While lawmakers debated the future of the Great Salt Lake, a group of artists, scientists and community stewards kept vigil near the shoreline
By Your Side
By Brooke Larsen and Amelia Diehl
On a recent February night, strong winds rattled Nan Seymour's camper on Antelope Island. She woke up and looked at the time: 11:45 p.m.
With so many hours left in the night, she felt compelled to text milo, a young poet and activist sleeping in a van parked behind her. "F—k the wind," she wrote, before immediately thinking to herself, "Oh man, that's not cool."
Seymour habitually speaks with a reverence for all life and elements. And for the past two years, she has organized a weeks-long, outdoor vigil at the Great Salt Lake because, as she says, "When the life of someone you love is at stake, you stay with them."
In November 2022, the Great Salt Lake was at its lowest recorded water level due to unsustainable water use and megadrought conditions. At the start of 2023, a scientific report predicted the lake could dry up within five years without emergency measures.
Seymour views this crisis as a relational one. She encourages people to stop viewing the lake as an object but rather as a sentient being. "Use any pronoun but 'it,'" she said.
Winter camping at Antelope Island has its challenges—not only because of the harsh elements, but also because it offers a front-row seat to the lake's receding shoreline. It was that sight greeting Seymour and a group of writers, artists, activists, scientists, faith leaders and concerned community members for the 47 days and nights that they held vigil near the lake, from Jan. 16 to March 4—the entirety of Utah's 2023 legislative session.
"It's not directly a political protest. The lake's life is at stake every day right now," Seymour said. "But during these [legislative] sessions, the stakes are higher. Maybe that's just something that the lake knows."
"Turn your face to the lake"
Seymour affirms the lake's wisdom and says the vigil was the lake's idea. She notes that she wasn't a predictable person to become a leading voice on the lake—she missed the fourth-grade field trip, she said, and her first visit to Antelope Island was on her 47th birthday.
"I was from what I call the culture of apathy and disdain regarding Great Salt Lake," Seymour said. "I grew up with that idea that the lake was peripheral—it's stinky, you don't go there. And we didn't—I didn't go there."
In the fall of 2021, Seymour listened to an episode of RadioWest during which host Doug Fabrizio interviewed biology professor Bonnie Baxter about the crisis at the Great Salt Lake.
"I drove out to the shore at Saltair to listen," Seymour said. "I just knew that when I listened to it, it would change everything."
Seymour started obsessively writing and dreaming about the lake. From her "nighttime listening" came the idea for both irreplaceable—a collective praise poem she launched to reflect the size of a restored lake—and the winter vigil. She says the idea for an annual lakeside gathering arrived like an invitation in the mail or a radio distress call in a war zone. "I happened to tune into the channel," Seymour said. "I'm not here because I'm special. It's just that she was crying for help, and I found the channel."
For the first vigil, in 2022, Utah Humanities contributed funds, and Seymour took the title "poet-in-residence" at Antelope Island. Her fellow creatives in the River Writing Collective—a non-judgmental, community-based writing practice Seymour founded—helped with vigil shifts. Her friend Rachel lent a camper. Others brought firewood and soup.
Jaimi Butler, a biologist who has been working on the Great Salt Lake since the late 1990s, jumped on as scientist-in-residence. Soon, this idea that seemed unfathomable became possible. The vigil has helped foster an emerging community of people connected by their concern for the Great Salt Lake.
When Seymour dreamed up irreplaceable, she set the goal of writing 1,700 lines to match the 1,700 square miles of a fully restored lake. She put out a call for contributions, but thought she'd have to write most of the poem herself. Instead, over 432 voices contributed 2,580 lines. "People want to bring their offerings," she said.
During the 2023 vigil, 474 people participated in events such as chili cookouts, public talks, writing workshops, hikes, drum circles, sunset singalongs and art projects. Thirty-one people camped overnight, from First Unitarians to fellow writers and activists.
And more than 100 people from near and far participated in 25-minute "lake-facing" meditations, offered each morning on Zoom. This gesture is part of Seymour's effort to tackle what she calls the "crisis of orientation."
