its messy heritage of being bigger and brighter than the neighboring Spiral Jetty, so much smaller than imagined and less visible than recorded. A side-by-side contrast of pursuits was basking in the last rays of the day. Both these extensions of human pursuits seemed quite vain and hopeless against their receding backdrop, of strangely curved time and space, and it mattered little what they were or are compared to where they are.

MOABs and Mini-Nukes

One fine morning at the northern end of The Great Salt Lake, where the abandoned salt works used to be, I struck up a conversation with a lone, resident worker who watched the pumps and ditches for a magnesium chloride extracting company based in Ogden. (To fight loneliness and craziness, I guess, his rotating schedule was one week on and one off.) He told me that every couple of weeks, when they tested various explosive devices at Hill Air Force Base, his trailer shook to the extent that items fell off the shelves. Lakeside is hazily visible across the expanse some 70, that is indeed seventy, miles away. On the occasions that he had visually observed the actual blasts of this stature, the mushroom cloud rose to a height well above the clouds, followed by the inevitable shockwave and later the rumbling sounds.

Since most of us are now experts on US Army weaponry courtesy of the expo in Iraq, it is safe to say that these droppings of the military-industrial complex do not exactly fit the 2000 lbs. bracket. The 20,000 lbs. MOAB, the look-what-we’ve-got deterrent that made a proud splash on cable news this March and April, was according to the broadcasts only tested out at sea in Florida. This leaves some 18,000 lbs. of intermediary explosive power unaccounted for, and it seems that experiments have been carried out with ranges of packed power toward or beyond the five-digit payload.

Frightening or reassuring as this may be, depending on which side of the “with us or against us” paradigm one may find oneself, this blast is already somewhat mute, despite its 70-mile radius of being heard, and felt. Congress right now has before it a bill that seeks to introduce the production of so-called mini-nukes (you can bet they’re gonna be cute). What this means is that 30 years of nuclear non-proliferation work will be scrapped, that testing will resume (a mutual ban supposedly adhered to the last 10 years), and that all the states seeking to contest the vague but violent “US interests” must now make WMD a priority to survive. In 1995, when the nuclear non-proliferation treaty was up for renewal, it was unanimously extended to the INDEFINITE, meaning that humankind would collectively and forever aspire to rid the world of nuclear arms by destroying those made, a pledge offered by those in possession, and never make new ones, a promise extended by those not blessed with cold war merchandize.

If the bill passes Congress, a new era, arguably already with us, is about to begin. Maybe also a new era for the man digging ditches and manning pumps only a salt lake away from ground zero. But to think that testing would once more resume on the flats and waters where it once took place is probably delusional. These mini-nuke weapons will most likely find a secret proving ground far, far away -- say in the cave-infested mountains of Afghanistan or on the Shia-populated plains of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Chances are that someone working the land within range of homeland detonations will probably never even hear about it, above the shrill noise, that is, piercing his eardrums and the shocks rearranging his home.

On the Landscape Menu

Whenever you come upon the foundations of the recent inhabited past in this region – usually square walls of rock and cement protruding a few inches above ground -- you are probably surrounded by a few square yards of the can around canned goods. Consumed by past residents and later ravaged by the environment, they are now rusty brown cylinders devoid of a brand or any other mark of what kind of foodstuff they once contained. Occasionally, there’s an odd box shape that brings home unfortunate recollections of Spam. Their numbers, however, are rarely enough to quite believe that doing the dishes in those days simply involved opening the window or door and then consuming the added energy of a light toss. More likely, and this is speculation of course, they are the residue left behind after packing up and leaving, traces of the final seven suppers or so (multiplied by the number of people taking off).

With so much attention paid to food, there is scant evidence from the same time period of bottled drinks on the menu. This is where our progress has come to the rescue and made the landscape complete, turning it into a gourmet feast for the discerning eye. Amidst the metal meals metabolizing from the elements, matching brown glass is normally scattered in equal measures. Some beer bottles are still intact, while others have recycled their shape after being lobbed from a pick-up (perhaps inspired by the open door, or window, policy for dumping apparently already in place). Now, the mildly surprising thing is that this binging almost always takes place in the exact spot where those meals were once devoured, where the ruined foundations of our culture rests; rarely even ten yards off the mark.

