Writing for Antelope Island
This track serves as a companion to the essay below, a mix of field recordings from my time on Antelope Island, as well as piano, upright bass, and the Lyra synthesizer.
I sit thirty yards above the shoreline, on the westernmost edge of Antelope Island. The slope upwards is a haphazard array of Tintic Quartzite, remnants of the Cambrian period cast in oven-sized hunks. These rocks are home to marmots, dense bodies of tawny and rust, with a thick tuft of white above their noses. My first glimpse of one came as it inched its way forward from a watchtower-like pillar, fifteen feet tall with deep scooped divots hollowing out the lower half. But the marmot's eyes weren't for me. Instead, it was watching the dark-winged northern harrier coasting along the hillside.
My afternoon began a couple miles to the north, along a broad stretch of sand, speckled gray with the color of fresh concrete. Around me, small birds are calling out in an Eno-esque melody of looping repeats. It's a questioning, three-note phrase, followed by a quick-dropping trill, overlapping from one to the next. But they lie hidden among the grasses at sand's edge, giving the shoreline a haunted, parched emptiness. Closer to the water, I begin to pass the bodies of dead birds, all on their backs with heads turned to the side and wings spread in frozen communion. Their feathers lie in mummified clumps, dried stiff from salt and sand.
In late 2024, an epidemic of avian influenza struck the flocks wintering on the Great Salt Lake, killing over fifteen thousand eared grebes. It's an astonishing number until you realize that roughly four million grebes, as well as eight million other birds migrate through the lake every year. Despite its namesake, Antelope, and its chief attraction, bison, this island is the domain of birds. Ironic for a place with so few trees.
Back on the rocks, tired of the marmots' slow patience, I work my way up to a small trail, hard-packed grit and stone. I want to get a closer look at the harrier, still flying along the upper reaches of the ridgeline. Northern harriers are known for their distinctive hunting style, a low-flying glide only feet above the ground, relying on their hearing to detect voles and mice in the grass below. This one is female, with a body of dark chocolate and a distinct white patch above the tail. With wings cocked in a shallow V, it tacks into the wind, belly nearly brushing grass and rock. Like a bug in amber, it looks frozen in the air, but somehow, imperceptibly, I still struggle to keep up with it in my binoculars.
Following the bird's path, I head up a loose draw, part game trail, part runoff wash. The ground is a patchwork of low-clinging Redstem Filaree, one of spring's early bloomers. Its flowers are small specks of crayon purple, an unnatural hue in this faded landscape. A chukar, even-gray and angry at my intrusion, bursts ahead of me in a gunshot of flapping wings and ringing cry.
The falling light, in a cut of muddy yellow splitting water and sky, sends me back towards camp. From up high, I watch as the lake sheds its drab spring dullness to come alight like a painter on fresh canvas. The hillside thrums with a symphony of sage thrashers, their tails a flipbook of natural contrast, symmetrical cream and brown, flickering between every call. Turning in slow circles, I look for every flash of feathers, but there's too many to count and their bodies are too dim to make out against the grassy dusk. All I'm left to do is listen.
Tell me, how closely do you hear the birds when they call all around you?
Antelope Island is a protruding thumb of land fifteen miles long and a third as wide, lying along the eastern edge of the Great Salt Lake. The landscape is mostly grassland, with a spine of upraised rock bisecting the middle, from north to south. Hidden among the hills lie forty freshwater springs, enough to sustain a herd of around six hundred bison, along with smaller residents like antelope, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and coyotes. In the mid-1800s, the island served as grazing land for cattle and horses owned by the LDS church. Later on, over 10,000 sheep, the largest operation west of the Mississippi, lived amidst a small group of bison. But a history of overgrazing and variable water levels led to a selling off of the commodity herds, with the state of Utah now managing access to the island.
