This time in Strangerville, people are giving Eli very annoying baby toys, gallows humor is our brand, and a story about an attempted swim in The Great Salt Lake. Listen on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Story

The Great Salt Lake, by Eli McCann (music by ⁠SalmonLikeTheFish⁠)

Production by Eli McCann & Meg Walter

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The Great Salt Lake

by Eli McCann

Over the years friends who didn’t grow up in the Salt Lake Valley like I did have asked me about The Great Salt Lake—about recreation, about my memories playing along its shoreline. “Yeah,” I’ve tried to explain. “The thing is, most people don’t make it out to the lake all that often.”

“Oh? Is it far away? Hard to reach? Restricted in some way?”

“No,” I clarify. “It’s none of those things. We just, I don’t know, we don’t really visit it.”

“Never?” they ask, surprised the way one might be to discover a Parisian hadn’t bothered yet to lay eyes on the Eiffel Tower.

Suddenly a memory will flash through my mind. “There was this one time . . .” I’ll begin to say. My voice will trail off. The image will become wavy.

I had never set foot on an island by age fourteen so when my Boy Scout leaders announced we’d be camping on one, I felt like I had just won an exotic tropical vacation to a place with swaying palm trees and ukulele music.

“Antelope Island,” we were told it was called.

Sure, it didn’t sound like “Aruba” or “Oahu” or any other word that conjures to the mind white sand beaches in front of never-ending blue waters the temperature of a comfortable bath illuminated by a setting sun silhouetting breaching mammals with mystical powers. But it was allegedly an island, nonetheless, and our imaginations allowed us to see whatever we wanted.

Yes, this was an actual, real island. One that belonged to us and our neighboring Great Salt Lake. Even better, this was an island two large vans packed with hormonal adolescents that smelled worse than the lake itself could access. Not by boat, but by car, somehow. Did this technically mean this wasn’t really an island? We didn’t ask that. No reason to risk spoiling the allure. 

That summer of 1998 we packed a trailer full of cheap mountain bikes, many borrowed from families around the neighborhood who had extra, and crammed ourselves and our hand-me-down camping gear into a couple of rickety vehicles pointed northward.

I’m sure I had seen the lake before this, but I couldn’t recall a time doing so up close. An hour or so after leaving home we departed the freeways of our budding civilization and made the quick journey across a causeway and toward the large brown mound of land dotted with bison and midges.

We ventured through the island’s dirt roads slowly, staring out at the vast lake, brimming up to the edges of the shoreline, reaping the ongoing benefits of a good snow run-off from mountains we could see on the other side of the water.

We arrived at Bridger Bay just in time to set up a small camp on the rugged beach and undercook a dinner. The salty winds began to blow toward us as the setting sun across the bay assisted the chaotic sands in blinding us, prompting our dutiful scouting troop to retreat under the protection of our cheap nylon homes.

It wasn’t more than an hour before my best friend Sam and I found ourselves holding the ceiling of the tent off our faces—our arms extended upward in a pushup position, fighting the wind that had easily collapsed our shelter in a way I still find humbling.

After the battle with the elements had raged an hour or two, we slinked through the tent and searched for a zipper in an attempt to peek out to investigate and locate our best neighbors for refuge. Instead of sturdy standing dwellings, we found, stretched across the beach, a dozen flattened bags half suffocating our fellow troopmates whose arms, it was clear, were similarly being used as last-ditch emergency tent poles.

I don’t think any of us slept that night, an inconvenience normally weathered alright by fourteen-year-olds. Our adult chaperones wore the experience on their faces and in their shoulders, physical manifestations lost on us and drowned away through our excited chatter about our island adventure we couldn’t wait to share as a war story, surely to be exaggerated over the years.

That afternoon we mounted our mountain bikes with tires inflated to varying degrees by the one leaking pump someone had been half wise enough to think to pack. We fought the winds, the midges, the sand. We meandered across narrow rocky trails, occasionally treacherous enough to turn the ride into a hike, our bikes packed onto our backs and leaving black grease stains that would never wash away from our shirts.

One of our troop leaders, Wayne, a childless man who no doubt wondered what sins he had committed to deserve any of this, carried bikes by the twos for those of us who eventually grew too fatigued and dehydrated to manage on our own, this, thanks to a combination of poor planning and the absence of grit.

I think our camping trip was supposed to last two nights, a fact our surprised parents surely tried to confirm late that evening when we boys were dumped onto our front porches by exhausted neighborhood dads who no doubt allowed the smells of our unshowered bodies to answer whatever questions anyone had about why they had pulled the cord on the whole thing.

For years we’d tell anyone who would listen about the time we survived the lake—that Great Salt Lake just down the street that we don’t seem to visit as often as a Parisian might a tower.

“Oh, it couldn’t be that bad,” my friend Daniel told me fifteen or so years after that camping trip when I regaled him with my miserable tale. He had just suggested we go to the lake for a swim. We had recently signed up for a distance triathlon. It was a spur of the moment sort of thing—done out of peer pressure. Neither of us had ever done a race like this before and neither of us had ever really done much lake swimming.

