Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today is Monday,
March sixteenth, twenty twenty six, and I'm the host of
the show Doctor Kara Santa Maria, and as always, I
want to start this episode by thanking those of you
who make Talk Nerdy possible. We are on episode number
five hundred and ninety three. I've been doing this since
twenty fourteen, and I would not be able to keep
making this show if it weren't for you, the amazing patrons. Remember,
this show is and will always be one hundred percent
free to download, and the way that I keep doing
it week after week is by relying on the support
of individuals just like you. If you'd like to pledge
your support on an episodic basis, all you have to
do is visit patreon dot com slash talk Nerdy to
learn more. This week's top patrons include Chuck Blell, David J. E. Smith,
Daniel Lang, Mary Neva, Will DeFraine, David Compton, Brian Holden, Gabo,
Jay Ulrica Hagman, Pasqually Gelati, and Joe Wilkinson. Thank you
all so much. Okay, let's get into it. This week,
I had the opportunity to chat with doctor Caroline Tracy
about her new books, Salt Lakes and Unnatural History. She
is a science and nature writer who work focuses on
the environment, migration, and the arts in the American Southwest,
Mexico and their borderlands. She's written for all sorts of
outlooks like The New Yorker, High Country News, New York
Review of Books, and elsewhere. She's won a bunch of awards.
And this is her debut book. Again it's called Salt
Lakes and Unnatural History. So without any further ado, here
she is doctor Caroline Tracy. Well, Caroline, thank you so
much for joining me today.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to talk about your new book, Salt Lakes
and Unnatural History. But before we get into the book
itself and some of the interesting topics that you dive into,
I love to learn a little bit more about you.
So would you call yourself a geographer? Like what is
a person with a PhD in geographies title?
Speaker 3: It is technically a geographer. My profession is not being
a geographer necessarily, but I do think it is a
good descriptor of the way I view the world and
approach things, so I do use it, and I do
have a graduate degree in it, So I feel like
I've earned the right to call myself a geographer, even
if my job isn't, like, you know, making maps.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I feel like once and if you did the work,
like you get to own that for the rest of
your life. If you are, you will always be a geographer.
But you're spending would you say you're spending most of
your time now as a writer?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I when you know, I will call myself a geographer
or I'll say writer and geographer. But writer really is
the title I tend to use.
Speaker 1: And so do you prefer as a writer to stick with?
I mean, obviously, this is a full length book, which
is like every time I have somebody on who tackled
a kind of science or academic topic in a full
length book, I'm always like, Oh, how do you do it?
You're so brave. But but do you prefer to write
in long form or do you prefer shorter pieces? Or
do you just kind of run the gamut.
Speaker 3: It's a good question because I feel like there are
benefits to all three. When I was doing my doctorate
in geography, I sometimes felt like the speed of academia
was much too slow for me, I wanted to change
topics more frequently than is really allowed, and so I
became a journalist in which I'm basically writing a new
article every single week, and sometimes that feels way too quick.
And so the book was really nice balance for me.
Even though it's a really long undertaking. I had so
much creative control over what the different chapters did, and
I was able to kind of, you know, put it
aside for a little while and then come back to it.
And so I guess, I guess I like long form,
but with a little more of an eclectic approach than
you know, being a scholar.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and I feel like there's a lot of crossover
for from like looking at your book and looking at
all of the incredible blurbs and all of the people
who read an early copy and you know, gave props,
like so many of them have been on Talk Nerdy.
So it's really fun that you're here with us today
because I'm seeing Ben Goldfarb, and I'm seeing Melissa Sevani,
and I'm seeing Michelle Nighthaus and and you know, all
these people that we've already featured on the show. So
you're in good company here.
Speaker 2: That's so fun. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm there, like, you know, my forebears in
this kind of writing, So I'm honored.
Speaker 1: Awesome, So tell me a little bit. I mean, as
a geographer, but also as a writer and science writer,
what drew you first to the topic of salt lakes? Like,
I don't know. I mean, obviously they affect all of
our lives, and we'll get into that, But I don't
know how many people listening to the show right now
are like I don't really even think about that, maybe
if you live near.
Speaker 3: One, exactly. I was one of those people. I never
thought about them. I guess I knew that Salt Lake
City was a place that existed, but I grew up
in Denver. It's very close to Utah, but like, we
would never go to Utah because we basically lived in
a version of you, you know, we had our own mountains,
We had our only city next to mountains I had.
Speaker 2: Utah was not a place I really thought about.
