Pollution
Jordan Ray Freytag
Mom reluctantly dropped me off at Lake Shore Harbor under a midday summer sun. Trucks with boats in tow lowered their vessels into the murk.
Dad’s camper rested on the gravel’s edge at the south side of the harbor, a beaten wanderer. Inside it smelled of cigarettes. In the bathroom, I stared at the creased foldout of a naked woman, feeling excited as I listened to boat motors chug through the gray water outside.
As the day waned, I ran down to the muddy shore. Dad called after me, smoke passing through his teeth: “Don’t get in.”
“Why not?”
“It’s polluted.” He stirred the fire within the rusted barrel drum. “It ain't deep but the mud at the bottom will swallow you up. Fast.”
Along the rocky shore, a ratking of fishing line and rusty hooks wove like a terrible vine. I collected the vagrant beer cans like Dad told me to. I looked back at camp. The procession of trucks and boats passed behind him. He didn’t look up. The barrel drum glowed atop the rise. Dad stirred the coals again then refueled it. I didn’t care that he lived in a Frankenstein camper or he barely held a job or his teeth were turning gray. He was my dad and that was enough.
The sun set over me, a pink rag running orange as I looked toward Timpanogos.
…
In the bell of light cast by the barrel, I was greeted with profound heat. Dad’s glasses reflected two suns. He took the beer cans and lowered them one by one into a steel tube secured into the center of the drum by the piles of burning wood and coal.
“Go ahead,” Dad said. “Look under it”
The drum was set upon three cinder blocks. I bent down on my knees and peered beneath the drum. A silver paste coiled onto itself like ice cream on a cone.
“But why, Dad?”
“Easier to truck to the recycling place.”
He pulled the glowing casts from beneath the drum with a long metal claw and dumped them into a bucket of lake water. They hissed like demonic serpents.
…
Headlights appeared at the closed gates.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Bret and Ivy. Come to enjoy the fire with us. ”
He ran to unchain the gate. The Volkswagen van parked, completing a haphazard A-frame around the drum.
“Hey there, kiddo,” said the man through the open window. His leather skin glistened in the firelight.
A soft woman with acne scattered across her chest emerged from the other side of the van. “Ain’t you the cutest,” she said. “You must be Jordy. Your daddy has not told me enough about you.”
“I’m getting baptized soon,” I said.
“Listen to that, Bret. Kid’s excited to get baptized.”
Bret stared at Ivy. “Ain’t no such thing as baptism.”
…
They passed around the bottle while I shoved a staff of driftwood into one of the myriad bullet holes in the barrel drum, turning and twisting it. The fire ran through the patterns of the char.
The moon rose to look at itself in the muddy lake. Bret ranted, fingering out the details of a story as Dad and Ivy stared into the burning. The waves lopped against the shore again and again. Bret took the pirate bottle from Dad and held it, talking, lifting it and pushing it forward for emphasis until Ivy yanked it from him.
She said, “I’m sick of hearing this shit–”
Dad cut in. “Hey Jordy, wanna see something cool?”
He stood, threw the beer can down the tube, and came around to my side. He pulled the flaming branch out and held it to his side like a spartan holding a sword. He left the circle of light and lunged forward, casting the flaming branch into the night. The lone spotlight of the moon shimmered on the lake as the glowing branch hit the surface.
“You know, son,” he said, turning to me. “There was a time when this lake was so clear you could see straight to the bottom of it. Even at night. Nobody alive now has seen it like that.”
He paused for a long time. A series of pops and cracks, lifting embers died in front of his face.
“My own dad,” he went on, “he brought us down once when we was kids. Blane, Brad, and Me. Wasn’t close to crystal clear, but it was something else. Different from this.”
Ivy stared into the fire. Bret swayed with his eyes closed, caught up in a longtime fantasy.
…
I circled the perimeter in the darkness while they partied. I walked in and out of the camper. They paid no mind to my furtive wanderings. A film of resin and dust covered everything, especially the posters. I stared at them each time I journeyed in.
Outside, Bret was asleep in the Volkswagen, flopped on the bed, his feet still on the ground. I watched through the intermittent flames. At the first snore, Ivy and Dad glanced at each other, and by the third, they retreated into the camper.
It didn’t squeak much, but I heard his grunting, and her muffled moaning.
…
After Ivy joined Brett in the van, Dad ushered me to bed on the camper floor. I lay awake listening to the water licking the shore, hoping that the next day, just he and I could go fishing. I dreamed of water so clear I saw the multicolored rocks at the bottom. As I scooped it up it ran like syrup through my fingers–and it tasted just as sweet.
I awoke with a tense feeling and left the camper in the gray dawn. I stared out at the chalky waves. Clouds hung overhead, and I thought about how Dad looked sad when he talked about Utah Lake, even though he’d never seen it any different.