Much can perhaps be read into this complete dining experience on landscape subsistence. Suffice to say that the past, misinterpreted or not, obviously leads by example. It seems fair to assume though that the pioneers and later explorers were leaving land they never ever thought would be of further or future use; it was spent, it’s purpose exhausted, fit for neither living nor scant leisure. In those days, there was, this in defense of their littering, a persistent belief in greener and greener pasture that rejuvenated itself through movement, by appropriation, exploitation and abandonment, not by cultivation and care, what has become known as sustainable development. The drunken stupor that launches these fragile missiles onto the land is thus an ignorant burp, indigestion of knowledge, an acidy gulp of the past, and it is heartburn for the future.

The Silver Lining

Further to the purpose of this blogging, I should note that the efforts of the week, about to be recounted, resemble a motorized reenactment of Lewis and Clarke more than a concerted targeting of residency work, in the sense of an already-been-there-and-done-that accomplished with sound prior knowledge of places. The problem is that the working idea often precedes the land, and, alas, one does not always find what one is looking for -- and, as oftentimes is the case, rather obstinately so. For the simple joy of experience, crossing the horizon without a clue as to what it continuously unveils is a journey of justifiable choice. But if the goal is to do work, which arguably falls under the laborious quest of making sense of these impressions, or rather formulate impressions into expressions, it sometimes helps to guide the gaze somewhat and balance the act of not knowing with what lies ahead to make some headway. Again, this is where this blog may or may not come in handy.

So the first tour of the week took the established autoroute (100 miles or so) around the Silver Island Mountains, which comprise Wendover’s immediate neighbor to the north-northeast. Unfortunately, as I puffed along the salt flats, few signs related to the meanings I was seeking in the environs popped into view, but the landscape and the weather made up for much of this disappointment. To get to the proverbial Floating Island in the flooded season, it seems entirely possible to drive down this road, and then a branch, to get very close. Some muddy trekking, perhaps coupled with some modest wading, would most likely make landfall. However, I did not try and kept the boots covered in the old mud cakes.

I pressed on to the Donner-Reed pass and took the bike to the very tip of Crater Island. Along this route, you pass an abandoned mining operation with a very fetching collection from the rusty Americana auto catalog. On the way back, as the sun was setting, I committed the ultimate sin for a photographer. Somewhat frustrated by lugging a piece of metal the equivalent to an 8x10 and a Bogen 3221 around all day, without finding a reason to set up, I ran to the cliché and sadly fired away a roll to make up for all the extra sweat spent on photo equipment. I have honestly seen the result before, both before and after processing, but I have come to realize that these sour eye candy shots infused with nostalgia and crimson palettes are really just a way of justifying photography when there is really no other reason for it.

Near the highest and foremost point on Crater Island, there is a relatively fresh and deep hole dug in the ground in search, I presume, of metals. But more curiously in the midst of this relatively remote wilderness (we’re well into in 4x4 country by now as the “road” was quite rough) was a new dumpsite of fresh debris that seemed out of place in more than one way. Not being much of a dumpster diver but always curious (maybe that’s why we match, Jina?), I wandered around amidst a warped-by-the-sun record collection of Jazz singles and other windswept items from a very urban life. There were almost new and very fashionable Liz Claiborne (?) shoes -- several pairs in all -- that belonged to a petite woman. Her scattered garments, what I would term flashy club wear without sounding like an old fart, completed the wardrobe. There were also items of a more masculine yet still youthful nature, including copies of National Geographic, ice-climbing mittens and REI shorts in male sizes, but the interest in landscape custodianship these items usually advertise did not seem to have prevented their wasteful migration into their image. It was like an outdoor catalog shoot had gone bad. A pack of Gillette Mach 3 razor blades, some left unused in their holder, dated the find to no more than 2-3 years ago (pending carbon dating, that’s the best I can do). Not only were the items peculiar, their final resting place was also incredibly remote, well away from anywhere anyone with the intent to dump their discarded belongings would normally venture. Seeking answers to my questions, I pilfered an intact 1.44 MB floppy left behind. After cleaning my data treasure, which seemed mechanically sound in every way, I was sad to find that it would not mount. It’s always so disappointing when the time capsule breaks.

O’ Blogger Where Art Thou?