"When I say 'lake-facing' people, I actually really do mean that; turn your face to the lake," Seymour said. "We're the periphery, and the lake is the center."
Throughout both vigils, writing and art were important ways to inspire a more intimate orientation to the lake. River Writing hosted writing workshops to move people away from a culture of apathy to one of attention.
Facilitators often started by asking participants to write sensory details about the Great Salt Lake. Prompts included writing a letter to the lake, and then writing a reply from the lake—an exercise that helped participants understand the lake in a more personal way. To conclude, each participant contributed a line for a group poem.
"I think for people who grew up here, they have to get themselves [to the lake]. And then think about it in an entirely new way," Amy May, a River Writing facilitator, said. "And River Writing helps you take content and think about it in a new way and do something completely different than what you would ordinarily be doing with your time. It's a really potent way to kind of quickly create community."
Reclaiming a relationship
Other artforms have been important tools as well. On Feb. 12, vigil keepers flocked to the Island Buffalo Grill to make avocet, grebe, brine shrimp and brine fly puppets by cutting and coloring paper and adding pipe-cleaner legs.
The puppets represent key members of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, and Therese Berry, the event's organizer, hopes participants will bring these puppets for future events in celebration of the lake.
Like Seymour, Berry—who was born and raised in Utah—said she "reclaimed" her relationship with the lake in 2021 after hearing Bonnie Baxter's interview on RadioWest. "After you're 8 years old and you float in the lake, you don't think about it again," Berry said.
But now, art—and especially art made through community—has been a way for her to grow her own bond with the lake. Last year, she made a set of prayer flags to support the first vigil.
"Once you pull people together in a creative environment, it just allows ideas, hopes and dreams and interpretations to flow and exchange," she said. "We all walk away in a better place, having experienced all those creative efforts of everyone around us."
Sarah May (no relation to Amy) is another artist inspired by the lake. In February, she spent almost every weekend at the lake, in addition to leading vigil meditations.
Growing up in Utah, Sarah May long ago developed an intimate relationship with the Great Salt Lake, despite hearing complaints about the smell.
"I see a lot of my story in the lake story—also being exploited and oppressed by white supremacy and patriarchy and greed and capitalism," she said. "I'm biracial, and I grew up in the Mormon faith, but I never saw myself in that, either. I've never really had a place that held my story the way I wanted it to, but the lake became that place for me."
The receding lake has been "discarded, forgotten, neglected," Sarah May said, and it's important to make the connection between the exploitation of the lake and other instances of exploitation.
She shared the example of west-side communities, predominantly people of color who are already bearing the brunt of air pollution, and who are at risk to be hit first and worst by toxic dust from the exposed lakebed.
"This has always been a sacred place for me," Sarah May said. "Driving on the [Antelope Island] causeway, you're coming to a place where you can exist outside of the expectations of the world."
She said it's hard to put the feelings into words, comparing it to translating between languages.
"I think that's why I'm here creating art," she said. "That's really the only way that makes sense to tell not only my story, but also the story of the lake."
Sarah May uses a variety of mediums, including writing, fabric, cyanotype, photography, digital imaging, weaving and even lake driftwood. She is always careful to practice what she calls reciprocity and sustainability, and she has performed rituals and ceremonies at the lake, inspired by her "witchiness."
"I never take anything without asking if it wants to come with me," she said.
She hopes to connect more BIPOC Utahns to the lake through her role with Plumas Collectivo, a group of Latinx writers and visual artists based in the Salt Lake Valley that has hosted events at the Tracy Aviary and Jordan River Nature Center. "[The lake] just feels like a place that can hold us and our experiences as BIPOC community," she said.
Science with a side of humor
In addition to writers and artists, scientists like Jaimi Butler have played a key role in the vigils. This year, Butler participated at both Antelope Island and the Steep Mountain Farm along the Little Bear River.
Because Butler has extensive knowledge about the lake, she has served as a resource for vigil organizers. For example, when Seymour decided to create a poem the length of the lakebed in 2022, she called Butler to find the appropriate number.