Speaker 3: And then when I was in my early twenties, I
was dating someone who had grown up in California and
we ended up taking a bunch of road trips around
eastern California and Nevada, and that was a part of
the American West that I was totally unfamiliar with, and
so we went to the salt and sea. We went
to Owen's Lake and Mono Lake and Nevada where you
have the basin and Range region. So basically every single
valley in between mountains in Nevada is a closed valley
with a salt lake at the bottom of it, all
these tiny salt lakes that are dry most of the year,
and I was just really taken with this landscape. It's
really striking when you're driving to come upon these lakes
because they're extraordinarily blue. Because they have the suspended minerals
in them, they reflect really well, and so you see
the sky and the mountains reflected in the lake in
this really beautiful way. And I just was so shocked
that these lakes would exist in this place in the desert,
and then confused.
Speaker 2: Why are they there?
Speaker 3: And do I keep finding more of them? And then
that set me off on this journey.
Speaker 1: I love that, And so maybe you can help us
understand right at the beginning what exactly a salt lake is,
because I heard you mentioned, you know, they have all
of these minerals suspended in them, so salt lakes aren't
just lakes of salt, are there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the term salt really refers not only to just
sodium chlorid what we would think of as table salt,
but it's any of the minerals that are suspended. So
some of the lakes have some of the lakes do
have mostly table salts spended in them, like the Great
Salt Lake, but some have higher concentrations of other minerals.
But what I tend to describe salt lakes as are
not by the amount of salts suspended in them. You know,
the scientists could tell you there's a certain threshold, but
I think that there's so much variation within salt lakes
that for me, what's an easier way to understand what
they are is how they form geologically. And so basically,
salt lakes are lakes that form at the base of
a closed valley. So that means a valley that doesn't
have an outlet where the water could flow out. And
what happens is that the water from around the valley
or the basin collects and it doesn't have anywhere to
go except for to evaporate, and so when it evaporates,
it leaves behind the minerals that are suspended in it,
and that forms a lake over you know, geologic time.
So many of these salt lakes are the remnants of
the of much larger plissscene Arara lakes or inland seas,
and so we're just seeing the sort of modern day
remnants of those. And then they do have this kind
of influx of fresh water each year that brings with
it a small amount of minerals too.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that is fascinating because I'm probably not the
only one here who just kind of assumed that assault.
But now that I think about it, it's like, what
was I thinking? The salt lakes that I know about
are really far inland, but like, who just kind of
I assume that salt lakes are formed kind of the
way that like, what are they called ox bow lakes
are formed where it's like a you know, that's like
a piece of a river or something that gets pinched off.
Why did I assume that it was like ocean water.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess in one moment in geologic time
some of them were ocean water, but really nowadays their
inflows are fresh water, and so sometimes I mean you'll
hear when with these salt lakes that are kind of
drying up, like the Great Salt Lake or the Salt
and Sea. You'll hear the idea of, oh, well, we
could build a pipeline from the ocean, but actually that
wouldn't really help because they rely the ecosystem relies on
fresh water refilling the lake each year, not saltwater.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm curious about some of these, like lagoons. I
was just looking it up. I visited the Blue Lagoon
in Iceland recently, which has this like really interesting mineral
content in the waters, like baby Blue, but it's geothermal,
And I was would would that be considered a salt
lake or is that sort of like a completely different process.
Speaker 2: That's a good question.
Speaker 3: I'm not specifically sure about those thermal lagoons.
Speaker 2: I will say, like.
Speaker 3: The Salt and Sea, for instance, has a lot of
geothermal activity around it. Actually there's like a geothermal there
are geothermal plants right around it. So that and that
has to do with the fact that it is on
a fault line, so it's almost like a separate it's
almost like a Maybe some scientists will listen and tell
me I'm wrong that it's that I'm about to say
it's a coincidence. But my understanding is, you know, there's
this one geologic process that sort of created the salt
and Sea there, and then there happens to be also
a fault line running through it that creates all kinds
of geothermal activity. But I will add also that in Spanish,
and I think in Portuguese too, they use the word
laguna to refer to any type of water body that
has only one inflow or outflow. So a salt lake,
an inland salt lake in Spanish is a laguna. There's
the Laguna Sala, which is like basically the salt and Sea,
but on the Mexican.
Speaker 2: Side, and it's a laguna.
