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Sylvia Torti --Forthcoming Great Salt Lake Anthology from Torrey House Press, editor Michael McClane The Once and Future Lake Before my son was born, I went often to the Great Salt Lake, always to Antelope Island. I'd drive out in the morning, stop along the causeway, and spend a half hour or so seeing who was on the water. Wilson's phalarope, Eared grebes, American avocets, Black-necked stilts. Then I'd drive onto the island, past the sailboats swaying in the marina, up the curving road and down the back side. In the spring I kept the windows down and listened to Western Meadowlarks belting out their flutelike songs. Usually, I would spot two or three Burrowing owls standing atop their ground nests. At the northwestern side of the island, I'd park and hike out to White Rock Bay where I'd sit on the rocks and eat a sandwich. Looking out at the whitish water and the blue-blue sky, I felt I was on another planet and I loved that feeling of adventure and weirdness. I did this for many years and then I stopped. When my son was ten years old, I met Jeff and he taught me how to raise him. How does one do such a thing, I wondered, as raise a son? There's no guidebook. Your parents can't teach you, especially mine who had three daughters, and everything is changing all the time: you, the child, the world. Jeff knew. He told me in an early conversation when I expressed my worries, you just need to stay in the room. Jeff was like that; he made everything sound easy. Jeff is no longer above ground, as he would say, but lately I've been thinking about him, my son, and the lake. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking. The son has become a man. The man is dead. Their paths crossing one living forward, the other backward. It's called shifting baselines. There is a documentary film about it with regard to climate change, how we, in our generation don't feel loss because we don't know what existed before, and how, in turn, our children can't feel the loss of space or species because they know no difference. ...a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of experience, memory and/or knowledge of its past condition. In this sense, what we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would consider to be degraded, and what we judge to be degraded now, the next generation will consider to be healthy or 'normal.* According to this academic psychological research, we're doomed. Jeff had cancer for our entire friendship, for the whole time my son knew him. At first, he didn't talk about it much. He acted so 'normal' it was hard to believe he was sick. He was plump and energetic; he complained about water weight and sweats and joked he was suffering menopause. We laughed and talked often about writing and teaching, but also about my dysfunctional marriage, the desired divorce, fears of how it would affect my son. He invited my son to participate in a yearlong documentary filmmaking course that brought together college students and community members with no formal education. For seven years my son spent every Monday evening with Jeff, and helped to make films about tattoo culture, child prostitution, immigration, meth addiction, and yes, climate change. He learned storytelling, camera work, lighting and editing. He met people from all walks of life. He was often exasperated by Jeff, telling me, “Mom, I ask him questions about what we should do, and his answer is I don't know, what do you think?" Classic Jeff. Empowering the young to figure it out for themselves. I had always wanted to climb Frary Peak on Antelope Island, and once during the years I was still married and my son was at camp, I convinced my husband to go out with me. I was excited, sure that we'd find the elusive bighorn sheep and I wanted to see the city from that vantage point. We began to climb, but he got dizzy almost immediately, a newly revealed vertigo. We aborted the effort and drove home. That baseline had shifted irreversibly, but I struggled to accept it. There's a night with Jeff that I remember in particular. I was leaving the university and ran into him as he was going into a student presentation. He pulled me in as well with you've got to be here. It was about gender fluidity, which had just started to become a talked-about thing on campus. He said These kids are teaching me. I have no idea about any of this; all I can do is ask questions and listen. We listened together and then went for an epic dinner downtown, eating fine food and drinking a superb bottle of wine. I remember that I told him about what I was missing—a real relationship, time to write, and then I said, “You know, I used to go out to the Great Salt Lake all the time and I haven't been there in years.” He didn't ask me to do deep introspection into why I hadn't gone, he just said. Go. Take your son. It was like the stay in the room advice. Annoying simple. Doable. A mandate. My son and I drove out to the Great Salt Lake. The water was shockingly low, so different than how I remembered it. As we neared Antelope Island, I saw a coyote trotting along the lakebed where years ago there would have been water. The marina was dried up, and all but a couple of decrepit boats were gone. We parked and walked down to the crusty salty edge where the colors were blue and pink and gray and purple. The white soapy water looked like floating clouds. Dead flies and brine shrimp shells had built up into raised circles two feet in diameter in the ground. I scanned the distant water for birds but saw few. My son took close-up photographs of the shoreline and some of the horizon. I took a picture of him squatted down making a video. We agreed we'd return to this spot, to spend more days at the Lake. The years continued. I got the divorce. My son moved through high school as well, I suppose, as any young man can. He continued going