On the foothill above my home there is an overflow water pipe that is attached to the tank for our small-town water source. A quarter of a mile below, the pipe drains in a cascade into the Highline Canal. From the canal there is a small turnout that allows a modest flow to trickle down and through the fields to join with a few other inlets to the small Spring Lake next to my home. Water drains from the lake in a circuitous route called Spring Creek to the west and north until it reaches Utah Lake. The Jordan River flows from Utah Lake north to Great Salt Lake. It’s a hell of a journey. For the past several years the overflow pipe on the foothill has had some degree of flow, some years more than others, but there has always been water.

This year it ran dry.

The Once and Future Lake: Stories for Great Salt Lake, edited by Michael McLane, is an important collection of essays, poems, histories, and fiction about the most vital body of water to the Wasatch Front’s well-being—in all the ways: financial, cultural, meteorological, physical health, biological, spiritual, and more.

Forty contributors to the book. One shrinking Great Salt Lake.

I learned so much. Sea monkeys, bison, Spiral Jetty, salt and magnesium, the railroads, Saltair, arsenic, the pleasure of floating, a feature film, spiders, the placement of a prison, invasive phragmites, microbialites, aqueducts, lake as social justice, personhood, water, water, water.

And there are the precarious lives of brine flies to consider. A lot of complicated brine flies:

In normal years, thirty-seven million flies teem in just one linear mile of shore; midseason, billions clothe the circumference of the lake, from Black Rock to Rozel Point, pulsing with life.

Joel Long goes on to describe the discarded fly pupal casings on the shores “…that curl and curve like hair in Botticelli’s Venus or his attending angels.” The flies are an invaluable source of food to the gulls and many other bird species that sojourn at Great Salt Lake. There are eared grebes that rely on the brine flies being there. “These kajagoogoo, new wave grebes with their red, beyond the power-of-Visine eyes, will miss more than half their nourishment.”

When Great Salt Lake recedes so do the brine flies.

Andy Hoffman:

Exquisite clouds, this migratory flood of wings. Arms spread wide in a cosmology of verbs, white pelicans enter my mouth and nest in my throat, just as brine flies hatch in the shallows of my heart.

Pelicans are all but gone from the islands and the wetlands. “What do the pelicans know that we do not?” –Terry Tempest Williams

For all its veneration, sometimes Great Salt Lake is hard to commune with. “The thing is, most people don’t make it out to the lake all that often.” Eli McCann recounts an ill-fated scouting trip on Antelope Island and then a later-in-life swim when a buddy suggested:

Let’s just head out there and try an open water swim. … And so we swam, if it could be called that, our hands scooping mud from the lakebed, our faces pointed up toward the sky in an attempt to escape any splashing. … After ten minutes or so … we forfeited to the lake and stood up… But there’s no denying this place is breathtaking.

You can not stand in the presence of the lake and not feel something, something larger.

“For me, Great Salt Lake is a sacred place. It is a place that our people have lived with forever. Our creation story began with Antelope Island. That was the center of our universe.” —Darren Parry

the lake is a mother who won’t say no
a vessel veined – woven – webbed with blue thread
she unravels till she’s a barren bowl
—from “Our Lady of Great Salt Lake, Dayna Patterson

And there is the water. Essential and precarious, there is always the water. Much is written about the water in and not in Great Salt Lake.

Holly Simonsen and Lynn de Freitas:

Located in the second most arid state in the nation, Great Salt Lake is fed by the Bear, Weber, and Jordan rivers. The Lake is relatively shallow—only thirteen feet deep on average, and thirty-five feet at most.

As Eli McCann noted you can wade out in the lake for miles and miles just to get in over your knees. And to imagine an immense Lake Bonneville sprawling across this land.

Andy Hoffman:

Facing east from the crust at the edge of water, it’s easy enough to locate traces cut into the hillside of Lake Bonneville, formed 30,000 years ago and spanning twenty thousand square miles at its peak, a body of which Great Salt Lake is a remnant.

And then came western expansion. Manifest Destiny against Great Salt Lake.

Since white settlement, any water flowing toward the lake from the east or north has been considered wasted. — Brooke Williams, Canto 61.

Indeed, all water with natural intent to flow into Great Salt Lake has been stymied. It has been subject to dams, diversion, pollution—the human hands, rightfully or wrongly, attempting to not let the water be wasted in the briny bathtub to the west where it is forgotten.

Geographically far from the shores of Great Salt Lake, Teri Harman likes to linger at the Utah Lake-Jordan River Inlet, a liminal space of nature controlled by man, where vast human will has altered the way of water:

The roar of tumbling water was replaced by the buzz of cars on the road bridge behind me. Like all modern waterways, the Inlet is a layered, hybrid space. The wild layered with the engineered, the human interacting with the nonhuman. The past echoed in the present. Culture interacting with ecology. Confluence embracing confluence.

There is a call here to embody Great Salt Lake with its own personhood, to bestow her with rights fitting any life form. Perhaps even more than just sentient being, but a giver of life. A Mother.

Hanna Saltzman:

This lake that gifts us snow and green glittering aspens but also pollution and dust. This lake that—or perhaps, who—is both a mother nurturing all beings in this valley and an existential threat to all she has nurtured.

The water. No matter how loud voices are raised, how often we pray, or the amount of money thrown at the cause. It will always be the water.

Karin Anderson:

It doesn’t matter how much I love or don’t love this lake, how representative I am or am not, what reasons I or anyone else might furnish to plead its cause: the lake belongs to itself, its reasons none of our affair.

This collection is shared emotion and science and heart embodied in one call to action. We must see Great Salt Lake, recognize that with our presence here we owe her gratitude, respect, and every little trickle of water we can offer.

Utah Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore, with the last two stanzas of the book perhaps says it best:

the next time I am there
I want to be there
when it rains     to watch snow
melt into its salt

I want to mark no further anniversaries
I want to witness water
having its own way

The Once and Future Lake, Stories for Great Salt Lake
Edited by Michael McLane
Torrey House Press
2026
270 pp.

Larry Menlove

Larry Menlove’s short fiction and essays are published in numerous venues. His debut novel, Rush, will be available in November from Shotgun Honey Books.