Looking at a map and comparing it with what is around you is very disorienting. 15 miles looks shorter, because you can see that far, but feels endless. The mountain ridges surrounding the flats read as tiny lines on a map, no more than a scratch on Earth's skin, but driving among them, they are epic. Enormous factory complexes look like miniatures; a train - and you can see the entire length of it - seems to be moving excruciatingly slowly.
The Great Salt Lake borders the site in which we are about to spend a week or so. I'm not sure if I'll get to see the Spiral Jetty in person, but entering this landscape reminds me of Smithson's initial writings about the Spiral Jetty site and his fascination with the idea of entropy:"As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear a quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the
possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence. My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It was as if the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. No sense wondering about classifications
and categories, there were none."