to the film class and convinced Jeff to teach him how to cook. There were dinners and shared writing and laughter, events to which my son and I went to celebrate Jeff and his life, his vision, his spirit, his generosity. Jeff began to wither in body. His skin turned crusty, and he called himself a trout, writing a children's book about the man who turned into a trout. He lost a lot of weight, his balance, his voice at times, but never his spirit. He wrote: I woke myself up two days ago laughing about Dante's Inferno and his journey through the nine circles of hell guided by Virgil. All I can say is this: Dante was a putz. My son and I, as far as I can remember, didn't go back to the Great Salt Lake. In my son's senior year, I had a work conflict and couldn't make it to the documentary film showing. Jeff wrote me the next day. You would have been touched because your son asked if he could make a short speech and it was beautiful. He spoke about you and how, when you suggested joining the class, he wasn't certain he wanted to because the idea came from his mother. (The crowd busted up). And added that "my mom was absolutely right." Then he went on to talk about how the program has become part of his life. He talked about how he would carry this experience with him to college and wherever he goes after that. Really, really touching and he was in total command of what he said. You stayed in the room, and it has made all the difference. The shifting baseline problem comes, I think, from problems of scale and our dependence on lived experience. We live such short lives. Our perceptions are faulty in an irreconcilable way. We adjust and adjust incrementally, and these adjustments add up over our lifetimes and then those of the next and the next generations. A few months later: I'm on a new study that has truly been kicking my ass and it's hit me in an unusual way. I'm starting to adjust to the "new normal," but it can't stay that way. Normal is not static. My son went off to college as the Great Salt Lake continued to shrink and then the pandemic took over. I hadn't seen Jeff for months and so I wrote him in late April. My son is here with me, and he's "on fire" as you would say. After years of grunts and half answers and glazed eyes, he has ideas, and he wants to hang out and tell me about them. Last week, floating on the Dolores River we saw an otter family, a great blue heron, a black-capped night heron. He knows how to read the water, how to paddle. He told me about the forty days he spent on an Alaskan river (first I've heard of these experiences though they happened two years ago). He talked about the Māori from his time in New Zealand, their values, and the ways they define themselves by the landforms into which they're born. He said, "I'd introduce myself as Mount Olympus, the Great Salt Lake, and then my name." He's thinking about power and environment, economy, and culture. I need news from you. How's your health? The next day Jeff wrote back. In retrospect, it was an uncommonly short email. I'm so glad to hear he's in the seam. He's turned into such a fine young man, hard to believe he'll be 21 this May. How does that happen? As soon as all this passes, we need a face to face. Until then, I send my love. This is the thing about shifting baselines. They shift. Jeff died five weeks later. The Great Salt Lake continued shrinking. In May 2022, my son graduated from college, and on July 3rd, that same year, the level of Great Salt Lake dropped to a historic low. I now think of Jeff as a Merlyn-character. In his magical way, he saw into the future, making the raising of my son happen. While no King Arthur, my son represents the best of what I believe is a possible antidote to shifting baselines. He has developed his own personal carbon ethic, carefully deciding where and when he'll travel. He's part of a group of twenty-somethings called the Great Basin Research Collective, who together produce stunning artistic reflections on the place they call home; their latest is focused on the Great Salt Lake. He started a business with another group of friends that details cars using just a few gallons of water, rather than the usual hundred. He's moved from environmental studies to nursing, rightly predicting that health work is an honest place to put his energies with the impending environmental chaos. I'm getting ready to return. I've signed on to co-lead a yearlong course on the Great Salt Lake, its past, present, and future. We'll review the geological, atmospheric, and ecological research. We'll talk policy. We'll talk stakeholders. I know that I will want to tell the students that from the time my son was born, I took him to the Lake, that he grew up floating in the salty water, running over the sand, watching bison, and learning the birds. I will want to tell them about the time we saw a porcupine nest in the tree, the time we chased after antelope, the time we climbed Frary Peak and saw the bighorn sheep. I will want to tell them that he has the Lake in his blood and bones, and that they do too. But those baselines aren't there. I am nostalgic for the boyhood I didn't give him, afraid of what these youths didn't have. I do know I'll lean on Jeff. I already hear him telling me now that you've raised a son, you can do anything. Right, Jeff, I say in my head, like save the Great Salt Lake? He laughs and says sure. He once wrote: I'd follow you anywhere, except maybe to a clogging festival. Those people scare me. Jeff's humor, a baseline that never shifted. He's out there, not just living on in my son but in me. He's telling me to let nostalgia die. Forget the academic shifting baselines. Forget the doom. Go to the Lake. Find the humor. Stay in this new room. Listen to what the kids are saying and empower them to figure it out themselves. *Soga and Gaston. 2018. “Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.