Ellen Fagg Weist lives in Salt Lake City. She earned a journalism education degree from Brigham Young University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She has worked as a reporter and arts editor in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, New York City and Portland, Oregon. She was credited for reporting contributions to Willamette Week’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative story, and consistently earned first-place feature writing awards (2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017) and review writing (2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012) from the Utah Headliners Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She has taught creative writing and literary journalism courses at University of Iowa, Portland State University, Westminster College and the University of Utah.
Ellen Weist’s essay, “Eight Views of the Lake,” won the 2018 Alfred Lambourne Prize from the Friends of Great Salt Lake. Her work has been published in magazines such as Tin House, Exponent II, Irreantum and Points of Entry, and anthologies such as The Essayist At Work, and The World Within: Writers Talk. The fiction anthology she edited, The Way We Live: Stories By Utah Women, (Signature Books, 1994), was named one of the top 10 regional books by the Intermountain Booksellers Association.
Works
VIEWS OF THE LAKE
VIEWS OF THE LAKE
Excerpt from “Eight Views of the Lake.”
The first view of the Great Salt Lake I remember is from a black-and-white postcard I saw as a child. Four women, their arms grapevined together like Rockettes, floating, floating, eternally floating. Four heads, two covered with bathing caps decorated with plastic, fishy scales, two bare heads with dark World War II flips, the heads floating in front of the wooden boardwalk and the domed pavilion rising out of the black-and-white lake. I hand-painted the photograph in my mind, imagining my mother as the woman with the reddest lips. White stitches anchored a stamp-sized bag — Salt! From The Great Salt Lake! — to the postcard. I remember sucking the cheesecloth bag when I was a child, the taste of the salt biting my tongue.
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I learned about the lake from my father, who grew up not far away. I was raised closer to the ocean, in Oregon, my mother’s home country, but because we were Mormon, my family considered Utah our religious home. As a child, I knew the topography: Utah Lake flowed into the Jordan River, which flowed into a salty sea with no outlet, the Great Salt Lake, another body of water as dead as the famous Dead Sea.
My father told me: Before the fire and before the floods, Saltair was a world-famous resort, and visitors came from all over to stroll along the boardwalk and float in the salty lake. I remember hearing how my father and Jerry and Cliff rode the open-air train out to Saltair, dancing to big bands on the largest suspended dance floor in the world, tasting salt in the air riding the roller-coaster out over the water, screaming as the cars pulled up the hills of the rickety track and fell down the other side, the ride thrilling the girls screaming beside them. Sometimes they traded dates with the same girl. Same girl, different nights. My father was skinny as a dock piling then, and I imagine he became an Air Force pilot because of those nights soaring over the dark salty water.
I don't remember my first view of the real lake, but I remember the trips we made to Salt Lake City every Thanksgiving to celebrate my grandfather's birthday. After the long drive, I remember how important it felt when we first caught sight of the Salt Lake Temple. To my father, who had been baptized at the Tabernacle on Temple Square, this was familiar territory, but to us children, who grew up on a religious frontier, Utah was Mecca, our promised land.
I was seventeen when I moved to Utah to attend college, and thirty when I thought I'd finally moved away for good. In between, I worked as a reporter, interviewing cops and small-town politicians and flood survivors, a job that suited me. I might have been born into the Mormon faith, but I remained an outsider for all the years I lived in Salt Lake City, because I had grown up somewhere else.
My connection to this place was through my father. When I stared at the mountains, I was seeing the same scenery he had, and his parents, and all our Mormon ancestors stretching back to our family’s British and Danish immigrants. Same view of the sky. Same mountains. Same landscape. Same lake.
And it was my calling to grow up hearing the stories, stories of dead Saints and their faith seeping deep into my cells, floating, like salt water, through my blood.
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Everybody reads about the Great Salt Lake in school, and the very idea of an inland sea seems improbable. Evidence of the massive Lake Bonneville, which filled the entire basin, is etched onto the mountains, as visible as a bathtub ring. This place has potential, its stories as classic and timeless as the myths of the West.