I’m finally back in Wendover Unit, after skirting the Great Salt Lake and its various, mountainous ranges this week. I’ll write some more details of people, places and things encountered tomorrow. The, or rather one, idea of this blog is to provide a personalized, topographic record that future residents may tap into to better and certainly quicker get acquainted with the various features of the region: what one may or may not find there (when it becomes here) that is marked on no map, as it may either come or go with the seasons, or remain an idiosyncratic trace, so hard to locate, upon the impressionable psyche. (The Blogger posting “software” allows for searches. It will thus be possible to enter through the backdoor with key words.) After traveling a few hundred miles the last few days, I sure wish there had been more mysterious and intriguing clues left behind by those that passed before, things and anecdotes that belong to the minutiae on the ground, in addition to the broad strokes of history plaques, map legends and other official versions of what makes land useful -- i.e. so full of marks that often go unnoted but rarely unnoticed. A collection, then, of tidbit fragments for the imagination, not a comprehensive filter for perception.

Bouldering Update

Tested the new V topography yesterday. The place has promise, but, alas, it’s not exactly a discovery for the pages of Rock and Ice, or even the Salt Lake crowd (they have Little Cottonwood Canyon). It is, however, the only solid rock found within easy driving distance and that counts for more than something. None of the problems found were particularly three-star classic, but overall great for a moderate workout. The setting: five stars! Recommended for anyone obsessively inclined to spend time in the vertical, even if it is just a few feet off the ground in the case of this, unnamed place.

The Grand Tour

I had a long day: got back just before 10 and after dark. Drove the dirt road from the Bonneville speedway to Lucin, 47 miles of washboards and pebbles. Crawling along at 10-15 miles per hour in an old car with no shocks, the trip was painful and scary on more than one level -- but the rewards, in terms of shots and views, were ripe.

The area between The Silver Island Mountains (these border the salt flats) and the Pilot Peak range used to be a Special Weapons Area for the army, and the USGS aerial photography map from 1972 shows a target area neatly framed as a bull’s eye with several concentric circles and long lead-in lines for the planes to stay on target. Although the overall shape of the bombing objective is only clearly discernible when one keeps the cartography in mind, the circles were still barren and smack in the middle a sizeable crater housed some rusty, and empty, shells. It looked like they had been torched open and defused, not dropped. This larger, inner circle was littered with many smaller metal pieces, some from bombs, others possibly from various items placed in the area. Directions: Take the road to Leppy Pass, turn right by the maintenance building and stay on the road highest on the Silver Island Mountains hillside. Continue along this road for about 1-1.5 mile and turn left on a trail, the first one, where you see an underground bunker and concrete foundations for what most likely was an observation tower. The center of the bull’s eye is at the end of the trail, a few hundred yards down the hill.

Stopped by a fenced-in watering hole further up the road and dead fish were floating around the edges; about 10 in total. The water level was high due to the rain, so either someone fished with dynamite or something else is going on. A couple of birds were ducking and diving, but none of them, nor other animals, had started eating the fish, which had not yet decomposed. Of course, seeing these fish up close, and recognizing the darker stripe along the side of their body, I realized that this is the same kind as the one found in Blue Lake; i.e. it’s not trout but a bass-like fish of some kind. (Excuse the ignorance.)

Finally made it to Lucin after additional stops and never saw the Sun Tunnels (by Nancy Holt), as the sun was already setting by then. The town was never much more than a stop on the railway line -- now it is completely abandoned without a single wholesome ruin -- but the “oasis,” as they call it, is intact, albeit very overgrown. The pond is fed with water from a pipeline originating in the Pilot Range to the southwest. It served as a watering hole for the steam engines of the last century and supported in its heyday a small community around the edges. A sign posted by the “oasis” mentioned that the town was long abandoned until a group of retirees returned, presumably in the 1980s, to live out their days on this desolate expanse that borders the salt flats in the east. All of them grew up in Lucin at the turn of the century. They came back, as friends, to stay on until the early 90s, when the last person left and the place was once more devoid of habitation, this time probably for good.

The Weekly Show

Watching the dryer spinning, my head took a similar turn looking at and reading the local broadsheet, The High Desert Advocate. Produced by what must be the old method of cutting and pasting film, rather than in Quark or InDesign, the printing screen appears to be below 85, if possible, and the typography, well, quite random. Instead of eradicating widows and orphans, the paper appears to willfully maximize them by using large fonts in narrow columns. The result of course is that they use about 4 times more space and pages than the content would normally cover. Never mind tracking and kerning; leading and typefaces also change throughout. (This is not snobbery, simply economy.) Particularly charming is the erection of a public scaffold in the form of published police reports, which run like direct-printout data in a mono spaced font. When, where and what from this column is followed up on another page, with the same, consistent style sheet for once, that informs the public of any arrests. Here we learn, for example, that Rafael Mariani Sangermano was double booked for “Basic Speed Rule” and “D. U. I First Offense.” He was born March 21, 1979. This flogging is pretty much reflected in the tone of the content; a few samples will suffice to illustrate the inner calm of high desert life:

