Great Salt Lake sunset from Stansbury Island
As typical of this time of year, we were drawn west. Sunsets over Great Salt Lake in Autumn are much more vivid than they appear in these photographs.
It’s wild out there. The gulls swoop within a few feet of your head, the winds are always vicious, and the plume of unknown substances spewing from the stacks of the giant magnesium factory across the water makes you want to hold your breath.
A classic scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds…
My dog loves his frisbee out there. Not actually catching it, just running in circles with it dangling out of his mouth, flapping in the wind, the joy of being absolutely free and perhaps the hope of someday being able to let it go for a moment so it can be thrown. I love this episode about the West Desert by Scott Carrier, mostly for the sound of the golf balls being hit across the salt flats.
It’s crazy that this scene exists a mere 37 miles as the crow flies from my house. If you were to be plopped down into this spot, you’d have no idea an overwhelming chaos of civilization exists on the other side of these hills. The magnificent desolation of this place makes me ponder why I would ever need to go anywhere else. But then I want to go. I have a zillion unused SkyMiles burning a hole in my passport, but the whole impending climate doom thing has me feeling guilty for even thinking of non-necessity travel.
Great Salt Lake sunset from Stansbury Island
I wonder why that now I finally have a location independent work situation, I am staying put. Perhaps now that I don’t have to be here, I want to be here. I found plane tickets to London next week for only 40,000 miles and I entertain the idea of heading to Iceland or to the outer reaches of the Hebrides from there. I also found tickets to Munich for super cheap and think how maybe its not too late to continue my four-year streak to Dolomiti. Then I think about roaming around the Nevada desert and hunkering down in Bend for a bit and then I think about running to the shelter and rescuing a little puppy.
Dried cattail-looking grasses on the shores of Great Salt Lake
What I really want is a donkey though. I’m halfway through Christopher McDougall’s new book, Running with Sherman: The Donkey with a Heart of a Hero, and it has only intensified my love of donkeys not to mention living somewhere rural surrounded by the Amish…
Thanks for writing again. You can never go wrong rescuing a puppy or owning a donkey.