Terminal - A Great Salt Lake Story
This is a teaser for a much longer story coming in two weeks. If your interest in Great Salt Lake is piqued after this, stay tuned for the next installation.
Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake because her water will never run to the ocean. But this word, terminal — a word so hard and edged you could almost spit it out of your mouth — could describe the lake in other ways too.
In October 2022, Dr. Bonnie Baxter, director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, delivered an obituary for the lake. Like many other concerned residents of the region, she was acutely aware that without immediate intervention, Great Salt Lake would shrivel and die, affecting everyone from the people of Salt Lake to the birds who love her waters.
“Utah regrets the loss of this unique piece of its identity, as does the lake’s namesake, Salt Lake City,” Dr. Baxter says in the speculative obituary. “The state is still struggling with 7,706 employment casualties when the brine shrimp and salt extraction companies literally dried up. Also, one million tourists no longer visit Utah, since the closure of state and federal lands surrounding Great Salt Lake. With her death, Utahns now pay more for their water treatment, and the ski season is limited to just a few weeks. They also are suffering additional health costs from dust exposure and a spiritual loss of this cultural hub.”
Earlier that year, Dr. Baxter and several other colleagues published an emergency report through Brigham Young University laying out the dire situation Utahns had put the lake in. The lake was 19 feet lower than its natural level. It had lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area. If water use continued at the same rate, the report predicted, the lake had only five years before shriveling to a bone-dry alkaline memory and maybe only three years before entering a potentially ecologically unrecoverable low.
So when I say that Great Salt Lake is terminal, I mean her water never reaches the ocean and I also mean she has a known expiration date. But mostly I mean that Utahns and their lawmakers would have to be filled with pure delusion not to see her fate, not to bear witness to her suffering. And I wonder what it must be like to be so disconnected from the land that death and disappearance entirely lose their meaning.