The page 3, half-page, column “Letter from Ely” by J. K. Jones (M. D., if you believe it after the below) makes a strong, and certainly informed, case for nuclear diplomacy in his assessment of the unstable situation in Iraq:

“…It is really funny to me that now the Iraqis, once the murder, rape, persecution is gone, how they want the US out quickly so that tribal chieftains and frantic clerics can start fighting and find a new Saddam. Maybe they should have just dropped 10 or 12 Big Boys and cleansed the surface…”

And the paper’s editorial certainly makes some profound endorsements for the various West Wendover city council players (never mind grammar and punctuation in the editorial quotes below):

“Mike Miera for instance was not wrong about the city manager because of quality of his candidate he was wrong because he was corrupt and evil.

Lore Cook was not wrong to work for a new city attorney because the current one is the best around. She was wrong because she was a megalomaniac.

And Dian Symes is not wrong about her opposition to the Standby and Service charge she is wrong because she is a megalomaniac and corrupt and evil.”

A more local item mentions that late lawmen will receive late honors, in the form of having their names added to a police memorial. Among the heroes dug out from the old archives are four from the last century; one in particular seems to have met a particularly horrible end in the arguably dithering line of his duty:

“William J. Kelley, 35, a Lander County deputy sheriff who was ‘stabbed through the heart’ by a woman in Austin in 1876 in a mysterious attack the local newspaper described as ‘a very complicated case.’”

And there you have it: foreign policy, local politics, and heroic history rolled into a few pages of scattered black ink.

Bouldering

This evening, heading back from the Blue Lake area, I found a sweet bouldering spot. Located just after the Blue Lake turn off, but going right instead of left coming from Wendover, the area should host at least 20-30 quality problems of varying difficulty. It’s just as good as Mecca, north of Vegas, in my view (but then again, Mecca wasn’t exactly a holy shrine for the boulderer). The rock is Hueco style and the view is Buttermilks!

Blue Lake

Spent the day in the Blue Lake area. The weather was better than promised -- only sporadic showers interrupted the shooting schedule. All in all, quite a productive day with some good views captured in the marshes (at least that’s what they are now) east of the Blue Lake and further south toward the Goshute reservation. There was even time for some skinny-dipping in the Lake, which holds a very comfortable temperature (apparently also after prolonged rain and unseasonably cold temps). Spotted several fat trout in the lake; the biggest around 3 lbs. Surprisingly none of them were particularly afraid and swam leisurely around in shallow water even after they had returned the gaze. I guess fishing is not allowed and that they are used to the scuba divers regularly swimming among them. As I write, the rain is falling quite heavily again. Wendover must have broken all records for the month of May in a matter of days. Used the mountain bike on the jeep trails today; it is actually much faster, and certainly more flexible, than driving. And there is, of course, less chance of getting stuck in the mud. Which reminds me; I need to do some laundry. (PS: The crawling connection obviosuly swallowed this last night. That provider guy needs to spend less time on the golf course.)

Home on the Range

Stopped by the Bonneville speedway (on my way to Leppy Pass) on a rainy and stormy afternoon, looking for shots that all washed away. While admiring the bullet ridden BLM sign that gives the racing history of the salt flat, another car pulled in: a tricked out Honda Civic with California plates. The guys were late teens, or early twenties, both in blood red T-shirts, and immediately voiced their excited approval of the “plugged out” sign, which actually is rather unplugged except for a few bullets left lodged in the soft metal.

My business done, I strayed a couple of hundred yards down the road, framing the landscape into potential panoramas. That’s when the first bullets started flying, as the kids had drawn their handguns and were busy adding to the punctuation on the sign, sending spouts of salt water into the air when their Wild West grammar tunneled through. Now, there is something quite disconcerting about being within range when two youths enjoy the sporting life of the ghetto to this extent, especially when these guns were presumably not of the 2nd amendment variety, but rather the kind that is, probably (in the livid imagination that is born around ricochets), pried from cold, dead hands. Anyways, formal legalities aside, bullets rarely care to notice this difference in where they came from.

