Now Playing: Sufjan Stevens, "Seven Swans", "All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands".

15 August 2009.

Following in the footsteps of the great Bilbo Baggins, I woke up later this morning than I meant to. On the morning of an adventure, waking up late is always a good sign of more mishaps to come. This particular morning, the mishap of waking up late was accompanied by dismal rain. While I dressed, a short sharp shower rattled on the leaves outside.

I went downstairs and ate breakfast with my parents. We had family worship, and then I packed lunch into a cooler. I loaded the paraphernalia necessary for the day's adventure into the back of the Buick: old newspapers, two very rusty shovels, an empty laundry detergent bucket, two ragged beach towels, a stack of CDs, my bag of odds and ends, bug spray, sun screen, and the cooler.

As I was loading the car, Sarah pulled up in her pickup truck. We added her belongings to the assortment already in the car: another rusty shovel, bug spray, a cooler, a sack full of provisions, a couple of textbooks, and an ill-fated pink plastic bucket. In the midst of our preparations, our third companion arrived in the back of her parents' car. Elizabeth added a wallet of CDs to our collection of junk.

After the appropriate farewells, and a stop to fill the tank of our faithful automobile, the three of us started out on our grand adventure.

Elizabeth sat in the front seat with me and "navigated". Sarah sat in the back seat and revised. We listened to an Indelible Grace CD, The Chieftains, and a mix of Tenth Avenue North and Switchfoot. We drove north, then west, then north again on I-35. The hour-and-a-half passed uneventfully. It was when we turned off I-35 onto Highway 60 that the adventure really began.

We were driving through green Oklahoma countryside--unnaturally green for this time of year. Dry field corn rattled in broad fields and tried to counteract the lushness of the grass growing in the pastures and ditches. We drove through small towns strung along the two-lane highway: Pond Creek, on the far side of a big old metal bridge, Lamont, and Jet. Each town with its big grain silo, its old houses with their broad porches, its school, its smattering of churches and convenience stores. We drove up and down over little hills. Ravines, pastures, plots of purple alfalfa, sorghum, and corn. Cattle and horses. We drove past windbreaks of enormous old trees, American elms and junipers stooped by the wind and hollowed out inside like caverns, their inner branches battered and bare, their outer branches making gaunt shells.

We met a couple of other mishaps during our trip, both of which took the form of brief thunderstorms.

Once we got to Jet, we drove around awhile before we figured out where we needed to be. We could see Great Salt Lake shimmering red and pale blue far away through dips in the trees. Google Maps was only useful to a point. We took a gravel road that branched off Highway 38. As the car bumped through the potholes, it startled a doe and fawn, which bounded off the road and stood to one side, staring. We also scared up a couple of armadillos. We found ourselves on the shore of the lake in a quiet grove of pecan trees.

Then we got back on Highway 38 and drove on until we came to the entrance of Great Salt Plains State Park. It took more winding around before we finally came to a car park and got out. We walked to the edge of the car park and looked down: there was the spillway. Two big concrete dams, with high concrete walls on either side, holding back the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River. Sarah and I had both come here as schoolchildren on field trips. It was smaller than I had remembered it being. Disappointing, particularly since everything is meant to be bigger on an adventure.

An enormous vortex of turkey vultures was hovering over the spillway, catching the heat rising from the concrete. Six cormorants and a big white heron were fishing on the edge of the spillway. Whenever the sun came out, the cormorants would stretch out their dark wings. A man was fishing with long rods from the wall that ran beside the spillway. Far below, in the dark green-and-brown pool between the first barrier and the second barrier, fish jumped out of the water. Sleepy splash and ripple. It was about eleven o'clock, but the morning was very quiet. The storm had left the air cool.

We carried snacks down from the car to the small playground. Elizabeth contributed clementines, Sarah contributed animal crackers, and I contributed bug spray. Ants swarmed on the ground. We sat under a big old mulberry tree and talked about children's books. Elizabeth bounced up and down on a see-saw with a chipped and flaking elephant on one side and a grinning horse on the other.

Fortified by our midmorning snack, we drove on around the lake. A swerved to avoid a big copperhead slithering across the road. We drove up to Highway 11, then turned back south into part of the wildlife refuge that borders the lake. Just as we pulled into the car park, a family with a couple of small children pulled in, too. They courteously let us go first. We walked around the Eagle Nesting Nature Trail, a lovely little loop, a mile-and-a-half or so.

We crossed a dry creek on a rickety bridge. We walked through a grove of wild catalpas: beautiful, strong old trees, their big branches writhing up like sea monsters' necks, rearing broad-leafed green canopies high overhead. Catalpas that have been allowed to grow freely like that are rare in the city.

We found a platform overlooking a bay with a telescope mounted on the railing. Birds were feeding and bathing out in the shallow water of the bay. White herons, egrets, great blue herons, small green herons, mallard ducks, ibises. Perhaps some spoonbills, too. We watched them through the telescope. Sleek silhouettes against the silver water, quick graceful actions, flick of beak and wing. The rising wind stirred our hair and ruffled the flat surface of the water.

We walked on, down the broad grassy path under the trees. Tiny tree frogs and grasshoppers bounced out of the way. Elizabeth spotted a couple of big toads. I mistook a water moccasin for a stick. It was shedding its skin, to Sarah's complete disgust. The wind, gathering strength, made sounds of rushing wings in the trees above us, willow trees, tamarisks, cottonwoods, sand plums. In the small marshes on our right, birds were feeding. Startled by our passing, they flew screaming into the air. Eerie cries of herons echoing in the woods.

