The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  I could tell: the bigness of Utah was freaking out the crows. They didn’t know what to make of such an uninhabited expanse. “I’m interested,” Smithson once said, “in that area of terror between man and land.”

  Smithson did not begin his career as an earth artist; nor, given his intellectually garrulous persona, would he probably wish to be called one. Born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1938, Smithson became keenly cognizant of how the local postindustrial landscape—what he described as “ruins in reverse”—shaped his sensibilities, as did natural features like quarries, which he said were “embedded in my psyche.”

  Contrary to popular belief, or maybe just contrary to my assumption, Smithson didn’t extend beyond his New York City studio to work in the outdoors because he desired more space. “I don’t think you’re freer artistically in the desert than you are inside a room,” he said. In his 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Smithson noted the importance, to his thinking, of the nighttime drive by fellow New Jersey artist Tony Smith on an unfinished stretch of the Jersey Turnpike, in the dark, with students from Cooper Union. “[Smith] is talking about a sensation,” Smithson wrote. “[He] is describing the state of his mind in the ‘primary process’ of making contact with matter.” In the same essay, he noted that Freud referred to this commingling experience as “oceanic.” When Smithson first started working outdoors, he made boxes and containers to hold, for example, slate from a Pennsylvania quarry, which he then displayed in a gallery. Still, the tension between freedom and restriction remained an exhilarating struggle.

  “If art is art, it must have limits,” Smithson wrote. “How can one contain this ‘oceanic’ site?”

  Clearly the crows, while lacking Smithson’s theoretical framework, were asking themselves the same question. One crow remarked fearfully, “Everything is dead here.”

  The littler crow stared out the window and sang a soothing song to itself, the lyrics of which consisted of one repeated sentence:

  No people.

  No people.

  No people.

  No people.

  Before visiting the jetty, I was thinking a lot about interior landscapes, those uninhabited places inside of us that cannot be contained (or explained) by any map. Interior landscapes are shaped by all kinds of forces: geographic or familial or cultural or genetic. When I was the age of the crows, for example, I lived in Maine. It was cold and dark the majority of the time. We were surrounded by ocean that produced food and bracing relief from the annual week of heat but was otherwise a gray, impetuous slab. People with some frequency were snatched off rocks by waves and drowned. Also, it being the ’70s and ’80s, we could not escape stories of nuclear annihilation, which was a perennial story line for television series and books, many of them aimed at young-adult audiences. Like a great number of my contemporaries, I became hooked on the narrative of nuclear annihilation, and via that obsession I started to plan. Because my home life was stable, I had the luxury of dreaming up very bad situations and strategizing how to survive them. It was as if my entire upbringing had bred in me a delight in destruction’s aftermath, as well as in destruction’s problem-solving thrills.

  Interior landscapes interest me because I am not only a parent but also a college professor. I regularly encounter young adults from similarly comfortable backgrounds who seem mentally undone by the often mild daily challenges they encounter (mild compared to a nuclear apocalypse, at any rate). I do not want to make uninformed guesses about why this is the case; I simply want to state that it is the case. Stress, anxiety, unhappiness, they thrive in these young adults. Which has, in turn, made me wonder about the crows. How prepared will they be to handle daily challenges, both banal and catastrophic? How might I help them cultivate their interior landscapes so as to improve their chances of survival—even happiness? I am admittedly limited by nostalgia for my own upbringing, which I like to think has served me decently. Perhaps for no better reason, I’ve wondered: Are they enough into their future annihilation? Should they be, as a means to gain present-day control over the frightening and the uncertain, more into it?

  Basically, I wanted the crows to be more regularly scared.

  But the crows (and their contemporaries), perhaps because of the future catastrophes they face—those of the global-warming variety, which are not “maybes” but “definitelies”—seem less receptive to destruction narratives that might shape their interior landscapes. Nuclear war was avoidable (or so I optimistically chose to believe), but what they will encounter as adults is not. Their interior landscapes, thus, are the only landscapes that may not end in ruin. Those are the only landscapes over which they may have any control.

  On the east-west road—the one that cut through Corinne, the last chance for gas—the even emptier terrain became entrancingly beautiful. The waterlogged fields suggested that a tsunami had recently receded, leaving the earth striated by long glassy puddles that acted as mirrors between the planting rows. What beat past our windows at 80 mph was land-sky-land-sky, and soon we didn’t know down from up.

  The crows remarked, with slightly more enthusiasm, “It looks like Minecraft out here.”

  The disorientation caused by so much natural beauty clearly explained the abundance of drowsy drivers next exit signs we saw back on the highway. Or maybe Drowsy Drivers was a roadside service the state of Utah provided, a type of GPS device you strapped into your backseat so it could babble map coordinates to you from the dream world. Technically, we were driving over a former ocean floor, or at least this is what we were told at a hot springs by a man with a dread god tattoo on his arm. This, he said, accounted for the water’s high mineral content. The land around us was still saturated by the residue of that vanished ocean and the life it once contained.

