The Logan Notebooks

On a Visit to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty

22 We pass the Golden Spike monument, joining this and that America and my guy says, I can’t believe I’m gonna be a man who wears jewelry. I find myself thinking about regret. But I find myself talking about pie. A passing pickup kicks a stone into the wheel-well of the Subaru, which screeches like a wounded creature.We pull over, he checks something, checks something else. A minute later, the car kicks the stone back out. When we get to the parking lot, our penny-colored pit bull trundles out of the backseat, and the three of us pick a way over rock-rubble to the lakeshore. Today, a coral-tinged froth gathers like snowpack on the Great Salt Lake’s ragged sandline. No, not like snowpack, exactly. More like cappuccino foam.The dog samples a mouthful, then shakes herself. The jetty curves into the viscous lake, dark rocks gathering towards the horizon—diminishing train of a far-off gown. Air coming over wet sand tastes like an old tin can. The sky is a bright, stark white and in the wind, the first pinch of winter. And while we stand there, that wind picks up and lifts heaps of pinkish foam into the air, blasts them apart like a beautiful explosion, except everything is so quiet we can hear the dog’s jaws click as she rears up to catch some of that ineffable fluff. I find myself talking about pie again. I find myself thinking: Blackberry. Blackberry. All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. —Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas” on a visit to robert smithson’s spiral jetty ...