That relationship continued in the second vigil. Butler provided the science—which sometimes included inconvenient answers—and Seymour took on the responsibility of figuring out how to communicate that science in a way that would resonate with people.
Butler met the Great Salt Lake as a teenager in the mid-1980s, when the lake was at one of its highest levels. Her father took her out to Interstate 80 to witness the flooding.
"He thought the lake was going to swallow the city up. We were standing on the highway just dropping pebbles into the water," Butler said. "You can't do that now. I mean you couldn't hit Great Salt Lake with a catapult."
Butler went on to study fisheries and wildlife management at Utah State University and got a job as a field tech on Great Salt Lake in 1999. From there, Butler worked for the brine shrimp industry, the Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program under the Department of Natural Resources and, most recently, the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College. She left GSLI in mid-2022 and moved to her husband's family farm in Wellsville, which has been a dairy and dry land farm—meaning they only use water that falls on their land—in Cache Valley for seven generations.
Butler spent her birthday, Feb. 3, camping at Antelope Island—a tradition for her—and then, the next morning, met vigil visitors for a "walk to the water" from Ladyfinger Point. The lake, far in the distance, was nearly impossible to see through the inversion smog. Butler stopped frequently to talk about the science of the lake and pointed out the dried microbialite mounds—Great Salt Lake's coral reef equivalents that are desiccating as the lake recedes and leaving brine flies without critical habitat.
The group never reached the lake throughout the two-hour walk, demonstrating how far the water had receded.
After the walk, Utah Humanities hosted a community conversation in the Antelope Island Visitor Center. Seymour opened up the conversation by asking for people's associations with the Great Salt Lake. People said words like "beloved," "mother," "protector," and then Butler threw out, "salty bitch."
Everyone laughed—and it was probably only Butler, someone who has been in a relationship with the Great Salt Lake for 30-plus years, who could say that. While Seymour and other vigil keepers readily expressed grief throughout vigil events, Butler consistently brought humor.
"You just have to laugh at some of the things that happen out there," Butler says. "I mean it's just like the wildest, weirdest place."
This year, Butler held vigil for a week at Steep Mountain Farm, which sits along the Little Bear River in Wellsville near her own family's farm. She chose to hold vigil in Cache Valley to highlight the relationship between the Great Salt Lake and the Bear River—the lake's largest tributary—as well as the role of farmers in protecting and preserving the lake.
Butler believes Cache Valley and the Bear River could be the key to saving Great Salt Lake. "It would be really hard, right?" she says. "But this is the only water that's available to get to the lake."
Steep Mountain Farm is organic and regenerative, and since 2015, has been under the stewardship of Nate and Tara Stireman, who view themselves as land stewards rather than landowners. The Stiremans like to say that they own the "mortgage," rather than the land, but admit that formal ownership provides a certain level of security.
"We would prefer for this to not be developed in the future," Tara Stireman said. "Hopefully, it will help us, by technically owning it, to carry that vision forward."
The Stiremans try to operate their farm in a way that nourishes the land, themselves and others. "We do what we can here on this small property to use water wisely," Tara Stireman said. "We basically try the idea of the honorable harvest. We take what we need but only what we need."
The couple were fully on board to host the vigil, and they understand their connection to the lake. "The water that goes through our farm and the rivers nearby ends up in the Great Salt Lake and then it comes back in the form of [rain] or minerals. It's all cycled," Nate Stireman said.
Stewards and kin
Butler closed out her vigil on Feb. 11 by hosting a conversation with Darren Parry, former chairman and current councilman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. Cache Valley and the Bear River watershed is the ancestral homeland of the Shoshone People.
Parry opened the conversation by expressing gratitude for Nate and Tara Stireman's emphasis on stewardship over ownership. "I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about Native Americans owning the land," Parry said. "We've never felt like we've owned the land. We're stewards over the land, and that's a distinction the world needs to know."
But Parry also recognizes that in the United States today, owning property is often the only way to have rights to the land. That's why he raised over $2 million in 2018 to purchase 700 acres at the site of the Bear River Massacre, one of the deadliest massacres of Native people in U.S. history. The Shosone refer to this sacred place where their ancestors are buried as Wuda Ogwa, which translates to Bear River.