  Smithson grew interested in salt lakes, in part, because the water was filled with salt-loving bacteria that turned the surface pink and sometimes “the color of tomato soup.” He started to explore the Great Salt Lake, looking for a place to make an artwork, and eventually settled on Rozel Point, location of a defunct oil jetty and a handful of derelict structures, what he described as “man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.”

  He chose the location first, without knowing what he would put there.

  At the Golden Spike National Historic Site, a ranger gave us a copy of an internet map. He circled the places on the jetty road that he’d heard were flooded, though “flooded” proved a relative distinction. The road, even in its driest iteration, was the consistency of wet cement; it strongly sucked at our tires when it wasn’t threatening to slide us into the adjacent pastures. Then we encountered the water, lots of it, opaque and brown and quick, traversing the road. It was basically a river made of thick, muscular currents. This water was not legible to me. It wasn’t Maine water. Fail to read Maine water correctly, and you could return after circumnavigating an island on foot to find yourself boatless. Fail to read Maine water, and you could swim into a current that—had you observed the lobster pots creating deep Vs of tiny rapids to either side—would require you to fight with all your strength to prevent being swept out to sea.

  Fail to read this water, and who knows? My husband and I eyeballed the flood. It didn’t look impassable; it wasn’t terribly wide. I gunned our vehicle; more accurately, I bulleted it. What I didn’t anticipate was the depth of the water, which of course, I should have. The breach was obviously because of the lowness of this land relative to the land around it. Our trajectory was sharp. We crashed nose first into the brown. The crows screamed as we surged down and through and up again, back to the semisecurity of soggy landfall.

  The crows also really loved the cows. Cows stood on either side of us, and then, as we approached the shore, the cows were replaced by cow-looking rocks, sturdy black lumps that grazed on the hillside like the previous cows’ petrified ancestors. There was otherwise not a lot of life, unless dead rabbits count. In the road were a decent number of flat, dead rabbits, which somewhat boggled the
mind, given how few cars travel this road. We saw no birds. Bugs did die against the windshield (we thought they were sticky rain); otherwise it was just a pastel-scape of pinky-white grasses and stiff, bleached bushes blown into wild, death-throe shapes, the frosted purple of the salt and sand flats, and far in the distance—more than a mile from shore, that’s how receded the water was—the light pink surface of the Great Salt Lake.

  Finally we saw what we’d come all this way to see. Not only was the jetty above water; it looked like a glyph marooned in a desert. It was smaller than I expected it to be. Also wilier. The jetty changed shape and seemed to actively grow or shrink as we drove parallel to it, forcing us to constantly recalibrate our perception of it.

  In short: we were not in hell. This was no inferno. The sky was low and soft and gray-mauve or dark mauve, as were the isolated triangular crags of mountains in the distance. “From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the ‘Spiral Jetty,’” Smithson wrote. “My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other.” The lake, with its pinkish cast, was difficult to differentiate from the sky, creating the illusion that there was no horizon line. It kind of did feel like the end of the world, though not in the way I originally meant it. The world hadn’t been destroyed; it simply dissolved into a combination water-gas-solid substance that surrounded us. Salt lakes, I later learned, are also known as “terminal lakes” or “endorheic basins.” “Endo” (from the Ancient Greek) means “within” and “rheic” “to flow.” They are self-contained bodies that do not empty into any ocean. They are the self-contained end to an infinite means.

  One of Smithson’s favorite words was “dialectic,” meaning he desired that things exist in productive tension with other things, thereby producing a “dialectical situation.” Our situation, vis-à-vis the jetty, clearly qualified as a dialectical one. But what was the “site” here, and what was the “nonsite”? I’d been reading oodles of Smithson and still felt confused by these two words that crucially underwrote all of Smithson’s earth art.

  “What you are really confronted with in a nonsite is the absence of the site,” he said in a 1969 interview. “In a sense the nonsite is the center of the system, and the site itself is the fringe or the edge,” he said in a 1970 discussion with the earth artists Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim. (If I occasionally tired of Smithson’s gnomic tendencies, I was not alone. Oppenheim, in the same 1970 discussion, grouched: “Why do you bother with nonsite at all? Why don’t you just designate a site?”) But the most compelling definition, to me, is Smithson’s claim that the nonsite is “based on my experience of the site.” The nonsite is a drawing or a sculpture or a box containing slate from a quarry. It is the collaborative transmission, or so I like to think, that results when a geographical landscape moves through or commingles with a figurative, human one.

  Sites and nonsites, in other words, involve the equal interplay of consciousness and matter. Which again made me think about the crows and what had thus far shaped their interior landscapes, the ones that might come to play (or interplay) on this trip, as well as on the vaster metaphorical trip that eventually their lives would comprise. How might they contain their interior landscape—their evolving selves, basically—and how will they productively, without becoming overwhelmed (or without imposing preconceptions that close down possibilities), deal with the deluge of feeling and information that exists both within a person and without?

