Brine shrimp are known adapters, but as the Great Salt Lake dries and becomes more saline, can they and the species that depend upon them survive?
1.
In 1847, as the wagons emerged from Emigration Canyon, into what is now called Salt Lake City, a band of silver blue water streaked across the western horizon. The pioneers must have been enchanted by the promise of a lake, a refuge from the arid trek they’d made from Missouri. Soon enough, immigrants realized that the lake was too salty to be of agricultural use, but still this valley held to its perceived promise. Rivers ran from the mountains to provide fresh water to grow the homeland they desired. Although Shoshone and Paiute peoples had practiced irrigation for years, the settlers began in earnest to divert that fresh water to their crops and homes and, eventually, businesses and mining operations.
That diversion has worked so well that these days, Salt Lake boasts one of the fastest growing population centers. To visit Salt Lake, a city in the second most arid state in the country, is to be surprised by how green the landscape is, how Edenic in its emulation of Illinois grasses, Missouri hawthorns. Linden and maple trees line the wide city streets. Lawns Lego into perfect squares in front of bungalows and duplexes, mini-mansions, and ranch houses. Golf courses undulate across wide patches of town. Farmers grow beets and corn and alfalfa for horses and cows. The settlers took the mountain water destined for that western-edge, blue-gray lake and converted it to instead to the geometries of green that color the valley.
The Great Salt Lake holds the remains of Lake Bonneville, that ancient lake, once vast and as full of as many species, maybe even more, than your own gut biome. Earlier climate changes, like the end of the ice age 14,000 years ago, forced Bonneville to retreat into its shallow, western edge. The water evaporated. The salt stayed down. No longer teeming with myriad sea creatures, now the Great Salt Lake teems only with brine shrimp, the only creature that can survive the salinity of a sea that collapsed on itself, doubling down on its minerals, then doubling again.
Although the pioneers didn’t find the lake useful to their purposes, the lake is not useless. It supports millions of migratory birds. A unique-to-this-lake algae prefers the heavy salinity of the Great Salt Lake and feeds the billions of brine shrimp that feed those migratory birds. In addition to feeding the birds, the brine shrimp form an industry that packages the shrimp for aquariums across the word.
But descendants of those pioneers mostly ignore the lake like one avoids the garbage dump. “It will resolve itself,” just as a landfill does, sending gases into the atmosphere, liquids to the water table, and everything else will linger until some of that lingering becomes useful again and a brilliant start-up figures out how to mine the landfill for its gems. But unlike a landfill, the dump trucks have stopped depositing their goods. Snowmelt once funneled its watery goods west and down. Now snowmelt feeds alfalfa farms to feed cattle. It waters lawns. It fuels industrial turbines. It washes cars and dishes. It flushes waste. It spins laundry. It fills water bottles. It quenches everyone’s thirst but the lake’s. In October 2022, the water level in the Great Salt Lake reached an historic low. The lake, divided in half by a rail causeway, prevents freshwater from reaching the northern end. The salinity is now too high even for the life that has adapted there. And the water, a great, protective blanket, holds down the toxins that have been dumped there, trapping what has been buried by mining operations—arsenic, antimony, copper, zirconium, mercury, selenium, and other heavy metals. As the water evaporates, those toxic metals will be exposed to wind which will carry them up to the Wasatch Mountains and beyond to Wyoming. The only thing that doesn’t evaporate and get blown eastward are the brine shrimp. Tiny enough to fly, they prefer their sticky, hostile habitat. But even lovers of hostile environments call uncle when they can’t breathe.
2.
When I was five years old and had just learned to read, my mom and dad sat on the couch on either side of me and read a book about how bodies became pregnant. Although it was a children’s book, the writing was clinical and the pictures stiff and uncomfortable. This was just before Where Did I Come From? came out—the more comic, cuter images of clouds and fat babies version of oh-my-god-I-didn’t-even-ask sex-ed explainer. The formal and thin characters of my book must have displayed some of their body parts in this unwarranted and unwanted lesson but the image I remember best was the pencil dot in the middle of the page that represented the egg. The narrator explained that the egg was this small—barely visible—and that sperm, even smaller than that pencil dot, could only be seen through a microscope.