Our race would require us to swim in an icy reservoir and the internet cautioned us that traipsing through a large body of water in a thick wetsuit couldn’t be accurately simulated in a temperature-controlled pool with lines painted on a clean illuminated floor. No, we’d have to find some body of water nearby for a number of training swims. Daniel had suggested we give the giant lake not ten miles from town a try.

I told him this seemed like a bad idea to me, and I recounted my scouting story again in case he missed it the first time. The wind. The salt. The midges.

“I’m not suggesting we go camping on the island,” Daniel told me. “Let’s just head out there and try an open water swim.”

I ran out of excuses around the same time I started to wonder if I had exaggerated the harshness of the elements in my mind. Besides, even if I hadn’t exaggerated those things, it was possible that adolescent experience on the lake was an anomaly, more uncommon than breaching whales and white sand beaches.

We heaved our newly-purchased wetsuits, fresh out of the plastic bags in which they had arrived, into the back of Daniel’s vehicle. And then we set sail down I-80 toward Saltair, the half abandoned sometimes-used concert venue near the southern shoreline—a ghost, a reminder of a time when proximity to the lake and the recreational opportunities it possessed wasn’t wasted on the residents of our community for whom a pilgrimage to the lake was a cherished rite of passage. We figured if Saltair was a good enough place for our teenage grandmothers to dip their toes in the lake, it must be good enough for two novice swimmers looking for a place to take a dip.

Minutes later we parked in an empty lot down the road from the concert venue, just next to a small campground. This was early spring and a cold rainstorm from that morning had doused the shoreline and cooled the air to but a whisper above foggy breath. We pulled on our tight wetsuits and set off on a barefooted journey to the water’s edge where we anticipated a slapdash plunge and athletic swim.

The terrain between our car and the lake had moon-like qualities, disabling our depth perception and ability to decipher how far we’d need to walk. We stepped over sharp rocks and carcasses we couldn’t identify. We swatted away a critical mass of midges that had taken an interest in us.

Finally, our feet touched water, cold, but that’s what the wetsuits were for. Displaying a level of optimism that is funny to me now, we immediately pulled on our goggles and took a few cautious steps anticipating a steep drop of the lake floor and water depth that might be swimmable.

Our footsteps grew less cautious and slow as we proceeded, minute after minute, to trudge through the icy water that never seemed to extend above our ankles.

“Is the entire lake two inches deep and I just somehow never knew that?” I asked at one point.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen pictures of boats on this thing,” Daniel said.

Our swim turned into a hike the same way my Antelope Island bike ride had done until, after twenty or so more minutes, the water finally reached our knees and we decided it was time to try to swim it.

As we placed our faces in the water, our noses were filled with what we ignorantly assumed must have been sulfur. The intense salty taste reached the backs of our throats after forcibly clearing our sinuses and we pulled our heads out of the lake and expelled the water the way a geyser might shoot out steam.

“I had no idea it would be this salty,” I yelled.

“Do you think the lake got its name by being sassy?” Daniel responded.

We’d have to try a new technique for our swim, one which kept our heads out of the water entirely.

And so we swam, if it could be called that, our hands scooping mud from the lakebed, our faces pointed up toward the sky in an attempt to escape any splashing. The vastness of the lake and the emptiness of the surrounding terrain made it impossible for us to confirm whether we were actually going anywhere. After ten or so minutes of undisciplined thrashing, we forfeited to the lake and stood up to begin our long journey back to our car.

We trudged again through the water, which leveled up just above our knees, and then receded to our shins, and then to our ankles. By the time we reached the comparatively dry land, our feet were numb enough to no longer feel the pokes of the vast shoreline’s rocks.

When we arrived at our car, we realized we had failed to bring an airtight bag for our wetsuits—we’d have to make our drive back home with the dripping swimwear soaking the interior of the vehicle with the potent waters of The Great Salt Lake.

Just before we climbed in to drive home, I took one more glance across the lake, stretching far beyond where I could see. Off in the distance the brown mound of island where I had camped as a boy poked up around the green and blue waters. The winds rushing over the lake seemed to whistle.

The Great Salt Lake—this unrelenting, mysterious ancient sea—had now conquered me twice. I should have disliked the lake. I should have vowed to never return.

Staring at it now, the rays of a nearly setting sun made the water glisten and shone on a handful of gulls like a spotlight.

“What are you thinking?” Daniel asked me, noticing I had gotten lost somewhere in thoughts of boyhood adventures and a piece of Earth I seemed to be seeing for the first time.

“I don’t think I ever want to try to swim in it again,” I said. “Or camp on the island. Maybe this lake is just never going to be my playground.”

I shook my head and goosebumps ran up my forearms in a wave.

“But there’s no denying this place is breathtaking.”

~It Just Gets Stranger