We found a dragonfly as big as my hand. Smaller dragonflies with bodies like iridescent needles hovered over leaves. Sarah heard the thunder of hooves down in a muddy part of the swamp, and when we peered through the leaves, we saw another doe standing a little distance away, waving her ears at us. A little further on, Elizabeth saw a muddy pool frothing and writhing with baby snakes. Sarah and I were both jumpy and avoided every stick we saw lying on the path.

The path had been high and broad, grassy, built up on a dam through the marshy area, overgrown with willow trees. As we turned back toward the car, it began to run a little more uphill, and we found ourselves walking on gravel through groves of junipers. Under their feathery branches it was very still and aromatic. We walked on and on, through small sunny places where buffalo grass and bluestem and prickly pear cactus were growing, through a grove of cottonwood trees, and finally out into the car park again.

It was half one, and we were all quite hungry by now, so we took our lunches over to a picnic table beside a small green pond. I prayed, and we ate what we had in the coolers: sandwiches, peaches, and some Cadbury's chocolate that I'd brought along. Mosquitoes fluttered over the green water in swarms whenever a turtle decided to surface. Sarah and I fed the crusts of our sandwiches to red-eared turtles and bluegills swimming in the shallows. The wind moved gently in the big tree above us and rustled a thick stand of cattails across the water.

As we were preparing to leave, Elizabeth and I both saw something large and furry "humping" along the far shore. It disappeared behind the cattails. Then it stuck its face out of the cattails above the bank and looked at us quizzically. It was a raccoon! Raccoons are mostly nocturnal, so seeing one during broad daylight was very unusual. It delicately pattered down to the water and washed its paws. It paused a moment, stared at us again, and then turned tail and leisurely made its way back into the woods. We stood, staring at it, until it disappeared.

On the road again, we drove on a trail made specially for cars through the woods. Elizabeth flipped through Anna's CD case, laughing at the selection. Sarah read out the names of the marshes as we passed them: Little, Intermediate, and Big. Most of the marshes were dry, their deep bowl beds full of wild lotus and lily leaves gone brown at the edges like burned paper.

We hit the highway again and drove west. We drove through "hickville", a ridiculously disreputable town meant to be a lakeside resort and consisting mostly of battered old buildings painted bright pink and blue. Then we turned south. Drove through Cherokee, through fields of alfalfa, and then turned off onto a side road. This took us east again, back to the lake, to the selenite crystal digging area.

Because Great Salt Lake was formed by damming the Salt Fork of the river, an unusual geological formation occupies the southwestern corner of the area: 11,000 square acres of salt flats. Driving out onto the salt flats is a surreal experience akin to driving onto the surface of the moon. On either side the white shining salt lies sparkling, perfectly flat, so that the water to the northeast shimmers like a mirage, heat rising from the flats shimmering with the reflection of the water. Battered wooden posts mark the roadway.

Part of the flats have been designated as a public space for crystal digging. By some trick of the soil, the combined salt, sand, and clay form beautiful hexagonal crystals. These are usually right under the surface, in the first six inches or so of soil. Intrepid adventurers that we were, we had pledged never to return home until we had discovered some of the buried treasure. For that purpose, we had come thoroughly equipped. The two buckets, two towels, three shovels, and sun screen were all unearthed from the back of the car, and we set out onto the salt flats to dig.

The digging area of the flats looks even more eerie, in a way, than the untouched areas. It has been littered with shallow holes and small heaps of soil that sparkle where forgotten crystals have been exposed. The combination of holes and mounds gives the place the appearance of a meteor field. Other groups of people were dotted over the expanse. Redneck central, as far as we could tell.

We found a place and started to dig. The sun beat down onto our backs, and the powerful wind scoured over the unbroken expanse of sand and salt. Close to the ground, our voices sounded strangely covert, as though we were inside, because by contrast the wind was so loud in our ears when we stood up. At first we just hacked into the soil, but then we got the hang of it. Elizabeth and I would carefully overturn a small shovelful, and the three of us would each take a clod and begin to break apart the sand and clay. Embedded in the soil, the crystals flashed like glass. I sliced a finger open on one of them. We made a heap of crystals next to us. Unwashed, they looked like chunks of brown sugar.

We spent about an hour on the flats, though it didn't seem like that long. When our heap of crystals got big enough, we put it into Sarah's pink bucket and settled down to digging again. As soon as we took our hands off the bucket, though, an especially strong gust of wind came along. The bucket bucked off the shovel I had leaned on it, scattered our crystals all over the ground, and scudded away. The wind was so strong that it was going much too fast for any of us to catch it. We stood laughing helplessly, watching it as it scudded away from us. Far in the distance, it hit a mound of salt and bounced merrily into the air. In about five minutes it was out of sight.

We laughed ourselves silly, put the crystals into my bucket, and sank my bucket deep into a hole where it would be out of the wind. Some of the crystals we found were as long as my palm.

At about four o'clock, we packed up and walked back to the car. Dazed by sun and wind. Sarah sat in the front seat with me. We listened to a mix CD that Anna had put together: Rascal Flatts, Brad Paisley, Coldplay, Snow Patrol, etc. Long black road stretched straight before us, running up and down over the little hills. Lush grass in the ditches rushed and rushed in the wind. We chased blue cloud shadows. Out in the fields, the sun would catch the top of a stand of trees and burn them green and yellow.

We dropped Elizabeth off at her house, and then Sarah and I drove back to my house where her truck was parked. The town is busy with students again. I helped her pack her things into her truck, and we said good-bye. I was very tired.