Nan Seymour offered me a mug of Irish Breakfast Tea, a wooden bench from her childhood home, and a warm campfire as we settled in to watch the sun drop into the Great Salt Lake. Nan, a Utah poet, spent 40 days and nights on Antelope Island as a form of vigil, a time of prayer and attention for the Lake during a session of the Utah state legislature that would decide, by way of important water conservation legislation, the future of the Lake. On the island, a mountainous 42-square mile stretch that becomes a peninsula at low water level, we watched bison wander through empty campsites, listened to coyote laughter, talked at length about water and birds and poets, and fed logs into a fire as the temperature dropped below freezing.
Nan Seymour: I want to make sure we don’t get cold, I’m big into not getting cold.
Carter Boyd: I imagine so. You’re out here for over a month, right?
Nan: This is day twenty-three, but the total vigil will be 47 days, and I’ll be out here for 40 of them. It’s a community vigil, and I’ve got some other writers coming. As a community, we’ll be here 24 hours a day for the whole legislative session.
Carter: So for people who aren’t here in the Salt Lake Valley, can you give an overview of what’s going on with the lake?
Nan: Yes–this is a great inland sea and a terminal basin, one of the great saline lakes of the world and hemispherically essential for a lot of reasons. This is where ten million birds on the pacific flyway stop on migration, or they’re based here and they’re eating these brine flies and brine shrimp. So it’s essential. It’s an island of irreplaceable hope for birds.
For humans, and people are catching on about how much this matters, Great Salt Lake has been designated as waste water and that designation is part of why we’ve diverted so much water. Of course, we’re also in an epic drought. This diversion of water plus the drought has meant the lake is now at its lowest recorded level. It should be occupying at least 1700 sq mi, that's a healthy lake, and it was in recent times, but right now the area is less than 900 square miles. So it’s already desiccated to that degree. And because it’s a terminal basin we’ve been dumping mercury and every other heavy metal you can think of here. As the lake is getting desiccated it’s exposing these toxic beds that become dust. Once that dust is released and is in this kind of perpetual toxic dust storm, they try everything to get it back, when water above it was a really elegant way to keep it on the seafloor. So that’s kind of the short answer, and there's a lot more to why this is important. One thing I feel here to witness is her beauty.
Carter: So then what brings you out here at this specific time and in this specific way?
Nan: Well, we’re keeping vigil during the legislative session because a lot could be decided that could help or not help the lake during this session, so we wanted to have a witnessing presence…
Carter: I was reading some poems of yours, and there's this poem called Praises from Mile Marker 146, which I think is not about the Salt Lake, as far as I can tell…
Nan: It’s so interesting that you found that: it’s also about not dying.
Carter: Yes! I read the last stanza, in which you say “praise for any help that comes/ praise for that which does not collapse… / praise for another chance at this, / to remember some shining,” which made me think of the lake, the word “collapse,” I think you already used that once tonight talking about the lake, and shining.
Nan: Yeah, the shining is something.
Carter: And so it made me want to ask, because that poem is also about things coming to an end, and I don’t want to get too far into pessimism or, like, speculative fiction, but if the lake dries up, what do you see as the next steps or the alternative? Where do we go from there?
Nan: Well, this is hard to answer because I can’t answer it in a way that anyone’s gonna want to hear, but it’s not fictional that we’ll be devastated physically. I won't live here. I will leave out of necessity. Already it's difficult to breathe here, frankly, and I… I love my life too much. I love this place almost as much as I love my life but I love my life too much to stay in that case. It really will be ruinous…
Carter: I came out here and camped in September, and I brought a canoe and then quickly realized that the canoe was not making it to the water. And so my friend and I just sat the canoe on a rock and looked at the lake instead. And it really is heartbreaking to have to imagine being able to get to the water of the Lake.
Nan: That’s why I walk to the water every day, because I want it to be in my body how far away it is. And when people come, that’s the main thing I do with them, if they can, we walk to the water. It takes a while, so you think about that. And when you get to the water, it’s visually a really different thing. I mean, this is stunning, but when you get there, there’s a different view and it’s so completely remarkable, and it’s not like that until you’re standing right there. You walk, walk, walk and then it’s like a revelation when you get to the water.
Carter: So you write about water a lot…
Nan: Hah, yeah, turns out!