Once my editor sent me out to the lake to report a story about the cost of flooding damages. At a dusty gift shop, located in an old trolley car parked alongside the shore, I talked to the store manager, and that’s where I first heard about the Silvers, and their family's history of operating lake businesses.
Years later, I finally interviewed the old man of the clan, Long John Silver, who had spent 35 years gambling on the lake. Salt water, Silver claimed, flowed through his veins. "Have you got a knife?" the old man asked urgently the first time we met. "Cut my wrist and you'll see."
He was 86 and weathered by the time I met him, his once fiery red hair having yellowed with age. He had lost some of his hearing but none of his vision, and he liked telling stories about Saltair's glory days, casually sprinkling words like "calling" and "curse" into his tales.
Some seasons, Long John claimed his family was lucky and made a fortune. But on their last big gamble, rebuilding Saltair in the early 1980s, they almost lost everything due to flooding of Biblical proportions. I listened to the old man talk, and it was as if I were hearing a prophet, or maybe an oracle. What I heard was the voice of a true believer. Or a crazy man.
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When I first moved to Salt Lake City, when somebody asked me where I was from, I proudly claimed Oregon, which was true. The cultural myths of Salt Lake's founding pioneer fathers were so familiar that I didn't feel like a newcomer, yet I wasn't a native. This was my father’s hometown, but I wasn’t born here and couldn’t ever claim to be a local. I was once removed from Small Lake City.
After a decade, when I still claimed Oregon, I knew I was distancing myself with my answer, exchanging one kind of label for another, trying to avoid the brand of religious provincialism I assumed was stuck on people born and raised in Utah.
A few years later, my answer meant something else entirely. Utah had become the mythical place I couldn't wait to leave.
I attended parties where knots started forming the minute guests arrived, knots of people whose ancestors had believed and people who used to believe and people who still did and people who wanted everyone to know they never had. Watching all those divisions and knots, I felt conscious of being an observer, and I started collecting stories about what it's like to live in a desert where the topic of religion, like fluoride, seems to be in the water and a part of the view.
And I had gotten tired, tired of all the tangles tied up in talk of religion and faith, tired of not receiving credit for the choices I had made to stay. Somewhere along the way, I started making fun of the earnest little Mormon girl I had been, and I adopted a smart-ass attitude to pass, to show off how I didn't fit exactly into the neat box of religion in which I was raised.
I can outline what I was raised to believe, but I can’t pinpoint a singular moment when my loyalties started folding back upon each other, can’t point to a single instant when a city and a culture and a religion became so entangled that I couldn’t unknot them in my own mind. I only know that somewhere along the road to losing my faith, I stopped believing in the place. And the only time I noticed the lake was when I drove out west to show the place to tourists.
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“Where are we going?” asked the reporter from Califorinia as we headed west past the airport on I-80, the sunroof of my Prelude open wide as a yawn, me driving fast, showing off, not sure what to make of the attraction between us. I wanted to see his reaction to the paradox of a hole in the landscape, a sea in the middle of the desert. I wanted to ask: Why are you here? meaning in my car on this visit in Utah, not home with the woman he referred to as the ex-girlfriend, but I didn’t want to ask about her.
The parking lot at Saltair was flooded, so we parked on the shoulder and stood on the frontage road, staring out at the water. Standing on the sand, stepping on dead brine fly larvae, forgetting about the smell and then inhaling and taking it in, that sharp, salty odor of rotting things, I stared at the blue-green water and nothing — not the salt, not the smell, not the flooded resort, not even the lumpy islands in the distance — seemed to be what it appeared.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“Used to be a famous resort. Saltair. In the ‘40s, when my dad was in high school, he and his buddies came out here on an open-air train and danced to big band music."
“Everything smells dead.”
I stared at Antelope Island, nesting on the horizon in the crack where lake and sky meet, the mass of land appearing as desolate as the salt flats further west.
“It’s a dead sea,” I said. “When Jim Bridger found these waters, he tasted salt, and thought he had made it to the Pacific. But he was wrong.”