The smallness of babies struck me as miraculous. I loved small things then and now: miniature teacups, miniature pigs made of marzipan, and miniature bears the size of miniature toy poodles. The idea that humans grew from an egg the size of a pinprick fertilized by a swimming thing several times smaller than that egg amazed me. Throughout my childhood, I studied A Child Is Born with its romantic language and each stage of the fetus depicted as if someone were in the womb with a camera. The photos have been manipulated to magnify and light the tiniest fetuses to make them look more babylike, but I was always drawn to how alien the babies looked. An embryo at six weeks of growth is still smaller than an adult brine shrimp. It also might look a bit like a brine shrimp, with its tail a bit like a tadpole.
This six-week embryo swims in a uterus that forms an ecosphere to itself. Everything the fetus needs is provided by the mother. Some say that the book A Child Is Born elides the gestater’s existence since the camera pays no attention to her identity or the work her body does to protect and to grow this shrimp. A study in the journal Science investigating endurance exercise events found that pregnancy equates to running a marathon every day for 365 days. No one watches films or TV shows about pregnancy as an extreme sport, but if you ask a pregnant woman how she’s feeling, she will exhale deeply at you and bow her head so you can slip the gold medal over her head, though she must be careful not to knock the baby, once it’s born, in the head with the medallion while she nurses.
3.
I didn’t mean to fall in love with brine shrimp. In 2017, for my birthday, my friend Angie gave me an ecosphere—an egg-shaped glass enclosure in which three brine shrimp swam among oxygenating plants in a carefully balanced, magical kind of system. The brine shrimp were meant to live six months. Two years later, they still swam between the tiny, oxygenating branch that produced the algae that fed the shrimps.
That year, I took the ecosphere on a book tour through California. As I explained about The After-Normal, an abecedarian about how climate change affects albatrosses, frogs, igloos, grasses, opossums, possums, and whistles, I passed the brine shrimp around the audience to show how their habitat is a synecdoche for our planet. This carefully balanced glass egg is as perfect as the earth. The brine shrimp are perfectly fine as long as nothing upsets the balance. I held up the sphere and said, “These are magical creatures in a magical chemical system. All food is provided. All waste is recycled. All chemicals equally distributed just like a perfect atmosphere.” Analogy made, I handed out blue and green marbles. “These are your tiny planets. Don’t lose them.” I strike metaphors too hard sometimes, but everyone took their marble and carefully slipped them into purse and pant pocket. A year later, I met someone at a writer’s retreat who had been at my talk. He produced a marble from his pocket. “I always keep it with me.”
I am enchanted by brine shrimp. They are known adapters, but I wonder, as the lake dries, becomes more saline, can they survive this extreme and extremely fast change? Can the brine shrimp adapt to life in a habitat of a wide range of salt concentration? Brine shrimp grow to be about a centimeter. They are the largest creatures in the Great Salt Lake. Because of their ability to adapt to different levels of salinity, they live in both the north and south arms of the lake divided by a causeway that literally causes the north side of the lake to become saltier as it receives, unlike the south arm, almost no new fresh water. Brine shrimp eat microscopic algae Dunaliella veridis. Dunaliella are soft and nutritious but adult shrimp can eat all kinds of cyanobacteria and diatoms, which grow well in the south arm of the lake but struggle to grow in the over-salty north.
The better-balanced south arm takes good care of their tiny creatures, providing sustenance as well as space to grow. What brine shrimp lack in individual size, they make up for in abundance. Over 17 trillion brine shrimp live in the Great Salt Lake. An eared grebe, just one of the millions of birds that feast on the shrimp, eats 25,000 to 35,000 per day. As one of the primary migratory bird stopovers, the Great Salt Lake provides the food necessary for birds to make it to their next stop north and then feed them thoroughly on their way back south again. It takes a lot of energy for migratory birds to fly up and down continents. Seventeen trillion brine shrimp are just the right amount to sustain the metabolism of ten million visiting birds.
4.