Carter: I think I’ve found myself in the same boat, and I wanted to know how this ended up being your water. In your life were there other lakes and rivers that you loved or was this the first one? How did you and your writing get tied to the Great Salt Lake?
Nan: I grew up here from age 7 on, so I grew up in the lakebed, and my people, my mom and my mother’s people for four generations back were from the lakebed. But the irony is, I grew up in the culture of disdain and apathy for the lake, which is prevalent. We didn't go there, we didn't swim, I just heard it was stinky and buggy and I didn’t think of it as a place to go. But every year, we drove right past –my grandparents lived in Idaho then where the North Fork of the Snake River runs. So the answer to “what water did I first fall in love with” is the North Fork of the Snake River. It was the water of my childhood, and the birds there that I remember as a kid that I fell in love with were great blue herons and white-winged pelicans, and I thought they only lived there. Every summer we’re driving along the highway just 3-4 miles from here to get to this other place, and in my mind that's where these majestic amazing birds are, and I don't learn till I'm an adult that they're all coming from here. This is their nesting ground and I didn’t even know.
So the one word answer is birds–birds brought me here. And they're the same birds; it's all connected, and this is actually the heart of it but I didn't have a sense of that. This lake really is the center of this whole land.
Carter: There’s this great interview with Wendell Berry in which he’s talking about how to face what we’ve done to our planet and Wendell Berry is saying you can't do anything on a large scale, there is no big answer, and there’s this quote that always stands out to me, he says “the only answer is to live as far as you can in love.” And I think the person interviewing him pushes back on that and says how does that solve our problems but I think it’s amazing and it made me want to ask you, what role do you think that poetry and prayer and vigil have in saving this lake? Because it's not always the obvious or the practical.
Nan: I love that question, thanks for asking it. And then I also have to make sure you don’t miss what's happening color-wise! If you want to turn your chair a little so you don't miss it. It’s just different every night and it’s so beautiful. But, poetry and prayer…
Poetry and prayer have a thing in common which is that they're both forms of consecrated attention. So you devote your attention to the holy, poetry or prayer or both, in my book. And what we pay attention to grows or flourishes. And you can look in many directions to see evidence of that, so I think poetry and prayer turn our hearts and faces towards whatever they're calling towards. So being here, one of the ideas is to turn hearts and faces towards the Lake. And I won't pretend I know how it works or make it mathematical, but I think there's a soulful knowing.
The whole thing is relational. If we recognize we’re in relationship with this water and also we recognize the water's sentience, we’re gonna act differently, you know? We’ll just act differently. Which is what we need to do. So I think that's the poet's job, that's the writer's job, that's the artist's job is to awaken a soulful knowing that has everything to do with relationship.
I’ll just tell you this, and you can do what you want with it: this vigil and this poem, I know them to be the lake’s ideas, because they came to me in such a specific way. And I don't have things happen to me in that way, generally, but once I got to know the peril of this water I started writing about and turning my own attention towards it, and then I started dreaming about it every night. I had dreams about the lake. This was in December, and this idea of keeping vigil dropped like a whole idea. Not like an idea that I was making, but like someone else told me the idea. And I woke up and thought, “okay, that seems daunting…” But it’s happening because the lake wants it to happen. It’s not really that big of a deal to come here and be a witness. It’s not hard. It’s really joyful, sometimes.
Irreplaceable is a community praise poem written by Nan, members of her community, and visitors to her Antelope Island vigil— “a swelling chorus of appreciation for our imperiled ecosystem.” Here, Nan reads the invocation at the beginning of the poem.
Since this interview took place, Nan’s vigil on Antelope Island has ended. Here is an article from KUER Radio in Salt Lake City about the legislation on which the vigil was focused, and here is KUER’s coverage of Nan’s time on Antelope Island.
Nan’s book of poetry, Prayers Not Meant For Heaven, is in its second printing and available for preorder now. To hear Nan further explore the ideas of poetry and prayer, listen to “Embodying Prayer and Soul Activism,” a podcast interview, or watch a reading and conversation between Nan and Laurie Wagner. Irreplaceable can be found in full, along with a recording of the full poem being read, on Nan’s website.
Nan Seymour is a Utah poet and activist.
Jackson Graessle is a designer and videographer based in Salt Lake City.
Carter Boyd is the web editor for EcoTheo review and a black-and-white photographer.