  Generally speaking, the crows did not consume traditional narratives. Reading did not interest them. Instead of stories, for example, the crows consume patterns of existence. They watched unpackaging videos on YouTube. They watched other people play video games. They had not been inculcated with a sense of duty to experience “the end”; ends, for them, don’t exist or aren’t significantly different from the middle.

  (I’m not saying narrative is the superior thought container. In fact, my memory was misled by the ruling paradigm—the one on which I was raised—in the beginning of this essay. The souvenir salt formation James took from the jetty? It didn’t disappear. That was just me, or rather my training, imposing an ending.)

  Also, the crows played Minecraft, which is perhaps the closest analog to the apocalypse narratives of my youth. Minecraft is less a story with arcs and ends than it is an experience consisting of pattern and repetition. It requires planning and involves randomness. In Survival Mode, you wake up. You work to ensure you have shelter and resources. The sun sets. You lock yourself in your house before dark to escape zombies and other monsters that spawn in the night. You sleep. You wake up. You work. The sun sets. You barricade yourself in your house. You sleep. You wake up. You repeat. Time is not so much a story line with a beginning, middle, and end as it is a sequence of actions and events that, shape-wise at least, resemble distinct circles that stack one atop the other.

  In his essay “The Spiral Jetty,” Smithson included a list of materials a person encountered as she walked from the center of the jetty. He demarcated twenty directional points (North, North by East, etc.). The materials view from each point was the same:

  Mud, salt crystals, rock, water.

  Mud, salt crystals, rock, water.

  The same materials, listed twenty times, the stack of repeated words gesturing toward sedimentary time layers while also, in replicating the many hash marks on a compass, implying the unseen presence of a circle.

  Smithson completed “Spiral Jetty” in 1970. He died in Texas in 1973, while aerially surveying the artificial lake area where he hoped to build his “Amarillo Ramp.” He hired a plane, a pilot, and a photographer. The plane crashed. All three were killed. The artificial lake is dry now. The ramp, completed after his death by his wife and friends, is eroding. The crash site—or maybe it is a nonsite—is a few hundred yards away.

  We parked in the dirt lot. We scrambled down the rocky bank onto the flats. The push-pull of negative/positive space made the jetty seem even more kinetically alive and like the storm its shape resembled, one that messed with the intuitive logic of water behavior. The land we’d driven over was filling up with water, while the lake appeared to be emptying of it.

  We walked the spiral many times; we developed individual jetty styles and jetty rules. The crows cut across the puddled sand between the concentric rings, but I did not, I never did that, I would never do that. I walked the line, or rather, the curve. Later we flung off onto the flats. My husband made mini-jetties with black rocks he found in the sand. The jetty, he said, was spawning.

  We returned to the jetty and walked it again. Was it an ancient ruin? Was it the beginning of a new civilization? Was it an example of, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “the revision of categories, where something past comes again, as though out of the future”? In always being both, it encouraged temporal slippage. We were not looking at the past or the future; we were in the middle of time. We were at the point of dislocation around which salt crystals spiraled upward like a staircase as they grew. The crows wrote their names on the sand, and because there was no rising tide—no ocean’s clock—their names would possibly never be erased.

  Smithson, in his 1966 essay “Entropy and the New Monuments,” mentions a recent electrical blackout in the Northeast. “Far from creating a mood of dread,” he wrote, “the power failure created a mood of euphoria. An almost cosmic joy swept over the darkened cities.” (When Smithson wrote this, a far more economically destitute New York had yet to experience the subsequent 1977 blackout, the violent and anarchic results of which would probably not be qualified as expressions of “cosmic joy.”) When we are in Maine, we often lose our power, and yes, the promise of darkness inspires glee. I gleefully fill the tub with water and the lamps with oil and make sleeping situations nearer to the woodstove. I create in our domestic interior a much more active and dynamic conversation with the exterior, that thing we are so often unaffected by, or simply trying, with our house, to keep out. And while this skill set has mostl
y been of use in places where the power lines are aboveground, sagging, even in good weather, from tilted pole to tilted pole, the underground electricals of New York are now equally menaced by rising (and descending, into the works) water. My gleeful preparations are increasingly applicable to many more situations, and by that possibility I feel energized. Not because I crave drama or instability, but because I am rendered, in a kind of trippy and exhilarating way, both indispensable and irrelevant.

  At the jetty I became entirely irrelevant, and the result was even more exhilarating. Smithson, when searching for a framework with which to explore both limits and limitlessness, found useful the concept of entropy, i.e., the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy proved intriguing to him because, as he understood it, energy was “more easily lost than obtained” and thus, “in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness.” I experienced that ultimate future. I experienced what the planet would be like when we were, every one of us, gone. I had, before our visit, worried not only about my crows but also about the loneliness of a planet that might someday have no one to see it, walk through it, feel intense things because of it. That is what made my brain and my heart fold in on themselves. Cities, yes, gone; ice caps, gone; but the beauty of the planet routed through a human consciousness, that’s what I couldn’t comprehend vanishing. This was what, more than my own particular death, I’d despaired at. But on the jetty, I understood what Smithson intuited so long ago in Rome: beauty did not need us.