Jordan Ray Freytag grew up in the cities beside Utah Lake, venturing to its shores to explore as a child and to cause mischief as a teenager. An only child, he read avidly and wrote stories to entertain himself. He studied creative writing and literature at Utah Valley University. He continues to paddle the fresh lakes and carve the variegated trails of Utah.
“Utah” Lake
Michael Minch
Way down here on Turtle Island
long ago Creator
conspired with creation
Love used breathwind
and the slow shift of rock
to birth a water animal magnificent
in its size and quiet voice
Spirit gave sweet life
mirroring sky, mirroring
feathered arrows whose flight
drew not blood but beauty, reflecting
the arc of twinned silver
darts under the water
in symphony with the murmurs above
Ute and Shoshone lived by the gift
this wild yet placid animal wet with grace
betrayed by the manufacture of steel
and edifice after edifice
after edifice after slag, acid scum, plastic,
boats, gas, diesel, garbage
and twentieth century assault –
the slow-timed detonation of violence
ignited by neglect, arrogance, and stupid
intervention
Nations, after the first,
pissed and still piss
on the gift
Michael Minch lived in Utah from 1992 to 2020 and worked in Utah County from 1996 to 2020. He often wondered about the lake and its history. Having taught ethics, political theory, democracy, and matters of peace, justice, and conflict at UVU over the years, his profession has reflected in his reflections on Utah Lake.
This Place Asks Too Much of Me
George Handley
I don’t need this breeze on my face or the whispering of leaves
I don’t crave this bower in my yard of maple and mulberry
I can live without the changing keys of birdsong each morning
I’ll manage if I never see that jagged edge of the south mountains again
The thrum of the hummingbird’s wing is not indispensable
Purple penstemon isn’t exactly news and big horned sheep fade into foothills
I can stand an existence without dappled morning clouds
My life without that canyon mouth jawing with the sky is imaginable
The smell of pear trees in the spring isn’t my sine qua non
I can make it through another day without standing in the river,
without feeling gravity’s gentle pull,
without trying to decipher the wriggling lines
written by nervous trout always moving away
If I never climb another knoll covered in gambol oak,
I won’t have to take in the spread of this valley rounded by rock,
the shining plate of water on its ancient floor, or look into
that blue eye that watches all that comes and all that goes,
the window that opens onto the mystery of being,
poses the riddle of home and lays bare the cost of caring
Long-time environmental activist and educator, George Handley is the author of the memoir Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River, a love letter to the watershed that sustains life in Utah Valley and of the novel, American Fork. He serves on the Provo City Council where he coordinated a recent effort to issue a joint resolution to protect Utah Lake.
The King of Bottom-Feeders
C.M. Hobson
The King of Bottom-feeders bends his L-shaped
body to crank his Evinrude outboard
back to life. “Hum for me, Evee. Take me home,
Evee. Humm,” he calls in his Manhattan fishmonger’s voice.
“This body is a caricature,” she chokes, “a political
cartoon in quicksand, a waist-high
mucous membrane sluffing off the edge
of a flat earth like irradiated skin.”
Evee sputters, coughs, then hums
in harmony with no-see-ums,
a guttural hymn for the desert saints, a eulogy
for the numberless lost.
“Let us be polite in conversing
And give Zion a courtesy-flush for progress,
but keep your mouth closed. One swallow
and your piss will glow for a week.”
“Yar,” says the King, “Shut my mouth and clean up nice,
like Evee. Plumb the depths. Churn the refuse, like
Evee. Dredge this bed with the longest tines and pull up the stinking
past, the massacres, the locust swarms, the black scent of dung.”
“Commercialize, monetize, alienate young Mother. The drooling
progeny of pioneers grind slick fingers together for the vox
populi.” The King of Bottom-feeders cuts Evee off and ties her down.
“These ravaged waters are a back-alley abortion,” she spits.
Late light spears the air, igniting surface waters and heiress
bones, once dross. Ghast whooping haunts the arrhythmic heart of the valley.
Stretched skin on powwow drums beat “Come sapling, bird, and fish;
come dormant. Return Paiute, Shoshone. Return An-kar-tewets.”
The King, ashore and lashing, creaks to a V as downbeats crash
like waves. The jack-knifed steward shields his eyes with a gnarled fist
raised. A promise to the Sun, to forsaken people, a pledge of peace:
pure water.
C.M. Hobson is an author, violinist, and combat veteran. He and his wife, Jackie, served for 15 months in Iraq and married shortly after returning. An avid outdoor enthusiast, he spent nearly twenty summers fishing, boating, and enjoying the panoramic mountain views of Utah Lake. He keeps houses in Orem and Washington, Utah, with his wife and their five children.
