The first time I peed on Spiral Jetty, I had to poop so badly I couldn’t enjoy it. And thus I squandered the event entire, painstakingly focused on which muscles stayed flexing, and which relaxed. A fragile task, this delicate balance, and one struck exclusively without glory.
I can’t remember why it had seemed important.
But I watched the languid crust of the salt flats. The lake was low. It came to rest several hundred yards from the artwork. My tremors ebbed, and people gathered on the hills behind me. Looking down, I was surprised at how I’d shriveled in this glassy atmosphere. I experienced some catatonia. Then I kept moving.
The second time I peed on Spiral Jetty, six years later, was easier on my ass, though no more so on my heart. My wife and I arrived weeks following a compulsory hospitalization. We could not say what the future held. We pitched a tent on the lakebed and trekked across the toxic froth as the sun set over the shore. A woman was swimming in it. I became nauseated, and we walked the basalt swirl in our sandals. I urinated. We didn’t speak.
In the morning, we realized we didn’t know how Smithson died. How could he have dredged such enduring poignancy from muddy brine? How could he have imagined the Great Salt Lake would flux over his causeway, turn pink, then recede so intensely, collapsing against reality, predicted to be a bowl of noxious dust as soon as 2028?
At the Golden Spike National Historic Site Visitors Center, when we got back cellphone service, we googled him. Just three years after completing his magnum opus, at the age of 35, Smithson went down in a light aircraft, siting his next major undertaking, an earth ramp rising out of Amarillo, Texas’s Tecovas Lake. Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Tony Shafrazi finished the work in his memory three more years hence. Now that lake too is dry.
-David Fishkind