Speaker 3: But then also you have coastal lagunas because it's just
a place where the ocean enters but doesn't really have
a separate exit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which we have obviously. I live in southern California,
and so we've got even places named laguna Laguna beach, right,
So yeah, for that very phenomenon, And of course the
Saltan Sea is somewhat nearby. I've actually never visited it,
but I've always been really fascinated by the Saltan Sea,
both from a. I guess you could say scientific historical,
geographical perspective, but also just from a cultural perspective as well.
So maybe for folks who don't know because they're not,
you know, over on this part of the country. What
do you like, What did you dig into about the
Saltan Sea because you did mention it a couple times.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Yeah, that's one that you know. I think many
people have heard of Great Salt Lake because it's the
name of a major city. But the other lake that
often people have heard of that I wrote about in
this book is the Salt and Sea because it holds
this very strong allure, especially for Californians.
Speaker 2: I think the.
Speaker 3: Salt and Sea was created essentially by accident in nineteen
oh five, when the early settlers to what is now
the Imperial Valley built built very quickly an irrigation canal
to divert water from the Colorado River into the area
they wanted to farm. And that year the Colorado River
had an enormous sort of above average, well above average
snowpack and came flooding down and accidentally diverted its entire
course into this irrigation canal. It wiped out everything that
had built, you know, all the railroad tracks, all the
telephone poles, and it filled up a basin, which it's
not that it had never filled up before. It was
a basin that was kind of part of the region
that had a historic lake called Lake Cahuila, but it
wasn't something that had a lake, you know, permanently, and
so it filled up. And then the lake continued to
be filled year after year by flood irrigation from the
Imperial Valley. So every year the farmers, you know, would
flood their fields to water their crops, and that water
would run off into the lowest point of the valley,
which is where the salt and sea had also settled.
And there, you know that Actually there's a thing called
secondary salinity, which is where in desert regions that haven't
had a lot of rainfall, the soils are full of salt,
and so when they would irrigate their fields, it would
bring those salts in the soil to the surface and
they'd have to flood irrigate them again to get that
salt to go away. So there was two rounds of
water going into the salt and sea every year, and
it made it pretty big for a long time, and
it developed this kind of tourism industry, very popular with
people from la and then the lake started to dry up. Well,
first I would say, I think it started to scare
people off because it was filled with fish. And then
when it gets really hot in the Imperial Valley, the
fish would all die off and it would smell very bad. Then,
just about twenty years ago, there was a deal between
the Imperial Irrigation District, the farmers of the Imperial Valley,
and the City of San Diego to sell a large
proportion of their water rights to the City of San
Diego for drinking water. And so after that point much
less water was going into the salt and sea, and
so it's been drying up pretty fast when you go
there now, like I write in the book about visiting
in twenty fourteen and how the beach at that point
was fishbones and from all the fish dying off because
of the hot temperatures. But now when you go you
do find those fishbones, but they're pretty far from the
water's edge. You have to walk through this kind of
former lake bed that's just like gray soft soil to
get to the water's edge. It's pretty noticeable, and that
in that time, you know, because it was this place
where this tourist industry was abandoned, these other communities started
to spring up. So now I think there's you know,
people know the Saltan Sea because nearby is Salvation Mountain,
this mural that one man kind of dedicated his life
to painting, Slab City and Bombay Beach, these towns that
have kind of developed an allure for people because they're
they're these sort of isolated, unusual places, and so the
Sultan Sea has layers of layers of interest.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating. Does it still smell horrible down there?
Speaker 2: It smells?
Speaker 3: I think now there are no fish, so now it's
not smelling because of the fish die offs because it's
too saline now for fish to survive. But there are
chemical reactions that are related to the fertilizers that are
dissolved in the water and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: So it does definitely have smells at certain times.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Yeah, I mean it's fascinating thinking about Well, it's
fascinating thinking about both aspects. And I love that that's
how you approached your writing as well. Like you thought
about geologic you know, timescale, but you also thought about
what we're doing right now to the landscape and how
incredibly quickly human activity is shifting things. And then of
course you shared, you know, your own personal story as
you were researching and visiting these areas. And I want
to kind of touch base if we have enough time
on all three of those things. And I'm not sure
what you feel most comfortable digging into first, but I
have to say one reason that my kind of ears
perked up, my eyes perked up, I don't even know
when your book crossed my desk, is because A we
haven't talked about these phenomena on the show before. And B,
like I grew up Mormon, I didn't grow up in
Salt Lake City. I grew up in Texas, but it
was so I mean, anybody who has ever lived their
life in the Mormon community, it's it's your whole life,
like it's such a massage a massive portion of your identity.