What I Know of Utah Lake
Ammon Medina
1.
Knock out & kill your catch, if the bleeding
thing ain’t already dead. Rinse it in the cool lake
water. Cut the sucker groin to neck and move your boots
as its guts hit the dirt. Accuse him, first, of stealing a shirt.
That’s how we Mormons did Old Bishop in 1849. Filled the Timpanogos
up with stones in the cavity that was his belly. Weighed him down.
What a baptism by immersion. A bullet mixed his brain gas
with the atmosphere—a hellish inversion. We buried him
in the water, poorly. No new clean self rising from the water, just
a mutilated dead body for his kin to discover. His kin
who did not know him as Old Bishop, but as neighbor.
His kin who knew his laugh, his obnoxious habit
of drumming on things during conversation, his quick hands
dipping into the water to pick up fish and throw them to the riverbank.
He is the dead, foundational transgression, of Fort Utah.
We never paid any sort of restitution.
2.
The generation before me carried a term for the Shoshone
who once lived at the lake: diggers. The rhyme intentional.
James Baldwin said “I imagine one of the reasons people cling
to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate
is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Old Bishop is bobbing
in the water again where every Utahn can see him, rocks
in his belly form a cairn marking our trail of hate. Bury him. Bury him. Bury
him. Bury him and build more city upon his bones. Bury him. It is easier.
Bury him in water, and this time fill his belly
with so many damned stones that he cannot. rise. again.
3.
My generation
left only
with pieces taught only
we arrived in a waiting valley
empty and anointed for us
not them we sought
a lake not of salt
but fish verdant we fled our extermination
orders signed by Boggs by Illinois
to kill Mormons still we cling our persecution
We arrived the lake peopled by Timpanogos
an old narrative obstructing our way
we made them flee their extermination orders signed
to kill “Indians” by Brigham by Mormons
easily we forget their persecution we were thrown
from Nauvoo a land we erected from swamp
My generation a new narrative our truth
foundations crumbling their loss
our loss your loss my loss
what else to expect intentional
design intentional results
new narrative never mourn
what you never knew rebrand
empty the lake of cutthroat
Bonneville trout in 1776 Spanish traders
met the Timpanogos at the lake it wasn’t empty
I’m bored already of history drudgery
drudge the lake build upon the bones
won’t think twice what I cannot
know their loss our loss your loss
my loss fading like so much water remnant
of Lake Bonneville ugh more history
new buildings please me
I cannot mourn what I cannot know
4.
It’s embarrassing. It’s a shame. It’s what
we made it. I knew a girl who cut herself
on rusted steel in Utah Lake while water skiing.
She nearly died of a festered wound.
Older fishers warned me off eating fish from Utah Lake,
said I’d get sick. It’s full of carp, disgusting
fish overtaking everything. It’s polluted.
It’s fearsome. It’s regret.
A trapper wrote that he floated clean
out into the water and marveled.
We’re blind looking in the water, but he could see
schools of Bonneville cutthroat beneath his canoe.
Bear with me through history, I promise I’m building
to beauty. First, pain. How else to overcome anger?
Before us, the lake was called Timpanogos, and Spring
meant the Bear Dance on the shores—
marriages, old friends and relatives, reuniting,
celebrating, trading. After Mormon arrival,
after Old Bishop sunk and rose, after we chased
Timpanogos onto the iced-over lake to die,
after we forced them far away from the lake to a reservation,
but before germ theory, Utah’s good air
and lakes and hot springs were touted for the health. People
traveled from across the US to heal at our lake.
Take pain, Utah County, for how the lake was won. Remorse.
But take pride, too, for the hundreds of years life thrived
because of the lake. Take pride for how the lake
was envied, nationally. The water was pristine,
for a time, before we overfished the cutthroat to near extinction,
before we restocked the lake with carp and residents could pull
enough fish from the water to feed thousands. There was dancing
and singing. The shore hosted the ceremonies of love. Beauty.
I’m trying to plaster your eyes in mud and wash
clean your sight with that old water. I’m trying to wash
away your tears that I know will come
when you see the lake’s former glory.
That girl who nearly died of a festering wound,
did not die. Despite the forgetting of my generations,
I learned all this history, first from the generation before me,
then more from a writer not much older than me.
What has history taught us? What we bury, rises. After
pain, anger quiets. What has broken can be made anew.
Ammon Medina is the deputy director at Wyoming Equality. They received their MFA from the University of Wyoming. Ammon grew up fishing in Utah Lake as well as walking and biking along the shores. Ammon was a Norman Mailer fellow, and his chapbook Ragged Red Voice won the Florence Kahn Memorial award. His work appears in Kweli Journal, Western Confluence, Black Renaissance Noire, among other places.