asylum

 

 

The big canyon empties into the valley, blushing green and delirious in blossoming trees. The valley's confetti of glass and steel gives way to the refineries: endless loops and arcs of enamel and steam. Then the parched and decimated towns that have sprung from the leachwater and finally the stillness of another valley; this one less peopled and wrangled. 

Here the northeastern arm of the Great Salt Lake swings into the mouth of the Bear River and lays bare its throat of alkali fields, marshes, wetlands and grasses. There are 80,000 acres of carefully controlled wilderness here. Dikes and jetties corral the water up and down. In and out. It is marked asylum, safe haven, packaged respite.

In May, despite the broad heat, everything is still gold and dry from winter kill. Only the most slender green feet of the cattails have emerged, fresh and delicate and lost among the dead standing reeds from last summer. 

Leaving the highway is like shedding a rigid husk. Nebulous and stunned we move out of the car. A split second of aching and slamming silence and stillness. And then. Sound. Whirring and palpable sound. First from one broad streak of river and then everywhere, behind our foreheads, in our clothes. Sounds like gravel being shaken in a brass bell, electric sounds split open with water, shorting and roaring. Sweet musical sounds snagged on the nodding grass, fringed sound and hoops of sound. Mostly it is from unseen life. To stand in one place and move only your eyes you'd think it was the marsh plants themselves singing. Faeries among discarded plastic cups, shotgun shells, plastic cutlery. 

Birds abound- on purpose. With purpose. For this place lost among many thousand arid miles is an oasis for birds who live elsewhere. These birds stop through, eat, rest, surrender and move on. Sometimes they leave feathers and bones. Footprints. Mud cobbling. A few birds will stay on to breed and raise chicks, but eventually the magnet fibers thrill through their hollow bones and they move on with greater Purpose to wherever it is they Belong.

The names are beautiful, foreign. For desert dwellers all this water and taxonomy is otherwordly. Cinnamon teals. Yellow headed blackbirds. Cliff swallows. Great blue herons. White faced ibises. Canada geese. Plovers. Red necked stilts. American avocets.Great white pelicans.  Even the more familiar birds seem exotic here: magpies, common finches, gulls. Terns and sea birds rent the air and, like falling spades, part the water and dredge up carp like bread loaves. Scales shock against the sun.

The air is alive with birds and midges. Squinting into the horizon flocks and swoops of birds will tip into view, throw wide beams of light off their blinding plumage, then tip back, dissolve. Disappear. We arrived in the midst of a midge hatch. Cyclones and lunatic masses of mosquito-like insects rising from the cupped faces of clover.  These flies do not bite and tear. Not because they do not desire, but because they are made without jaws. The weight of them bends grass. Shivering and arcing columns of the bugs fringe the road like smoke signals. The noise, like warm hysteria, can be heard with the windows rolled up. Such a microcosm exploded.

Where the road spreads and stops a pavilion has been erected. Octagonal, fit with those plastic coated benches for addressing the marsh. But cliff swallows have taken over. Tiny birds, capable of lfying 46 miles per hour who spend eighty five percent of their furious lives in the air. The little mud gourds of nests have crept along the entire underside of the pavilion. Like soaring barnacles the swallows move in and out, calling and shifting, completely unafraid. The loudest sound we hard was the tap-tap of wings beating as we went to sit under the nests, not song, just air being shoved along. A moment of stillness, then the birds were back, bringing mouthfuls of mud and song to tack their nests together. The air was outrageous, disorienting, truly alive.

A sweep of dirt road clutches a central disc of wetlands in the center of the refuge. The rest cannot be entered by foot or on wheels. Twelve and a half miles is as much as you get to drive. It took us four and a half hours. We stopped every so often to let the midges alight on our elbows, to see pelicans knocks and bob against one another, to see herons spread wings wide as station wagons and heave themselves across still glass. The sun hit the water. Many little skies winked up from the ground. We rode a fine line of horizon, doubted how solid it was. Moved slowly so as not to slip out of time and place. We clutched each other every so often but didn't know why. We perched on the back of the car with a small sandwich in each hand and forgot to chew for long periods.

And then we re-entered the world. Returned to our clumsy bodies, moving hugely, anchored to the ground. We turned on the air conditioning, scanned the radio and then peered at each other with our brows drawn. Turned the radio off. Pointed our faces and our compass due north, tried to melt back into more familiar living world, the one bound to stillness, with decided gaping hole where bird song should be.