If you Google “What should pregnant women…” Google will autofill the rest of the question for you with the word “eat.” Then Google will return to you 671,000,000 entries. Six hundred seventy-one million isn’t as many webpages as there are brine shrimp in the sea, but the internet teems with delicious information to strain through the baleen that is your brain. Similac, a predominant brand of baby formula, occupies the first entry. If there is a perfectly designed-for-wellness drink for babies, why isn’t there one for pregnant humans? Not only do we have to distill the advice, we have to shop for and concoct our own nutritional intake. In the Google list, Johns Hopkins Medicine is the fourth entry. Since there is no Similac for pregnant people, Johns Hopkins advises pregnant people to eat their food the hard way. With cooking and with teeth.
The Johns Hopkins site connects the nutritive purpose to each of the superfoods:
- vegetables: carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, spinach, cooked greens, tomatoes, and red sweet peppers (for vitamin A and potassium)
- Fruits: cantaloupe, honeydew, mangoes, prunes, bananas, apricots, oranges, and red or pink grapefruit (for potassium)
- Dairy: fat-free or low-fat yogurt, skim or 1% milk, soymilk (for calcium, potassium, vitamins A and D)
- Grains: ready-to-eat cereals/cooked cereals (for iron and folic acid)
- Proteins: beans and peas; nuts and seeds; lean beef, lamb, and pork; salmon, trout, herring, sardines, and pollock
I imagine that Johns Hopkins thinks pregnant humans are mostly carnies who run the Tilt-a-Whirl across from the food court. They must believe that pregnant people need reminding that carrots do not come via food truck. Once you start manufacturing humans, the internet/world/Johns Hopkins becomes invested in your diet. The list of foods to eat is short. The list of foods to avoid long: food trucks, carnivals, fast food, delis, raw sushi, and fresh cheeses like feta, queso fresco, blue-veined cheeses, and Camembert, and smoked seafood. When I was pregnant with my first child, I felt hemmed in, hampered, envesselized. I did not want to be a walking environment. I felt like an aquarium—belly on display, John Hopkins shaking the right kind and right amount of flakes of fish food (cooked not raw) into my tank, taking my pH balance daily (blood work, ultrasound, weigh-ins) to make sure I wasn’t fucking anything up.
Embryos are not as sturdy as brine shrimp who feed on algae and live with bacteria. Bacteria from foods like deli meat and raw cheeses potentially threaten the fetus’s native environment. Nine months of no queso fresco, no hot dogs, no sushi, no Caesar salad, no pâté turn the pregnant person’s body into a laboratory. We’re running experiments in here. Try not to contaminate with your regular person, regular turkey slices, regular raw-fish eating ways. It’s a fragile, delicate environment—you don’t want to upend the balance.
I want to have the kind of patience for my species as brine shrimp have for theirs.
5.
Brine shrimp are sensitive to their environments but not particularly fragile. Adept at adapting to extreme situations, they come prepared with strategies to extend their survival. Brine shrimp are gender tamperers. Sometimes, environments prompt changes in their sex, sometimes other environmental changes require them to adapt. Brine shrimp have no say in the salinity levels in the lake but they do have the capacity to employ their plasticity in order to adapt to radically altered environments.
When conditions in Great Salt Lake become especially hostile, dormant brine shrimp embryos lay protected inside cysts until conditions improve. The science journal Frontiers in Physiology published an article, “The Brine Shrimp Artemia: Adapted to Critical Life Conditions,” that reads, “Under extremely critical environmental conditions, for example when seasonal lakes dry out, Artemia takes refuge by producing a highly resistant encysted gastrula embryo (cyst) capable of severe dehydration enabling an escape from population extinction. Cysts can be viewed as gene banks that store a genetic memory of historical population conditions. Their occurrence is due to the evolved ability of females to ‘perceive’ forthcoming unstable environmental conditions expressed by their ability to switch reproductive mode.”
In addition to turtling up into cysts and waiting for the water to return, female brine shrimp can reproduce asexually by parthenogenesis or regular-sexually with males who are slightly smaller than they are but still cute. Parthenogenesis requires no oversight by the internet nor Johns Hopkins.