Of course, I left when I was very young. I'm
no longer a believer, but I love that you like
learned about Salt Lake the you know, the great Salt
Lake via kind of like Mormon history and genealogy and stuff.
Speaker 3: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, actually, can I ask Can
I ask you a question about that? Yeah? Please, I'm
curious what you know growing up in the Mormon Church.
What was your sort of perception of environmentalism, were concerned
for the environment?
Speaker 1: I did not notice any of that. I mean, I
will say, like again, I didn't grow up there. I
grew up in Texas, so I kind of grew up
in like oil country where it's like very very conservative.
And I did leave the church when I was quite young.
I was like fourteen fifteen, but my family is still
fully Mormon. Like I left, they didn't, which was a
whole thing which I've I've talked about on other shows.
But no, I you know, I don't remember there being
a lot of conversations about that. But I also don't
remember an anti environmentalist bent either. I I just remember neutrality,
like I just didn't really hear people talk about it
when I was a kid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that was I mean, that was something that
really interested me in the research I did for the
book was to you know, talking with talking with Mormon
environmentalists about the sort of synergy they saw between the
church and environmentalism. But I definitely got the sense that
they felt somewhat isolated in that interest in that effort.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Yeah, I could definitely see. I mean, one thing
I will say about my experience in the Mormon Church
is that for all of the problems that I could
list with it, it was probably because culturally it is
a more like middle class existence, or at least it
was in the eighties and nineties when you know, I
was younger. There was a real emphasis on like education,
there was a real emphasis on knowledge, and on in
some ways on kind of stewardship. Maybe more of the
country than of the globe, but there definitely was a
lot of emphasis on having a relationship with your home,
and of course history and the history of the West.
I mean, that was a huge part of the church
because you know, they moved west to settle and we
can again where this podcast is not about the why
and all the problems with them, but goodness did they
have a lot of probably really rich descriptions of the
landscape exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was part of what drew me to doing
that research that well, Like I mentioned, I grew up
in Denver, and so I had this sort of environmentalist
culture that I was surrounded by from growing up there,
and it was really interesting to me to learn that
in Salt Lake City that that sort of relationship to
the land had a religious element to it, and that
there were people who had sort of approached it as
part of you know, scripture and belief. And so I
was interested to learn about the relationship to land from
that perspective.
Speaker 1: And so what kinds of insights did you gain? I mean,
did you find that some of this sort of outsider
science as it were, was just as rich as some
of the documentation of you know, kind of I guess
what you would consider to be like learned explorers or
were there insights that were offered by the sort of
Mormon literature that maybe we wouldn't have if we didn't
have that literature.
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I think that, you know, when
I was starting the interviews that I did, the word
stewardship that you just mentioned came up a lot. I
think that, you know, that's a big sort of keyword
in Mormon culture, as the impression I got, you know,
just is stewardship at every sort of scale, right of
your home, of your community, and.
Speaker 2: Then of the planet.
Speaker 3: Right and so with that comes a degree of thrift
and not using more resources than you need and some
people told me that historically a lot of Mormons had
been vegetarians because of those principles, and and so that's
kind of where it started, was these sort of daily
life practices. And then from there I got really interested
in sort of the history of irrigation, because another reputation
that Mormons have, at least in the West and maybe nationally,
is they are irrigators.
Speaker 2: They they're like beavers, Like, that's like that people.
Speaker 1: So they like beavers too, Yeah, exactly, that's like there's
like bees and there's beavers, and there's like certain animals
that they like celebrate in the Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's like the envirments are obsessed with building downs, you know,
like anyway, So that was I wanted to understand that history,
like why why does this community that is a faith
community have this reputation for being obsessed with engineering, like
and so I started to read about why, you know,
why that was and what the history of it was.
And what I was interested to learn was that it
came out of really practicality, right that if you're going
to settle in the American West, you need to move
water from from the rivers to your field because it's
not going to rain enough to grow crops, so it can't.
It was born of a necessity, but it was of
course organized in the same structure as the church oversight,
and so it became really melded with the faith community,
and I think from there the irrigation, you know, took
on this it took on a big significance and then
interesting what I was most surprised to find out was
that the Mormon sort of oversight of its irrigation works
ends up becoming part of the basis of Western water law.