(The history of the bill of rights is quite interesting; it wasn’t so unalienable at first, rather a reluctant compromise to get the constitution ratified. The first two amendments, since stricken, actually concerned pay for the notables that invoked these rights, which makes for a slightly different list of priorities than the current 1, 2, 3…)

On my wanderings around Wendover, I have come across the usual western landfills cum shooting ranges, sporting spent shells and cans with corresponding bullet holes in unequal ratios (because no sharp shooting badges are ever won at these outings). But, of course, anything and everything goes as the cartridges pop, from innocent rocks to all sorts of household debris; all sentenced to be wasted. A firm and recurring favorite, however, is evidently beverage containers. For obvious reasons, this is a several-birds-with-one-stone scenario that fuels the entire session both with trigger happy, if blurry eyed, enthusiasm and neat exploding effects upon projectile impact. Show me a can of Budweiser in the middle of nowhere and I’ll show you a bullet hole.

Abandoned cars, especially, are apparently irresistible to the gun-nut pounding round after round after round into the chassis, as if to write off the VIN number with a dot matrix lead stencil. Maybe it’s the sheer barn-door size of this marksman’s bull’s-eye that makes it so damn attractive, or the fact that one can imagine, Hollywood style, the car moving for some expert panning and follow-through, even though the rims are already halfway into the desert floor and the only passengers are tumbleweeds. There is certainly no RIP parking space for a rusty vehicle left in the desert.

Or how about all those shot-holed road signs? At least the ones with deer or elk, or those with any other animal kingdom silhouette illustrating a crossing, carry a certain authenticity for automobile-bound hunters, although this sort of road kill must be driving the various Departments of Transportation absolutely mad. Perhaps the renderings are far too authentic: the camo brigade first attack the curbside in good faith, only to retreat in shame with bland metal sheeting to swallow with their pride. People have, when aided by alcohol and long, boring hours on post, actually fired on red tractors in the hunting season. But any sign goes, it seems, and the imperative of the iconography is questioned in rhetoric with a rivaling economy. Stop! Bang! Yield! Bang! It’s like a juvenile duel of the tongue-tied, kindergarten banter with authority. Instead of just rebelliously driving through without the requisite full halt and 3-second wait, the shotgun gunners in their seat-belt recliners screech to a halt at a safe and, one would at least hope challenging, distance to answer back with sharp bursts of explosive tantrums.

As common as this violation of the actual traffic code is, it does not really stand up to the drive-bys that preceded Compton so long ago and introduced the sport of senseless poaching to a mechanically accessible nature. Back in the old days, they had luxury trains puffing through the landscape to decimate the buffalo. Nowadays, the pick-up truck, powering on all wheels, enter into the hinterlands with guns blazing out of the open-to-the-outdoors windows. A deer staring into the customary, multiple headlights is probably also staring down a barrel. Reports of such sojourns usually leave a trail of injured or dead animals behind that are targeted for the pleasure of shooting alone; the hunter and gatherer figure of masculine prowess has been replaced by a macho psychopath driven by the desire for senseless death and destruction. The nature drive-by is obviously one of the finest emerging customs of the American gaming tradition.

None of this has been lost on the photographic biographers of the mythical American West, a frontier apparently drawn in the sand at high noon on dusty high streets. Richard Misrach first offered an ironic Bravo! in his documentation of the bombing ranges used by the military, and later the cancerous fallout from the more inaccessible, except via downwind, nuclear proving grounds further south in Nevada. Among his many cantos, there is also the so called Playboy series that metaphorically seeks to illustrate how one manly magazine, left in the desert, was penetrated with bullets, leaving various facets of American culture reserved for sheer pornographic delectation riddled with the power of violence. And then there’s Mark Klett’s meticulous Polaroid inventory of the Saguaro, which is also an impressive taxonomy of mutilation and annihilation -- scars from bullets sadly showing evidence of healing in a living “thing.” The sparse, upturned branches around a central trunk lend this cactus it’s anthropomorphic shape, akin to the one recognized by Mormons in the, for them, welcoming Joshua Tree, but instead of greeting the promised land, Klett’s Saguaro morgue sort of mark a descent into this gun-toting torment where everything, standing in for a prickly but shapely everyone, is apparently fair game.

Recently there has been much written about the American predilection toward violence. Historians have found that, cumulatively, their work from the last decade has pointed in a direction that maps violence as the American way. Afraid to confront the right to bear arms, to avoid the apparent confusion it has caused with a right to kill (11,000 plus per year), the treatment of this cultural trait has been reluctant and piecemeal, a stone best left unturned -- as it turns out, far too often, to be a tombstone. Still a national fervor driven by an unfortunate mix of fear and patriotism seems to believe that the Bowling that took place just before Columbine did indeed produce a flawless strike, a perfect score, not a gutter ball lobbed limply into its entrenched path of a society’s eventual decline.