I want to take stock, or even purchase stock, in these potentialities. I want to hoard my gene bank for when environmental conditions become more hospitable. I want to live beyond severe dehydration, beyond evaporation, beyond wind-blowing my chemical brethren asunder. I want to have the kind of patience for my species as brine shrimp have for theirs. I want to think ahead. I want to plan ahead. I want to take refuge in the dream that all that was will be again. I want my children to spring forth from my head like Athena from Zeus and land in a well-balanced habitat where what goes in goes back out in equal, nontoxic proportion.
As the Great Salt Lake changes shape, the brine shrimp are acting up—they’re drying out, ready for the next world. They’re tantalizing their male partners then faking them out, flipping their naughty bits into head gear. Is the Great Salt Lake dying? Possibly. But the brine shrimp are prepared, just in case.
In what reads a bit like a eulogy, Terry Tempest Williams wrote in the March 25, 2023 edition of The New York Times about the lake, “The malignant colors, shapes, and smells eerily mirrored the imaging of my mother’s late-stage cancer. I knelt to caress the water body of Great Salt Lake, my henna-painted hands now tattooed in intricate designs by the feathered bodies of dead brine shrimp.” Later, she uses “she” pronouns to refer to the lake. Twitter users excoriated Tempest Williams for “equating a body of water to a woman.” They made fun of her for giving human status to a lake. Maybe it was the “mother” idea that bothered them. Women take up enough space, I imagine they felt.
I too have trouble with the gendering of lakes and nature but not for the same reason. If you name it “she,” it will suffer at the hands of “he.” Maybe if we called things Father Lake, Father Nature, we’d be cowed into carefulness. No father likes it when you chip the paint on the walls of the house, let alone coat the floor of a waterbody with detritus like mercury. Being a mother means your body takes the brunt of its children’s nutritional needs, their fetal desires, their in utero demands. If the earth had been a father, not a mother, maybe we wouldn’t have depleted her like a fetus depletes the calcium of her host’s bones.
6.
Polycystic ovarian syndrome makes conception hard for some people. The ovarian glands produce more testosterone, causing fluid-filled sacs, or cysts, to grow on the ovaries like little, impenetrable barnacles. These sacs produce more androgens, stunting the egg’s growth and causing other problems like growing facial hair, missed periods, and thinning hair. In general, the ovaries perform male attributes, which makes pregnancy difficult because the whole system is subject to the kind of binarism we try to avoid in the social realm but in the biological realm, we still must obey. Opposites attract, etc., etc.
In infertility, we usually assume the fault is with the egg. Maybe you just need to poke it to make it penetrable. Some poking can be done with drugs. Some fixing can be done by retrieving an egg or five and poking it with a needle and inserting some wily sperm directly.
But sometimes, as with brine shrimp, the problem is with the sperm. Or the relationship between the egg and sperm. Perhaps the host waterbody, a.k.a. vagina, is too acidic. Or too alkaline. Or salty. How is it that when one does not want to get pregnant, it is so easy to do so and when one does, it becomes so difficult that you’re assigning pH terms to your vaginal mucus?
And, then, sometimes, the problem is with the metaphor. Is the brine shrimp here the egg? The sperm? The finally cell-replicating embryo? We are all tiny things in a big salty thing—blood, semen, water. It is amazing that any of us survive our environments, and yet here they are, made directly for us. We tiny. We swim.
7.
The brine shrimp situation is dire in many saline lakes, not just the Great Salt Lake, but researchers watch in real time salt crystals stack where water molecules once piled. As agriculture, residential use, mining, and damming increase, less fresh water reaches the lakes. As the lakes become more saline, the brine shrimp stocks shrink. The northern arm of the lake has been oversaturated with salt for a while now, but now even Gilbert Bay, on the other side of the causeway, has reached 27 percent salinity. No brine shrimp have been found in the bay. Researchers at S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources at Utah State University compare the Great Salt Lake to Lake Urmia in Iran. Both have similar depth, size, and geographical setting. “Lake Urmia has already lost most of its ecological and cultural function—but the Great Salt Lake has not yet crossed that precipice.” You can hear the ellipses burbling out from the “yet.”