Speaker 1: Wow. Oh that is fascinating, And I mean, in a way,
it kind of doesn't surprise me because definitely when I
think about the history of the church that I was
privy to as a woman, as a young woman, it
definitely did seem like just for whatever reason, people who
found themselves in this religion, especially early on, were also
just like very industrious and very politically motivated and so
being involved and obviously like there's an entire city and
beyond that is like deeply enmeshed with the church, but
there's so many Mormon individuals in politics, in government in
these different areas, and especially when it comes like you
mentioned to like infrastructure and municipal projects. I mean, my
dad's an engineer. He's a Mormon engineer. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a book Cadillac Deserts, sort of a famous
book about water in the West where and he says,
he has this line that I just really have not
been able to corroborate, but it doesn't strike me as
terribly far fetched. I just don't know how far vegetes
where he says, like the Bureau of Reclamation, you know,
the government dam building agency, he says it was primarily
staffed by Mormons. And it's I mean, yeah, I haven't
been able to really fact check that, but it would
make sense that the federal government was looking at Utah
as the place to learn how to do what they
wanted to do.
Speaker 1: And so how have their sort of policies. I mean,
I know, it's like probably really complex because we've got
this interplay of like both stewardship but also kind of
exploitation and you know, colonialism and manifest destiny and all
of these things. But I'm curious, over time, how has
the you know, the Great Salt Lake been managed and
how is it actually faring.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a great question. The major problem facing salt
lakes in addition to climate change, which has kind of
made everything worse. But for decades, the issue has been
that the water that we use in arid regions, because
salt lakes mainly are found in arid regions, is diverted
before it gets to these lakes, which are at the end,
you know, the end point of the rivers, because they're
at the bottom of the valleys, and so along the
river's course there are many points of diversion for irrigation works.
So this is true in Utah, but not only in Utah.
Of course, it's true in Colorado, it's true in Arizona,
it's true in California that the water is diverted.
Speaker 2: On its way to these lakes. And the amount that
the water is.
Speaker 3: Diverted has to do with the kind of concepts that
undergird water loss. So there's an idea called beneficial use,
which is you need to put the water that you
are allowed to use to use. You shouldn't waste it.
Waste is the opposite of beneficial use. And then there's
this idea of prior appropriation, which is first in time,
first and right. So prior appropriation sort of gives you
the list of who gets the first water right, second
water right, third water right, and beneficial use says you
can divert as much as you can use, but you
can't divert more than you can use. And that's the
one that came from you know, Brigham Young and Utah.
But when they come together, they mean that you can't
basically leave any water in the stream because that is waste.
That's wasting the water. You're not putting it to beneficial use,
to put it to the next person in the list
of prior appropriation.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 3: That has led to this situation now where the rivers
are all over appropriated because the goal is to sort.
Speaker 2: Of not leave water unused.
Speaker 3: And that's a problem for lakes because for these terminal
lakes I mean lakes at the bottom of closed basins,
because no water or very little water, much less than
they need, reaches them. So the problems that that creates
are primarily having to do with the ecosystem first, where
the creatures that live in these lakes require a certain
amount of salinity. Just because they can live high salinities
relative to most of nature doesn't mean they can live
it extreme salinities, right, And it also as the lake shrinks,
it's creating a problem for humans of dust storms.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, so sort of the soil that is exposed,
is that what is kind of the foundation of the
dust storms exactly.
Speaker 3: So like soil, you know, I mean, it's not that
you don't have dust storms from an exposed, bare ground
area of the earth, but the soil the lake bed
is much looser.
Speaker 2: It hasn't been compacted over.
Speaker 3: Years in the same way that the ordinary earth surface has,
and so it's very amissive.
Speaker 1: Right, There's no plants grown into it, there's no root structure.
It is just loose dirt exactly. Yeah. Oh that's fascinating.
And you know, we mentioned climate change kind of in passing,
and I understand why we always do this because it's
like such a huge issue and like we all sort
of get it to some extent, but ultimately I've always
been confused about this. So, you know, the water cycle,
like the globe is a system. It's a full system,
and there's only so much water on the planet, right,
and the water operates and it recondenses and it rains
and it does all these really interesting things and it
seeps into the ground. But when we are extracting, extracting, extracting,
and then you add to that that the planet is
getting hotter and hotter and hotter, which means more and
more evaporation. A. How does that affect these lakes and
b you know, how does that then kind of feed
back on itself in the whole system.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good question. And my understanding of it is, yes,
like there's sort of there's somehow this this amount of
water that like stays static and the earth.
Speaker 2: That's so confusing.