Telling as the musings prompted by the Bonneville teens off to accomplish bigger and better things with their firearms may be, they do not really provide much ammo for the bigger picture. A few years ago, we drove down from Mt. Lemmon toward Las Vegas and set off, late in the afternoon, on a dirt road to find a place to pitch the tent for a night. Coming over an incline we were met with gunfire. Ahead a team of two from the very head of the family unit was wielding handguns in the wilderness and practicing to keep their gated community safe. Sporting matching pastel polo shirts, as my memory recalls, it would not be surprising if their flashy “pieces” were actually engraved with His and Hers. Nearby the requisite Jeep was parked. What is worrying about this homely picture, much more so than stray delinquents playing skitters on a salt lake (their direction and contact is at least likely to change), is the ingrained currency of guns within the core American values this couple was, on every observable surface, emblematic of. Unlikely to win favor with the Sierra Club, or the crimson Hallmark crowd, it was nevertheless a perfect picture postcard from the center of a gated-community nature that does not confuse land with country, and treats what comes into the gun-sights outside a narrow, enclosed definition of value a target. The holey, apparently not holy, landscape around here bears ample evidence of the ruin this armed mindset has caused.

The Flood

I guess weather is always part of the experience, but this must be the wettest spell within modern times for Wendover, a veritable flood is soaking up the flats. I went out to South Base with Pat from Simparch this morning and everything off the roadway is mud, mud and mud, deep sinking mud. The rain stopped for an hour or so this morning but now it’s back on all horizons, great sweeping sheets of blue. Yesterday was the same, wet and windy with light meter readings in the seconds for ISO 12. That's like DARK for those not keen on EV. Only one sunny day without the flood so far and it came, of course, before the flood. Getting much done has been impossible, as water does not mix well with coated lenses and bellows, nor do tripods float. There has been much scouting around for locales and the shooting list has advanced, but the actual frames recorded remain the same as two days ago. Frustrated by the foresight of mostly recording a dark and lackluster desert, shrouded in this rising lake of reflections (I guess an aesthetic concern about color made worse by my only choice of Fuji Velvia), I consulted the oracle at weather.com about the future buoyancy of my project. The next 10 days does not exactly call for packing of the Gore-Tex, only partly cloudy days that must be put to extra good use. Imagine that, a few days into the blog and I am reduced to talking about the weather. Nice.

Today May 08 Rain / Thunder
Fri May 09 Scattered T-Storms
Sat May 10 Scattered Showers
Sun May 11 Showers
Mon May 12 Partly Cloudy
Tue May 13 Showers
Wed May 14 Showers
Thu May 15 Scattered Showers
Fri May 16 Partly Cloudy
Sat May 17 Partly Cloudy

(The average rainfall for May is 0.82 inches. Ha, ye amateur rain gods of the past.)

Crop circles?

Matt and I wondered about the large, as in absolutely huge, concentric circles seen on the USGS map/aerial photo of the area just east of Wendover. They belong to the first attempt at distilling potassium chloride, or potash, from the salt flats by the Solvay Processing Company, which commenced operations in 1916. Operating out of a headquarter at Salduro station on the Western Pacific Railroad, some ten miles east of Wendover, the company dug a series of circles to serve as a distillation and evaporation system; brine flowed into the canals and was pumped inwards as it got more and more concentrated. Today (I passed by yesterday) the original station is removed and only the scattered foundations of several large buildings remain. Spot the rusty machinery seated on top of a sizeable mound and the circles are just to the southeast, invisible as geometry from the ground.

How fast, far or high?

According to BLM records, the Bonneville Salt Flat is the home of record attempts along several axes: speed, length and height. Famously, there are the three annual speed events that take place August through to October. The most frequented, Speed Week, draws thousands of participants. There’s also the Utah Rocket Club launching its amateur space program into Wendover orbit. Crowd count for this event reaches the hundreds. Finally, there’s the Utah Archers that point their arrows into the great white nothingness, launching a vector of length. Sadly, at last available count only 22 people bothered to show up and share the joys of simple science -- power mixed with the right trajectory angle -- compared to hundreds and thousands admiring rocket technology, traveling vertically as well as horizontally. Records are relative, and each to their own, but this urge to measure ourselves against a white blank space suitable for inscription seems to be a popularity contest for the latest technologies.