Already, birds suffer the lack of food. Utah Public Radio reported that 95 percent of all eared grebes stop at the Great Salt Lake. Eared grebes, once they stop to rest, don’t fly again for nine to ten months. They live much of their lives on the Great Salt Lake, feasting on brine shrimp. There is no other place for them to stop in the Western United States. If 95 percent of the eared grebes rely on the brine shrimp of the Great Salt Lake, 95 percent of eared grebes will die.
Northern shovelers fatten themselves on the shrimp, but the shrimp are missing. Instead, they eat brine shrimp eggs (cysts), which they can barely digest. Northern shovelers are dying of starvation. Cysts are not very nutritious. Plus, the brine shrimp were counting on them to bring their genetics into the next go-round.
8.
In the human body, cysts are small egg follicles that don’t grow to ovulation. You learn a lot about cysts when you’re trying, and failing, to get pregnant. The dream is to stimulate an egg follicle into ripe and receptive material—like Jell-O awaiting bananas. Or, in Utah, sometimes carrots are installed inside the Jell-O. Heck, sometimes even hot dogs, although that may be too on the nose in this metaphor. Imagine a cyst, hard-shelled like a fully developed chicken egg. No way in. No way out.
Fifteen months after the party Angie threw, one of the brine shrimp did die. Then things inside the ecosphere got a little strange. The water turned murky. The two remaining shrimp stopped moving. Light reflected against the glass instead of through it. I missed my tiny orange friend. I was worried about the other two. I moderated the temperature as best I could. I tried not to shake the egg. I didn’t take the shrimp on any more road trips. A year or so after that, another shrimp died. Then the next. I shouldn’t have been so sad—they lived seven times longer in that bubble of a planet than they were supposed to. But I thought they were amazing little guys so I grieved and looked to find another ecosphere but the only ones I could find were made of plastic instead of glass.
9.
When I was trying to get pregnant, it seemed easy. I had been pregnant before, although I hadn’t grown any of the embryos to term. Not everyone is suited to be the Great Salt Lake and, even if you are, it takes time to get there. The Great Salt Lake is the remnant of a giant inland sea called Lake Bonneville. The ghostly shoreline etched its memory in chalky lime as the lake withdrew to its leathery basin. Seashells from all kinds of sea life teem the foothills but as the lake salted up, the fish and other crustaceans dried up. The only creature the lake could house were those vigorous, adaptable fish.
Since I had been pregnant before, I assumed it would be easy to get pregnant again. But I didn’t understand about freshwater lakes versus salty lakes. When you are a very young person, all kinds of fish want to swim in your belly but as you get older, it takes a special kind of fish. I ate all the proper foods, including the clichéd pickles and ice cream in order to get pregnant. I reined in the eating of hot dogs and sushi, tightening my belt like Lake Bonneville tightened her shores. I flipped my legs over my head after having sex to get my shrimp to implant on my uterine wall.
During development, inside her own mother’s womb, a female-sexed fetus comes stocked with six million eggs in her ovaries. By the time she’s born, five million of them have shriveled up and died. By the time she hits puberty, about 40,000 eggs are viable for sperm to infiltrate and fertilize. If I put 40,000 brine shrimp eggs in homemade salt water with twigs, how many of those eggs will hatch? Conversely, if I put 100 million sperm in the vicinity of the egg, how many eggs will fertilize?
It is not only the fault of the egg and the salinity. Sperm are subject to climate crises of their own. Have you heard of wearing boxers when trying to impregnate someone, dear gentle sperm deliverers? Cool the testicles, my dude. Lay off the beer and Winstons, my friend. Keep that water an even 72 degrees Fahrenheit for proper hatching.
10.