On the phone, when the reporter had called to arrange this stopover, I wondered if I would even recognize him at the airport. But the undertow of his throaty laugh sounded just as familiar as the night we met.
Standing on the frontage road, I kept staring at Saltair. This version of the resort was constructed out of an old airplane hangar, decorated with six golden mushroom turrets and bands of painted trim, flourishes intended to transform a cement building into a tourist attraction. After the flood waters had receded, the place had simply appeared deserted. I watched as the sun set fire to the surface of the water, bright stripes of pink and orange, then the light struck the flaking gold paint on top of the building, turning the domes green, the same color of green that a cheap ring leaves behind on your finger.
In that moment, I saw an ornately decorated and seedy warehouse, stained and faded from water damage, not “the Moorish-inspired resort” the brochures raved about, the place my father and his friends had visited before the War. I couldn't quite imagine anyone dancing to Big Band music here.
“This is wild,” the man said, lacing his fingers through my hand, pulling me toward the gift shop. Inside that old trolley car, salt was displayed everywhere: salt crystal souvenirs and salt water taffy and postcards with teeny bags of salt attached. He wandered around, picking up key rings and puzzles, considering each trinket seriously, reading the booklet, “Saltair: Gone With The Waves,” before replacing it in the rack.
He found something to show me, and across the racks and shelves, everything covered with a layer of dust, I couldn’t see what he was holding. I couldn’t see into the future, couldn’t see what would happen next, the painful goodbye scene at the airport a day later, then five months of phone calls stretching between California and Utah, how he would call me from work, not home, how we would agree not to get involved until after the ex-girlfriend had finished moving out, a process, I would say, that appeared to be taking an unusually long time. I couldn’t see into the future, didn’t have evidence to know that one day I would call his number and hear a woman with a voice even perkier than mine answer the phone. I couldn’t see myself hanging up the phone, then calling his office and picking a fight, followed by an even louder silence, one that would last nearly a decade.
When we started talking again, our conversations made me nostalgic for a shadow self, a woman with faith, a woman who drove a man to the edge of a dead lake because she wasn’t afraid of what would might happen.
My attraction to the lake was connected to the stories I had heard of the people who had been there before. The idea of those earlier generations floated in my mind like relics, like shadowy cultural memories, evidence of what I could and couldn’t see. I felt nostalgic for the romance of a time that I hadn’t lived through and had oversimplified, I know, made less smelly and more expansive and believable in my mind. I thought about how after a swim in the sea, when the salt dries, your skin suddenly feels at least one sweater size too small.
I longed to believe in the kind of faith I knew as a child, faith that leaves tangible evidence as permanent and substantial as the ancient water level etched into a mountain. Maybe my faith, too, had transformed into something else, a feeling that might seem a size too small, as see-through and illusionary as an emotional mirage.
But before all that, across a dusty trolley car, I heard him say: “You don't know this about me.” I was curious about why he appeared embarrassed, and then strangely moved by what I heard. “I've got stars pasted on the ceiling over my bed,” he confessed. “I collect stuff that glows in the dark.”
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No matter where I live, in my mind the lake belongs to me. I will drive my new husband to the Great Salt Lake Marina and tell him about the dreams of the Silver family. But he was raised on the shores of midwestern lakes, and these shallow waters won’t impress him. He says: “This isn’t a great lake.”
Another summer night, years earlier, I had ridden past the airport with someone else’s boyfriend. We both lived somewhere else and were back visiting Salt Lake City. On this night, the lake smelled fecund and sharp, the odor filling the car before we could see the dark water. As he drove, he said: “I always thought I would end up living here.”
We drove into the darkness. It was so quiet it seemed as if the night could still hold memories of my father and a time when people danced and fell in love under real stars. We turned off the frontage road and kept driving until we were so far out on a jetty that water lapped around us and we couldn’t go any farther. Staring into the waters of the Great Salt Lake, I thought if I looked long enough, I might see a vision of four women from the postcard, their arms wrapped together, still floating, eternally floating, out there in the dark.
Bibliography
The Way We Live: Stories By Utah Women, Signature Books, 1994.