Speaker 3: But what I think is happening is that in these
closed basin systems. So if you picture, you know, picture
Salt Lake City with the mountains around it, there's less
water in the system. There's less water. There's ugh snow
falling on those mountains every year, so there's less water
to begin with. And then the other factor is that
when the water is diverted onto irrigation irrigated fields, So
when you when you take that water out of the
river and then you're using it to water plants, a
lot of that water is evaporating into back into the
atmosphere and it's generally falling as rain on wetter systems,
on system on like areas that are more likely to
get rained on.
Speaker 1: Right, And so actually something huge like it doesn't mean
that it's it's home mo genius, right.
Speaker 3: Exactly, Like waters come is like evaporating, coming right back
down onto the same mountains.
Speaker 2: It's not like a closed loop like that.
Speaker 3: It's going into the atmosphere and it's falling in the
places it's more likely to fall, and it's contributing to
sea level rise because it's sort of moved, like all
the irrigated agriculture and the evaporation from it ends up
moving water into these wetter regions.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's fascinating. And so are we seeing that sort
of across the globe because obviously we've we've described you know,
American salt lakes so far. We are American. We both
live in sort of the southwest region of America. But
there are obviously salt lakes all over the world, right,
So are are all salt lakes evaporating.
Speaker 3: The vast majority? Yes, there and there are examples all
over the world. So another example that maybe listeners will
be familiar with is the Aral Sea, which is in
Central Asia and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that that was once
the world's fourth largest lake and is now like less
than a tenth of its original size, largely because the
rivers that fed it were diverted to help the Soviet
cotton industry. So those rivers were not reaching the sea
for years, and the sea essentially dried up as a result.
And you've seen the same things on a bigger scale
as the Great Salt Lake or the Salt and Sea,
where you have massive dust storms, you know, health effects
because the waters that were reaching the lake had fertilizer
and chemicals, pesticides in them, and so that dust, the
dust has the residues of those that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: Are are is there something about lakes being really really
big and also being salty? I guess I'm looking it up.
And of course all of the lakes, the Great Lakes
are not salt lakes. They're freshwater lakes. But like I
don't know, the Caspian Sea, the Dead Sea, the salt
you know, salt Lake, the Aral Sea, like those are
all salty, right.
Speaker 3: The Caspian Sea is a salt lake. Yeah, and it
is it is shrinking.
Speaker 1: Actually, God, that's rough. Is the Dead Sea like different?
Because I mean I know it was different because I
visited it and I spent time in it, and I
was like, oh, my body is tingling because it is
very salty and you can like cut yourself and all
the jagged salt on the shores. But is that a
different type of salt lake. I mean, it's very famously salty.
Speaker 2: Yes, I didn't.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't a chapter about the Dead Sea.
I didn't research it for this book. But I have
heard the same thing from other people about how much
it makes your body hurt, which you know, in my experience.
Speaker 2: You know, the Great Salt Lake doesn't do that quite
so much.
Speaker 3: I think it is a salt lake like these others,
but I think it has a higher, significantly higher salt constant.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I just looked it up. Jeez. It's nine
times saltier than the ocean. It's hyper saline. Yeah, so
then you can like sell the salt water for all
this money and be all pseudo scientific about it. But
I will say it was It was fun because you
just float, like very easily float. But if you have
an unknown cut on your body, you will discover it
when you walk.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I feel like I live with dry skin.
Speaker 2: I feel like I would just suffer.
Speaker 1: You gotta go. It's fascinating. I was able to go
a couple of years ago when I was visiting Jordan,
and I really enjoyed it. So, you know, we've we've
talked about sort of the a medium level, a more
macro level, but you also get micro and I think
my favorite books, the ones that feel to me, at
least in the nonfiction genre, the most literary, and the
ones that are the most page turners, are memoirs where
there's vulnerability in the author and where there is a
lot of kind of personal conversation. And so I think
we'd be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit
about your own personal journey and your decision to use
Eye and to reflect on on that journey in the book.
So tell me about before we even get into kind
of your story, tell me what drove you. Was it
a hard decision? Did you know you were going to
do that from the beginning?