The Great Salt Lake grows and shrinks. In 1983, snow stacked itself deep in the Wasatch Mountains. Skiers skied until May. Then, the temperature spiked and all that snow seemed to melt at once. Streams that meandered through Liberty, Fairmont, and Murray Parks turned into raging rivers. The road that severed the town east from west was underwater. Sandbags lined the street, Utahns lined the sandbags, watching the snowmelt slide westward toward the lake. Governor Bangerter enlisted industry to solve the problem flooding. Great pumps siphoned floodwaters from the lake and blew them into the salt flats just west of the lake. Or they would have if they’d turned them on. Evaporation and aquifer suck restored the lake to more reasonable boundaries. The pumps still await their destiny. It snowed over 800 inches in the Wasatch Mountains this winter. Perhaps those rusty, 40-year-old pumps can still be put to work.
By 2003, 20 years after the Great Flood, astronauts studied the Great Salt Lake from space. The halophilic bacteria in the north, saltier side of the causeway reflected red, the shallow pools wave turquoise, umber, russet lengths into space. The outlines of the lake, though still visible from the Space Station, constrict. Since 1986, when the lake stretched to Bangerter’s pumps at 4,212 feet, the lake has been in retreat. In the fall of 2002, the lake hit a 20-year low, measuring 4,198 feet. 20 years later, the lake is at its lowest level ever recorded, 4,188 feet. Those who measure the water level have become a different kind of astronaut—you can see them suited up in Hazmat gear as they walk across toxic waste once buried by water to reach the edge of the lake to measure what it has lost.
Have all natural processes gone haywire? And if so, should we intervene, even when the results may be purely delightful?
11.
I didn’t have polycystic ovary syndrome. My periods were regular. According to pH strip tests, my vaginal fluids registered normal. But I still, legs flipped over head, couldn’t get pregnant. I seem flippant now, which I can be, because my kids, Max and Zoe, exist, but at the time, I felt horrible, like I was pure poison on the inside, made of acid. I felt guilty about my previous abortion—I couldn’t have had a baby then, it might have killed me—but maybe this was karma. You had your chance, the gods of balance chime down from above.
What is the difference between hope and faith? Faith requires no proof. Foolish hope requires just a little. I touched my breasts every morning to feel for soreness. I practiced Kegels to keep my pelvic muscles in shape, with a side of, “maybe I can clutch an embryo into the uterine fold.” I ate pickles and ice cream in hope. What facts did I have? I had been pregnant before. I had been read at a young age the process. My friend, Julie, got pregnant. My sister, Valerie, got pregnant. Human bodies can in fact do this simple thing. Why could mine, right now, not?
When my period came, every month, regularly, for two years straight, 24 regular, furious periods signifying nothing, I tried to force my brain to give up, to quit hoping. When the scent of boy-craziness wafted from me like Axe body spray, my mom said, “Don’t look like you’re looking.” I tried to trick the gods of balance into looking like I gave up. I didn’t even want to have a baby. Who would bring a baby into this lake-shrinking world anyway? How can you call something loss when you couldn’t even hold it?
12.
Brine shrimp should be easy to grow. If something can survive in salinity three to five times greater than the ocean, if “hardiness” is the adjective always modifying the shrimp, if these shrimp can adapt to live in waters whose salinity spans 14 percent to 27 percent, then shouldn’t you just be able to drop those brine shrimp eggs in a bucket full of salt and water and watch them hatch? Called Sea Monkeys in another marketing life, people used to order them by mail. I’ve heard stories that people successfully grew their sea monkeys—so called because Harold Von Brunhot, who visited a pet shop and saw a tank of brine shrimp awaiting their fate as fish food. He thought the shrimp would be a great way to teach kids about nature. He named them sea monkeys because brine shrimp tails whip behind them in the form a question mark, similar to monkeys’. It’s a stretch to see these crustacean carapaces as mammalian, but if shape is your diagnostic gift, then perhaps you can embrace these monkeys. Mainly, Von Brunhot just thought they were cute. Which they are. Bright orange and adorable. I missed mine. I wanted to bring them back into my life.
That night, with my in-laws in town eating leftovers, I carefully spooned a teaspoon of cysts into distilled water. I dumped in some salt, turned on a pump for aeration, and set some glow lights above to warm the makeshift tank. Erik and I didn’t sleep that night. The lights were bright. The pump loud.
