Land Locket

The Great Salt Lake is a tease. You get there and it smells salty like the ocean, there are a million seagulls and sailboats bobbing; but it's a sham. To look at a map of the U.S. is to see just what a promise a lake of this magnitude holds. It makes you feel like you do live next to the ocean...if the ocean had no sharks and starfish and whales and dolphins and seals and seahorses and mermaids. Nothing can truly survive in it's waters with the exception of brine shrimp. There is a special bird though, Wilson's Phalarope, that uses the GSL as it's staging ground, apparently the biggest in the world. I wish I could live on Antelope Island. I wish I knew not of the modern world as it is right now and I wore skins and made fossil necklaces. I wish I lived close to the ocean again, or had a small summer home on the Chesapeake Bay or a cabin in Vancouver. I once thought I was going to get to live in Whidbey Island again, for a brief synapse of time. I want all the natural elements. I want the mountains I want the naked sea I want the thrushes in the ponds with fish and turtles and snakes and frogs. I want the threat of fire season coupled with crippling winters. I want a fishing village i want a snowy chalet with a pitched roof. I want all the stars and sunsets and moonrises and morning glory. I just want the ocean again. I need to hear it with my own ears. I contemplate the disaster that would be me flying into Baltimore and renting a car for a two hour drive to the beach I feel is mine just to stand there on the shore in the middle of the night and 

and


wish I had the black cotton blanket with the different colored triangle patches quilted in so I could lay on it and look at the night sky and listen to the lapping waves licking up on the sand; the sound of dogs howling in the distance. I got what I wanted, I have what I came here for. My heart always wants the most, wants the utmost of what I think I can make true. I could rent this place. easily. I could move again. I want to go where LIW lived when her family left the prairie. They lived in a dugout covered with sod next to a creek with a swimming hole. I could do that, I could build a place like that. Soda Springs. That's where it will be.

and

I am living at the bottom of prehistoric Lake Bonneville which was just a really shallow sea. I am a mermaid living at the bottom of a dried up sea.