Reflections on a Living Landmark

Torrey House Press

For millennia, Utah Lake has been the heart of a gracious desert valley, its waters a life-giving bounty for migrating birds and abundant fish, its shores a long-time home for people. Then nineteenth-century settlers, unversed in aridity, wreaked havoc on the lake and the lives it sustained. A World-War-II-era steel mill poisoned the water almost beyond recovery, and introduced species decimated aquatic life. Yet the lake still draws people to its shores, waters, and memories even as communal grief has partly obscured the potent, if tenuous, return of a great jewel of the West. These words arise from complex emotions, striking encounters, and surging hopes for a place that can transcend tragedy, heal community, and answer to past and future generations.

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My clearest memories of Utah Lake include the former expanse of Geneva Steel. We passed the mill every week or so in the 90s — on our way to my grandma’s Provo house; to Topaz and Bryce and Nine Mile and Arches; to what was then Utah Valley State College, where my mom worked. 

I couldn’t imagine the mill not existing. I think I believed the steel was sourced directly onsite, hauled out in big, gleaming menhirs from the lakebed. But how the steel was deployed after, I didn’t know. All I saw was energy, scale, and relentless output. 

And yet, the mill is (almost) gone, and the lake recovers.

Any of these moments, my now husband (same age, different access) might have been wandering the lake’s south shores. I never took family photos like he did, never heard the ghost stories, never prowled sloughs or built bonfires on the ice. 

This chapbook was inspired by activism, appreciation, and the possibility of more collective, nuanced management for the future of Utah Lake. Our question is not: Who takes the lake? Rather it is: Who hasn’t been included in its recovery? Or, maybe: who, now, can be included? 

We haven’t sounded every answer, but there is integrity (and pleasure) in the pursuit.

—AMELIA ENGLAND, Utah Lake Stories

Header photos by Kevin Hehl | @kevins.scenic.photography