The next day, I start nine miles to the south, headed into the island's interior for a point called Sentinel Peak, with the promise of unobstructed views across the width of the island. The morning's light is a wash of pallid purple, like hospital fluorescents on dying skin. As the trail rises in serpentine bends, a beautiful rock has begun to appear, the metamorphic gneiss, with fluid, tiger-like bands of pink and red on a wall of white. Only a few trees rise in these hills, plum-shaped junipers tracked out underneath into dust heavy with bison print.
Finally, I spot a raptor in the air. The body is espresso dark, dense and thick, with a lightening of color at the fringes of its wings. It flaps slow and heavy against the still morning air, until it gains enough height to soar. And soar it does, a concentric spin higher and higher, three, four, five hundred feet up until I lose sight of the silhouette in the thin of the sky.
The top of the ridge has come quick, a wide and gentle slope studded with rock. From up here, all but the view to the north is open to the eye, with the lake around me bisected into two distinct forms. To the west lies deep water, with a richness heavy as steel, and a silent austerity broken only by wind and birds. Off to the east stretch mud and salt flats with a thin ribbon of water acting as the only remaining barrier between civilization and this wind-swept landscape.
A haze of pollution and the steady stream of overhead planes serves as a constant reminder of the 800,000 people living within a 20-mile radius of where I'm now standing. The contrast from one glance to the next, of sparseness and density in equal measure, causes a kind of disembodied presence. I'm alone, having not seen a person all morning, and yet the gravity of the city exerts a constant pull.
I go outdoors with the desire to escape the stickiness of our modern lives. Everything has become too accessible, too focused on grabbing our attention and keeping us addicted to screens and services. The sense of remoteness is becoming harder to find, with extended cellphone service and hordes of RVs encroaching on these once wild spaces.
I need time, quiet and wondrously alone, to keep my spirit alive.
Fortunately, all it takes is the fury of weather and wind to break my mind from this existential drift. A quick-moving storm pushes me off the ridge and back to camp, but there's nothing to be gained sheltering away during an already short trip. So I set off, once again on the northwest side of the island, along a trail cut into the earth with the heft of a woodblock print, beelined towards a distant band of rocky faces. Two ravens are circling low on the trail's inland side. They dip their wings in a fast break, diving sharply, but always righting just before the ground. What are you looking for in this kind of weather? I think they must be in the air for the pure sake of flying, an acrobatic pleasure, sure with grace.
The wind is an immense force from behind, compelling me further forward. It has the sound of a rogue hairdryer, running without pause. In all this whirlwind of noise I've forgotten that the idea of silence is even possible. I walk through a valley of white and grass, with parabolic curves at the edges, an upward rise into mountains hidden by clouds. And always present to the west, boundless water driven to froth from the unconstrained wind. As the storm heavies, I take shelter under a large three-trunked juniper. The dirt underneath is worn into a powdered flour, thick with berries from last season.
This view in front of me, the miles I've covered and the hills hardly revealed, offers a study of clean abstraction. Every shape has melded into a simplification of curves and jagged edges. Colors, massed and blocky in their uniformity, hay yellow alongside plaster white. The break of water, an intruding presence, burnished and broken. No individual detail can be resolved, obscured by distance, storm and cloud. It's all one vast landscape, together, summed into a continuity of being.
Dripping and cold, I hike back through the rain. Stinging droplets find my exposed skin, soon red and numb. The flood of water has added a richness that was missing from this spring palette, like a faded t-shirt straight out of the wash, saturated with more color than it manages when dry. As the storm moves south, a crack of white and turquoise blue opens up along the water line. Clear weather is still a ways out, but that flash of sky and sun is a promise of what's to come, the hope of a warm, clear night around the campfire.
Our perception is constrained by the distance of our perspective. We've traded sweeping vistas for the myopic screen, the cold unknown for temperature controlled ease. But human nature was not shaped by comfort, rather by the willingness to search for what lies just beyond our grasp. Within all of us lies a hunger to plunge into the depths of the unknown. For nature beckons, and if you must exist, exist in full.