Speaker 3: I would say it was almost the reverse. It was
it was me writing this I kind of narrative about
my life experiences in this kind of essayistic mode, and
realizing that Salt Lakes, you know, was this thing I
was interested in and slowly orienting the book more or
toward research from being crystialistic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, I love that. So then you were able to
kind of blend almost these two parallel tracks and bring
them together.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean I had been visiting Salt Lakes, I had
been writing about those experiences, but I realized I wanted
to also research and report about them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So tell me then about sort of the personal
narrative that you chose to include in the book, Like why,
how did you decide what you wanted to talk about
and how deep you wanted to get?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think that was it was always
going to be a book that had a personal narrative
because I was writing it, you know, partially in order
to kind of figure things out for myself. And one
of the things I was trying to understand, or maybe
the principal thing I was trying to understand, was I
wanted a sense of home. I was in my twenties,
and so I felt like a drift and I didn't
understand you know, how do you how do you find
a sense of home in the world, and especially in
a world where I'm constantly bombarded with information about the
horrors of climate change. The degree to which the region
that I have grown up in, which is the American West,
has changed, is going to change further. You know, how
am I supposed to feel at home in that kind
of of setting situation, And so the the personal narrative
follows me sort of on the on that conceptual journey,
and one of the big kind of elements of that
is is a kind of queer, queer coming of age
journey in which at the beginning of the book, my
early road trips through the Salt Lakes were with my
college boyfriend, who, as I mentioned, was from California. And
then the toward the end of the book, I end
up getting married to the person who's still my wife,
my current wife, who who is from Mexico City, which
was built on a salt lake, So that has its
own salt lake narrative there. But I think, you know,
the promotional materials for the book describe it as kind
of like an exploration of my own identity, and I
would say, I don't want to, I don't want necessarily
want to negate that, but I think I see it
as kind of part of this search of, well, what
is a sense of home in today's world?
Speaker 2: And what kind of life do I want to live.
Speaker 1: I love that, and I think it also is you know,
not to politicize your own life, because that would be
a pretty fed up thing to do. Like I guess
as I've been, you know, on my own journey and
spending more time with the people that I love, and
I'm just learning more and more that you know, we
have the classic coming coming of age stories, we have
the classic coming out stories. I think everybody right now
is like real excited about heated rival because you know,
there are all these like really kind of hopeful and
like hard but like, I mean, that's why we love
heated rivery, because it's kind of it's kind of like, oh,
that's how it should have always gone. But but I
think there are more and more, and I don't know,
maybe this isn't a fair thing to say. The exploration
of sort of not just queer identity, but queer societal
I guess, alternate new normativity, I think is so exciting that.
You know, I think for a long time, people had
to fight to be gay, They had to fight to
be for it to be okay to be gay, and
and that's still the case. But we have a new
generation of people who are fighting just to love who
they love, and I think there's something really meaningful in that.
Speaker 3: Definitely.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean I also really enjoyed Heated Traveling and washed
the whole thing multiple times. But I think it actually
has really something very cool narratively going on that resonated
with me having written this book where a lot of
the queer media that I consume, because I also have
watched all the other like queer coming of age teen
dramas and stuff, is it often the end point is
making this sort of coming out pronouncement. And I had
always watched this media being like, why can't you just
not tell anyone for ten years and just live your
life and have a great time, and or like specifically
not tell your parents, right, like yeah, the teen dramas,
they're always the season finales coming up to their parents
right when they're.
Speaker 1: Like seventeen, and it's like that is just not most
people's experience exactly people, yes, but not most people.
Speaker 3: So I loved I loved seeing this like representation on
TV of just like having sex with someone for ten
years and not telling anyone, because I thought that that
is a queer narrative that just exists a lot in
the world and was not on TV, and so I
really appreciated that. Yeah, I think that, you know, my
sort of journey toward queerness had as much to do
with things like going to friends' houses, you know, queer
friends' houses. I describe this in the book and sort
of feeling like this is so different than my like
you know, newly married, straight friends houses in a way
I can't totally put my finger on, like what is that?
Speaker 2: What does that mean?
Speaker 3: What is the sort of what am I feeling here?
Speaker 2: And then even.
Speaker 3: As you as I sort of spent time with queer
friends that were a little older than me, sort of
being like wow, like the sort of rhythm of life
is different, and the values are slightly different, and and
it just sort of felt like, oh, I feel more
at home again, back to the sort of where do
I find a home question of like I feel more
at home in this rhythm and this house and this
sort of style of life.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I've definitely found that the older that I get,
and like, whether I'm talking about you know, being on
the apps, you know when that was a thing or
it's still a huge thing, or spending time with other
people or you know, dating one person or dating multiple
people that the more I think that there are, at
least in my experience, that there's a queer identity, the
more there's like a shorthand there, the less there that
you have to kind of explain yourself, the more kind
of that there's this feeling of acceptance really early on,
and I don't know, it takes me back to my
experiences sometimes when I was very young, and even though
I wasn't lucky enough to, I think find a queer community.
