The no longer Great Salt Lake

from the New York Times

Don't ask me to find it anytime soon, but somewhere in the darkest of corners in a back room there's a b&w picture of me, maybe ten years old, waist deep in water, holding a towel up to my stinging eyes. We were on our way home from California when we stopped at Salt Lake City, and, as planned, I took a swim. So did my sisters, but I was the only one dumb enough to "go under."

When I did, my eyes took a beating--hence, the towel. If I remember right, mom and dad didn't pull on suits that hot afternoon. They waited on what I remember to be some kind of bleachers or something, where they somehow got me that towel. Honestly, I do remember crying, probably from shock at the water's being so unpleasant to a guest, a boy, who meant no harm.

It was the Great Salt Lake back then, all caps. Truth be told, Brigham Young had never even seen it when he began to lead his people, the Ladder Day Saints, far, far west, out of harm's way and into a blessed realm he couldn't help but call Zion. The story goes that Young heard a couple of adventurers go on and on about this amazing salt lake just beyond the Rocky Mountains, a gorgeous place, an immense, dreamy island of emerald around an inland sea hidden between mountains and unending killer deserts.

But now, Salt Lake City--and Ogden and other Utah municipalities--is in trouble because the Great Salt Lake no longer deserves the adjective. It's shrinking badly, no longer the dream it must have been when Brigham Young determined he'd found the place.

Because the lake is as shallow as it is, any decline is clearly verifiable. Endless lakebed goes naked when the water levels go down even a foot or two. What's worse, what's thereby exposed altogether too easily becomes a cloud of really evil sentiment, toxins like mercury and arsenic, relics of mining activities now long shut down even if their refuse isn't.

Right now, the Salt Lake doesn't seem like a dream. I'm not sure if anyone swims in its waters. Even Utah's staunch conservatives now clearly recognize that for far too long state government has simply looked away when anyone suggest that significant damage was being done to the environment, to its own Great Salt Lake.

What's happening in Utah is one piece of a huge problem in the American west, problems with water. 

It rained here again last night. Not much, but rain has come so regularly than it's been a week or so since the ground in our garden has been dry. The greens are extraordinary right now, and the weeds are loving it. 

Maybe a decade ago already, I remember reading thoughtful articles about how the armies of the future might just be going to war about, of all things, water. 

Such dark prophecies are getting less hard to believe.