Testing, testing…1, 2, 3…

This weekend the car racers were out on the old airstrip, painfully pushing their slightly modified and chromed-up vehicles to high-pitched crescendos. Bright traffic cones made up the race track in a tight, spiraling pattern that every so often saw a vehicle carve up some tarmac in a plume of out-of-control smoke, leaving rubbery skid marks in place of a near wreck. Not so much a race, really, as a trial for limits set by each driver and vehicle combination, this boyish testing of power and prowess seemed quite appropriate for Wendover, which, when one thinks of its checkered past, is a place for tests and experiments that have never quite blossomed into maturity here; they were usually, when here, imagined complete elsewhere. Watching another noisy weekend warrior conjuring the Indy 500, or the Le Mans, while dodging the guiding cones, this continued history of trial and error fuelled by a misplaced imagination recalls the rumble of bombers that, in the 1940s, first occupied this nothingness for target practice aimed primarily at Germany and Japan.

(Thanks, for much of the below info, to Erik R. Bluhm and Mark Sundeen of Great God Pan, previous CLUI residents, who compiled such a good read –- read yesterday evening -- in “Salt Desert Tales” after their stay here: greatgodpan.org; number 14.)

Place then becomes something or somewhat of a precursor, a place for another time and space, both ahead and behind, as its moment of glory has already passed once retroactively recognized. When the Allies finally got their hands on the German V-1 (V for Vengeance) flying bomb during WW II and set out to build a copy, it was tested, under the cover of BJ-2, just across the sands here, within view. The observation bunker for the launches is still intact, in a befitting concrete shell. Although eventually considered weapons grade and entered into production, the war ended before the BJ-2, or Buzz-bomb, was deployed and put to service. By that time, the Germans had already built another, better version called V-2, and Von Braun, their lead scientist who later, post-war, was to become an American researcher and developer, had started work on what would lead to intercontinental missiles. Wendover sort of hovered in a non-place vacuum -- throughout -- that rather anachronistically pursued its programs; a copy, paste and finally cut of other preoccupations, dictated by events unfolding elsewhere.

Maybe this is why its affiliation with the training of the 509th, which would drop the Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan, is so prevalent in the Wendover identity records on the Utah side. (Nevada, the city of West Wendover, has casinos and history as a value proposition is muted by its irrelevance to the constant clinkering of slots; history’s jackpots are already won.) Here the stakes of official participation are much higher and a niche on the world stage seems more assured for this lowly and lonely outpost of the paradigms that set time: Wendover, or at least the Utah side of East Wendover, was there that day when the mushroom cloud lifted. The current informational airport display and the “Historic Airfield” markers that dot the off ramp and the high street from the Utah side (although the first one off the I-80 going West is knocked flat either by accident or what looks more like purpose) invoke this distant spectacle of the Enola Gay as its very own landmark. While at Wendover, however, these planes were just busy dropping replica dummies of the atom bombs (assembled in nearby buildings) for improved accuracy, again enacting a sideshow dry run for the events that would later leave their sad craters on another continent and influence world events for our foreseeable future.

This is not at all, of course, to lament that the first unfunny duo of Fat Man and Little Boy (who does not think of Laurel and Hardy when the pair is mentioned?) missed Wendover or that the first flying bomb did not use the coveted airstrip as a boomerang base. Rather, it points to a distinct difference between East and West, between a desire to restore the past and a dream of the future, swirling dust and spinning dice. Each side of the border has chosen its city limits according to what may at first seem diametrically opposed agendas, yet they both wallow in the present moment none can fulfill; West with the odds stacked against it, East haunted by ghostly barracks.

Gold crawl?

Did some taxi service today, on the outskirts of SLC, for someone who had run out of gas. As always, it’s worth the time for the story alone and I learnt how to mine gold with dynamite – drilling patterns and explosive dosages. It’s nice to know. Of 14 claims, the richest was yielding 12 ounces of gold per ton of mass removed and refined, through melting. At $350+ per ounce at the moment, one can only wonder why that old and beaten Ford 150 ran out of gas…

Infinity focus

I had to focus the camera on infinity today. It’s one of those all manual models, which mounts the lens in a barrel that must then be turned to infinity for the focusing knob to match its already set distances. (Focusing can also be done with a ground glass.) Not without irony, the lens pointed southeast from the unit, across the salt flats toward the red camera obscura put in place by a previous CLUI resident -- and beyond that what seemed like the curvature of the earth, clouds meeting the land. I forget the actual math, but infinity in optical lens-design terms is the focal length X number of times. So I fixed the ground glass on the camera obscura, with its rigid box outline in weathered red, and eventually found infinity with the help of an 8X focusing loupe. It was a great philosophical moment for photographic nomenclature and ontology: the distant camera obscura coming into sharp focus at infinity, on the ground glass seen through the loupe, against a receding horizon ripe with mirages.