The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation is building a cultural center at the site to tell their story and, in partnership with scientists at Utah State University, they're restoring the land using plant journals written and illustrated by Parry's grandmother as a guide. The restoration efforts, ranging from Russian olive removal to the reintroduction of beaver, are estimated to return millions of gallons of water to the Bear River and, by extension, to the Great Salt Lake.
"We're not doing it to save the Great Salt Lake, but the byproduct of what we're doing should have a huge impact on the Great Salt Lake, which really plays into our whole story," Parry said.
The Great Salt Lake is central to the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, with the traditional Shoshone creation story taking place at Antelope Island. Parry read from that creation story during one vigil event at the Antelope Island Visitor Center on Feb. 18.
Parry grew up in Syracuse and spent a lot of his childhood at the Great Salt Lake, often visiting the Bear River Bird Refuge with his grandmother.
"She would talk to me about the importance of the lake and how the Shoshones loved to collect duck eggs—it was a delicacy for them, and they could always find those in the wet marshes," he said. "She always talked to me about the healing properties of the plants that are found around the lake and plants that are found here on the island itself."
While many of his friends thought the Great Salt Lake was gross, Parry said it was always beautiful to him. "As a young child, I learned the stories of the lake," he said. "I learned the stories of what my grandmother called our plant and animal kinfolk."
For Parry, kinship has always evoked familial relatives. If people treated the environment and their non-human kinfolk the way they treat their human family, he said, many of today's problems could be avoided. "That, more than anything else, sums up all of it," he said.
After their conversation, Parry, Seymour and attendees went outside the visitor center to face the lake. Parry sang a water healing song his grandmother taught him and played a drum made by his great-great grandfather, who survived the Bear River Massacre.
"It will keep going"
The last day of the vigil, March 4, was a kind of culmination of the preceding weeks—but was not an ending, according to Seymour. "Last year, I thought the vigil ended," she said. "I think it will keep going."
The afternoon was designed to celebrate and express the lake in a variety of artistic mediums. Each performer was framed by two of Sarah May's cyanotype pieces, carefully hung to avoid blocking the view of the lake. Larger banners, which had been featured in a January rally for the Great Salt Lake (reading "Save Our Great Salt Lake," "No Dams, Dredging, Diversions," "Water is Life, Defend Great Salt Lake," "We Are All Upstream and Downwind" and "Defend Our Future") flapped in the wind. Next to the stage, Therese Berry left a bouquet of brine shrimp and bird puppets.
Seymour opened with a poem, accompanied by a keyboard player, followed by 20 poets reading while facing the lake, with two dancers performing at the half-way point. One dancer wore the head of a phalarope shorebird, another improvised as audience members shouted out members of the lake ecosystem, from "meadowlark announcing spring" to "mice sharing camper with Nan."
One poem was told from the viewpoint of brine flies, another in the voice of bison, another the lake herself. To maintain a sacred atmosphere, Seymour asked the audience to hold their applause. And to conclude, the poets read the rights of the Great Salt Lake.
The vigil has been a powerful awakening, organizers say, not only to restore reverence for the lake, but to renew commitments to creating a better world.
"What are we doing to make sure our children, their children [and] our future ancestors have a place where they can breathe healthy, clean air and grow things in the earth and have a home that is safe?" Sarah May asked. "There's a way for everyone to get what they want—to have stability, to have nature be restored. It's really just about how we are living our lives where the Earth is not compromised by our lifestyles."
Brooke Larsen is a writer from Salt Lake City with a Master of Arts in environmental humanities from the University of Utah. She is the co-editor of New World Coming: Frontline Voices on Pandemics, Uprisings and Climate Crisis and a recipient of the High Country News Bell Prize.
Amelia Diehl is a writer and organizer from Michigan studying in the University of Utah Environmental Humanities Graduate Program. Her writing has been published in In These Times, Belt Magazine, The Trouble and elsewhere.
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