Erik elbowed, “It sounds like someone is peeing.” I told him the eggs needed air. It should only take 24 hours but when I looked the next day, nothing happened. I remembered, fertility is hard. I added some more salt.
I gave up on the brine shrimp eggs and dragged Max to Petsmart, its own kind of adaptation. We were going to get some already hatched shrimp. And some premixed salt water made by the same experts who make fish tanks for display and possibly helped organize Lake Bonneville when she receded to her Great Salt Lake stature. The internet warned me. Hatching brine shrimp is not as easy as it looks. Even harder, possibly, than hatching chickens or squirrels or babies. These puppies need all of your attention. Also a light that never goes out and a water heater. I asked the man at the PetSmart if he had any brine shrimp.
“Just ones in the refrigerator.”
“They’re already dead, right?”
“Yeah. They’re dead.” I looked in the fridge and they looked like the shrimp from my ecosphere. The ones that had died. I missed them. I would have revived them if I could have.
But I couldn’t so instead I asked the guy for some salt water from his big red garbage bin of salt water. He filled up my mostly clean milk jug.
“Can you recommend a heater? The brine shrimp need it to be 72 degrees to hatch.”
“How much water do you need to heat?”
I held up the milk jug he had just filled. “A gallon.”
He handed me a tiny heater and I handed the cashier $17.99. I was now into this for something like $40 and several 24-hour periods of disappointment. It was fine. I had been disappointed with the fertility of the universe before.
13.
The winter of 2023 provided some relief for the Great Salt Lake. With snowfall over 800 inches in the Wasatch Mountains, the lake rose three feet this spring, but the lake level sits at 4191.9 feet elevation. A better number would be 4,200 feet, which would allow some give and take. The snowmelt of 2023 will help but it would take years of that amount of runoff to fill the lake. As it stands, the north side of the lake is dead except for the few bacteria that turn the water pink. The legislature contributed a whopping $232,000 to mitigate the release of toxic dust. The brine shrimp are stuck in small pools. Pelican chicks, once safely born on islands, can now be taken by coyotes and foxes who cruise along dry ground.
Perhaps it’s time to turn Governor Bangerter’s pumps around! Attach those pumps to every hose bib and irrigation pump in Salt Lake and send the water to its original destiny. How much can humans do to fix the problems they’ve made? The poet Audre Lorde said about the patriarchy that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Human demands and innovations filled a lake with toxins then turned the convection oven onto high, evaporating the protective blanket. The brine shrimp have a cyst plan. What do we have besides rusting pipes?
14.
Have all natural processes gone haywire? And if so, should we intervene, even when the results may be purely delightful? To get pregnant should have been a natural process, but after two years, it was time to call in industrial favors, rig pump to follicle, and see what science could produce. Spontaneous generation, spontaneous combustion, spontaneous sex—these things can happen inside the home, but if you want to ensure success, sometimes you have to turn the systems inside out. Thanks to human innovation, the systems are on display as if through a window. Look closely at the anatomy. Put the shrimp under the microscope. Let’s see what we can do here. Intrauterine insemination isn’t a magical procedure. It takes the pure science of conception and adds one centrifuge, some stirrups, and the muscle it takes to plunge a syringe.
The process wasn’t the one I wanted or expected but the result was still enchanting: Next week, I’m driving from Flagstaff to Salt Lake with my kids, Max and Zoe. We’re going out to the bird refuge, which is flooded, but the drought comes back quick in the West. For now, the grebes find food. Perhaps I can scoop a few brine shrimp into a jar to see if I can rebuild that once-perfect sphere.
Read Melissa Sevigny’s interview with Nicole Walker, “A Wildness in the Design,” as well as other nonfiction by Nicole Walker appearing in Terrain.org: “Recommended Reads on Metaphor in Nonfiction,” “Letter to America,” “Dear Rain,” “Micro-Conversion,” and “Microapocalypse.”
Header photo of Lucin Cutoff railroad that separates the northern arm from the southern arm of the Great Salt Lake near Promontory, Utah, by Guy in Utah, courtesy Shutterstock.