Danger Cave

The Danger Cave, about half a mile further toward Wendover, has been subject to the same iron bars as the Jukebox cave. Here, alas, there’s no gap in the defenses; the cave, however, looks like it is/has been the subject of an archeological excavation. Wooden steps descend from the entrance toward trenches complete with aluminum ladders, and there appears to be some sort of markings inserted between the sediments. But that’s all guesswork and a report simply for the records…

[As it turns out, Danger Cave is indeed listed in the Utah rock art directory. Petroglyphs in the Hogup cave futher north are dated 2000 years back in time, but there is no mention, in the literature consulted, of what's found in Danger Cave, or when it is believed to be from. One can rightfully speculate, with plenty of geological evidence found in the hill sides all around Wendover, that the cave was once prime lakefront real estate.]

[[As it further turns out, the Danger Cave was once part of a state park, called, you guessed it, Danger Cave State Park. A map of the area from 1953 clearly outlines the environs around the cave as a state park. Finally, all the mysterious pieces that currently has a pretty unassuming cave opening barring visitors without authorization, and a key, are falling into place.]]

Jukebox Cave

Went to the jukebox cave today. To keep people out, the entrance has been blocked with iron bars, welded to iron rods drilled into the rock. But someone had very slightly bent aside the bars in the bottom left hand corner. If I were to speculate, I would say that someone with a 32-inch waist or less (even slightly more for a tighter fit) could quite easily slip in and out. Possibly maybe go in feet first and come out head first, if you, against this iron will, were to perform this stunt of breaking into and then out of the prison. The concrete slab poured to entertain the troops during WW II is still intact and someone has marked its outline with a bright, orange tape, anchored in the corners by rocks. Perhaps one should note, for clarity, that the slab itself was not the actual entertainment, only its platform. Other than that, there was very little to see in the dark and one could instead ponder if Plato would have favored bars on his cave, too. (Bring a car jack in case of an emergency.)

Orientation

Orientation. That's what Matthew Coolidge called our meet and greet arranged for upon my arrival at Wendover. But orientation implies a sort of establishment of bearings, an index finger following the compass and dividing it up into 360 distinct degrees of arguably circumspect yet very practical certitude. What I got on our exclusive tour was more like H.G. Wells in a rental car, that is to say the whole time machine itinerary on a four-cylinder budget. Wendover is, based on first impressions, an outlandish crossroads of time and space, or even, as the Christian fellowship just about next door to the Unit proudly announces, a desert highway straight to God. As we zipped around the airbase and the town, however, the usual saying of mysterious ways certainly traced our brief stops in a sort of warped and winding pattern that touched upon pivotal moments of American history and anecdotes of Cadillac convertibles getting stuck in the mushy salt. Being so close to the Bonneville speedway, where speed is of the essence (for our records), the acceleration of time and space that Paul Virilio has attributed to a networked digitization seemed to be quite neatly condensed into the orientation route, on the ground. How do you, possibly, reconcile the Enola Gay legacy with the Jailbird prop from Con Air, now sitting side by side; or munitions bunkers filled with casino records, and protected by the same mounds; or the eat-my-fallout graffiti of Richard Misrach fame with the army collectibles of paramilitary nostalgia, now housed in the same depot? Only Wendover may tell…

Welcome

Welcome to the blog for residents at The Center for Land Use Interpretation's Wendover, Utah unit. Inspired by the many scribbles in the notebooks left behind here, this blog will hopefully serve as a more public insight into how the experience of interpreting the vast and varied land around here unfolds for both first-time and seasoned visitors. In other words, the blog may be considered a project journal of sorts that seeks to studiously inform and, perhaps, lightheartedly amuse those interested in the the Wendover strip, its environs and the work undertaken by CLUI residents. After all, and in all seriousness, the residence unit balances precariously between the atom bomb dust and a lush casino rainforest, so do not be surprised if some rather confused ramblings appear. As Jean Baudrillard wrote and the Matrix later voiced, via scripted ventriloquism: "Welcome to the desert of the real."