Hello friends,
Recently, I traveled to Utah, to the northern edge of the Great Salt Lake. It was an unexpected, last-minute excursion. I had been in Denver, just walking down the street thinking about my potential monument project. I had just interviewed someone about the idea and had plans to fly home to Portland the next day. But as I walked back to my hotel, I felt as though I needed more time to think about monuments before returning to the routines of home. There was something I wanted to see in Utah, and as I walked I thought, wait, Utah's not too far away. Maybe I should just...cancel my flight and rent a car and drive there?
And so I did.
I was in Colorado for an event at The Bookworm of Edwards, a terrific bookstore near Vail. The event was an informal discussion with a book club affiliated with Walking Mountains Science Center.
One of the things we talked about was the concept of place, in Windfall and beyond. Katie Geraci, a writer and fellow at the center, asked people if they had any practices that connected them to place. I listened intently as people described their connection to the place I was visiting, a place I'd never been. Many were people who had ties to other places before arriving in Colorado. They talked about how the Atlantic Ocean or the Great Lakes had imprinted on them as children, and how the mountains of Colorado grounded them as adults. One woman mentioned that she felt disconnected from the place she lived in because she could never afford to own a home there.
The prompt made me think about places where I feel most connected, but that aren't necessarily "home." Like the windy plains of northwestern North Dakota, a place I don't want to live but a place that nonetheless feels as though it has imprinted on my soul. Or our old backyard in Washington, D.C. The thought flashed through my head: What happened to the weeping cherry we got as a wedding gift? How big is it now, 10 years later? I considered the place imprinted on me in childhood, the foothills of the Coast Range of western Oregon. The fog of winter mornings, the green lichens in the oaks, the tan wheat fields of September, the smell of blackberries and gravel dust in the dry summers. Fogged breath while waiting for the school bus, the smell of woodsmoke hugging the valley floor. Rolling an inner tube over the bubbling, tarry asphalt to the same swimming hole where we scattered my mother's ashes.
And of course, I thought of my home now in Portland, and what it meant to be away from it so much recently...and why I didn't want to go home yet.
As I drove back to Denver, I continued thinking about places that leave impressions. Along the I-70 corridor, I passed abandoned gold and silver mines and the newer scars of ski resorts carved into the mountains.
In Denver, I spent hours on the 7th floor looking at the museum's permanent exhibit: The American West in Art. I sat in a gallery that showed how early onscreen Westerns were based on repetitive stories and stock characters from a brief moment in history that those who lived and documented were nostalgic for even as it passed them by. I thought of the Pioneer Mother monument I saw in Kansas City by Alexander Phimister Proctor that was based on illustrations from a Wild West story in a popular magazine, an image that also inspired key scenes in a silent film Western. I learned Proctor was raised in Denver. I copied down some of the interpretive signage in my notebook: "Since the turn of the 1900s, art and film have intersected to construct a powerful visual legacy which has shaped how people worldwide have understood (or misunderstood) the American West." All the while, a film clip looped from The Virginian, repeating Gary Cooper's words again and again. "You wanna call me that — smile."
I drove on to Grand Junction, and then the next day hiked the "real" monuments of Colorado National Monument. Somehow and somewhere, sagebrush country had imprinted on me, too. I like the look of this place, I thought. I asked the bookstore owner about the climate. I examined the surprisingly affordable prices in the real estate office window and dreamed for a moment about what it’d be like to have a little place of my own somewhere in sagebrush country. Is it too late to learn to ride horses?
From there, I drove toward Salt Lake City. From Provo to Brigham City it's 100 miles of exurb and suburb and city and suburb and exurb again, never slower than 75 mph, along a strip of I-15 seemingly never fewer than eight lanes across, oftentimes 10. Who are all these wide roads for? I wondered yet again, as I had when I drove through in October of 2017 and October of 2020 and now again in October of 2023. I was glad it was dark so the bleak sprawl wouldn't bum me out too much. What will this place look like in October 2026?
The next day, I drove to Golden Spike National Historical Park in Promontory to see the place where the transcontinental railroads met in 1869. Under dusty plexiglass was a display of a replica of a golden spike that, in 1990, had gone up with a space shuttle. I copied the interpretative signage in my notebook because it was so weird. "By this gesture, the ribbons of iron that spanned America's First Frontier are united with the ribbons of iron that are spanning America's Final Frontier." I wondered how something written 33 years ago could already sound so archaic, like a script penned in the obsolete vernacular of a 1930s newsreel. I told the park ranger on duty that I was a "monument enthusiast," which perhaps was a refreshing change from the usual "railroad enthusiasts" that come to this place.
But in Promontory I lingered longest at Spiral Jetty, a 1970 land art installation by artist Robert Smithson. It sits south of the Golden Spike Historical Park, although the park has little to do with the art other than being its access point. Smithson died at age 35 in a plane accident while making a final earthwork in Texas, three years after Spiral Jetty’s completion. His wife, Nancy Holt, was a land artist and photographer who died in 2014 after a long, illustrious career. Here's what she had to say about the places that marked her:
"As soon as I got to the desert, I connected with the place. Before that, the only other place that I had felt in touch with in the same way was the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey, which only begins to approach that kind of Western spaciousness."
The lake's edge was about a half-mile from the end of the spiral jetty. I walked toward it, all the while considering how the earthwork was utterly dependent on this place for its artistic impact. As I returned to the car, I noticed from my footsteps that I had not walked in a straight line. How long would my crooked path to and from the lake remain in this dry place? The foundation that owns Spiral Jetty notes that it is "a site-specific work, meant to interact with changing conditions of the surrounding water, land, and atmosphere," but not a piece that anticipated the extreme drought cycles of climate change or how that would affect its existence or future.
What did it mean for a man, a white artist, to make his mark on a place wrested by force from its original inhabitants? What did it mean that I enjoyed walking along the artwork to where the lake lapped the shore, even though I understood the complexities of its existence in this place? What does it mean that I am always going and looking, that I'm driven by this incessant need to leave home and to return, over and over again? Should I feel guilty about being a wanderer, a collector of obscure places and their stories? Is it an extractive practice, or am I giving back in my work? Why are some of us humans so insistent on leaving a mark?
I drove toward Idaho, cruise control at 83 mph, maybe sometimes a little faster. I realized as I headed toward Boise that I forgot after leaving Spiral Jetty to return to the historical park to look at the replica locomotives. I slept at my favorite nondescript hotel in Boise, then left the next morning for Portland. I stopped only in Pendleton for gas, lunch and coffee, and a look at yet another Proctor sculpture.
Then, I drove into the Columbia River Gorge. Home, home, home, the river sang to me.
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
More on place, from Portland journalist Leah Sottile and author Joe Wilkins.
A 43-foot golden spike arrives in Utah, marking the history of the transcontinental railroad. (Kinda why I was there. More to come from me.)
Ever have a sinus infection at 10,000 feet? The nose is mysterious and congestion is complicated, but yogic techniques might help! Failing that, get the good stuff from behind the counter to open your sinuses.
The rise of pedestrian deaths can be traced to two things: Bigger and heavier trucks and SUVs, and streets and roads designed to maximize the convenience and speed of drivers.
Want to give someone a signed copy of Windfall for the holidays? You can now order them from Up Up Books, an independent bookstore in my neighborhood in Portland. Bonus for locals: The store has a terrific community room with a long table that can be reserved for free for book clubs, writing groups or other gatherings.