When I was young, growing up in Texas and being Mormon,
I think I always was able to find in sort
of an alternative community, like a punk rock community, and
it felt more like home because it was like, you
just be you, like we like you, regardless of how
weird you are. And I loved that, you know, and
I love that we're living you know world Now. I
think like young people are teaching us an awful lot
about about identity and about you know, some people, the
label is meaningful and it is it is a way
to be able to feel ourselves when we never quite
could before. But for other people a label is just
really really constraining and constricting, and what a cool thing
that so many kids now are just like I just
I don't know. I love who I love, I'm attracted
to who I'm attracted to. I don't even think about
those kinds of things. That's beautiful. And so I love
too that the Salt Lakes have been there for you.
I mean, tell me, what do you expect then for
your future? What is your relationship going to be? And God,
I hope they're still around, you know, as we grow old.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's almost this sort of like mystery
element to the book, an unsolved mystery element of will
we save the lakes? Because there are a number of
options on the table of political changes that would be
really beneficial. And I don't know if you saw this
past weekend Trump was tweeting or not, it's not even tweeting,
it's truth social or whatever this new platform that he
uses is called, but he was he like posted on
that platform like make the Great Salt Lake great again.
Trump for some reason has gotten interested in the Great
Salt Lake.
Speaker 2: So there that.
Speaker 1: Almost makes me more worried. Like I'm like, can you
just ignore it? That would be more helpful. I feel like,
let the adults come up with the policy.
Speaker 3: I know, I'm like, what is going to happen? Where
is this going to lead? But yeah, apparently Utah is
going to like provide him with a possible plan. Yeah,
so that's you know, there's there just are sort of
multiple political cliffhangers at the moment. There's also the Faler rope,
the Wilson's vower rope, which I write about in the
second to last chapter of the book, which is the
only bird that migrates the entire length of the American
hemisphere only only via salt lakes. So it goes from
Canada to Argentina flying between salt lakes. Recently received the
petitioners received notice that it is going to advance to
a full review for being listed as threatened under the
Endangered Species Act. And if that happens, that's another thing
that would trigger an enormous amount of protections for salt lakes.
Speaker 2: There are also, you know, really.
Speaker 3: In the weeds changes happening to water law across the
American West, but that could have pretty substantial impacts on
salt lakes. So there's all kinds of stuff that could
happen politically, but we really don't know what is going
to happen, And whether it's going to happen, and so
there you know, yeah, I think it does sort of
leave me still with a bit of the question of
how you find a home right that these that sort
of the country that surrounds you still remains changing absolutely.
Speaker 1: And so for the listen kind of back to the
very first thing I mentioned and your experience before your
eyes were open to salt lakes. For the listeners who
are like, I've never even thought about a salt lake,
I don't know if I've ever seen one before. I
don't know if I've ever spent any time around one.
You know, do you think that there is something to
be said about encouraging visiting, learning more. Obviously reading the
book you're going to learn a lot more, but having
a personal experience with these these kind of geologic wonders
first of all, but also these really rich ecosystems, Like
should we all visit of salt lake at least once
in our life?
Speaker 3: I would say absolutely, there's you know, there's probably no
harm that can come from it.
Speaker 2: But I think that the book is about my decade.
Speaker 3: Long exploration to attachment to these lakes, and I want
to not only encourage people to become equally obsessed with
salt lakes, which is totally fine. If that's the outcome,
I would be very happy, but also so to sort
of alert people to the fact that there are all
kinds of underappreciated and threatened ecosystems around us that are
sort of surviving against the odds and that have all
kinds of unusual life forms and geology that you can
just learn about. You can whether whether you're near a
salt lake or whether you're in a totally different ecosystem,
you can find something around you that merits the same
amount of interest and affection and that you can learn
similar things from.
Speaker 1: Well, I love that, find your own salt lake and
nerd out on it, and yeah, become obsessed with it,
and maybe you can a have a more fulfilled life
and be like make a big difference for the planet.
But it doesn't have to be as salt lake, whatever
your own version of that is. That's great advice.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Well, gosh, I've got to I've got to thank you
so much for being here with us today, for obviously,
you know, putting your heart and soul into this book,
for sharing it with us. It's been a really interesting
conversation and definitely sort of like wetted my appetite to
learn more about this part of our home that you know,
I like you before this, like didn't really think much about.
So thanks so much for being here.
Speaker 3: Well, thanks so much for having me, for the invitation,
and for your interest.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and everybody listening, thank you for coming back week
after week. I'm really looking forward to the next time
we all get together to talk nerdy