by Anne Valente
We’re here, she says. Now tell me why.
The reason Billie came back to the book again and again: a small section on the refuge’s predator species.
One page devoted entirely to the red-tailed hawk.
Hawks breed and hunt here, Billie says. I thought we’d see one. Mom might be happy if I do something with the feather and jesses.
It’s a lie. One she’s sure Rhiannon can hear, the feather and jesses useless out here. She’s already seen a red-tailed hawk in the enclosure of an aviary exhibit. She’s already seen ten thousand bats spiraling from the open mouth of a cave. There is nothing at this refuge that she hasn’t seen except this: the flat pages of a child’s book come to life.
Six years of dreaming from a prison library made real.
She walks over an embankment beyond the parking lot and past a field of tall grass dotted with picnic shelters, the air thick with swarms of birds. Small swiftlets. Starlings. Their summer nests stuffed into the shelters’ eaves. Rhiannon follows her beneath a thick sky teeming with hundreds of circling birds as they make their way down to the boardwalk beside a shallow lake. Billie can identify every species. American white pelicans. A cluster of cream-colored tundra swans. The slim beaks of white-faced ibises, their snouts nearly as long as their fluffed bodies. And a fluttering mass of American avocets, crane-thin legs, wide wingspans of white and black feathers.
Billie squats at the edge of the boardwalk and drags her fingers through the water. A woman sits in a folding chair farther down the boardwalk, a tripod stationed beside her. Ready to wait. The kind of bird-watcher Billie once imagined she’d become, so much more patient than the person she turned into, a can of gasoline in her hands. Someone who couldn’t wait anymore. She lets her hands skirt the surface of the water, concentric rings forming like pools of skipping stones beneath her fingers. Rhiannon sits down beside her and dangles her feet in the water.
Hawks aren’t shorebirds, Rhiannon says. I don’t think you’ll find one over here.
Billie smiles.
Come on, Billie. I know birds too, almost as well as I know you.
Fine. It was a book. On this place. The only book on birds they had in prison.
Rhiannon nods and Billie doesn’t speak. There is no way to say it, the sun glittering across the water, a huddle of peeping snowy plovers gliding beneath the boardwalk. That this place is more than anything she imagined in the pages of a book, this entire trip a wide span of country she forgot. A wall of sunflowers rippling along the highway across Kansas and on toward Colorado. The blue of a pool. The malt taste of beer. The sugar-tart of whiskey. A man’s hands circling her waist in the water. A man’s hands at last welcome. Diner food. A cone of bats. A ridgeline. A pocked sky filled with stars and a once-sea of endless salt, small crusted peaks of white crystal spreading in fields toward distant mountains and the open highway rolled out like a carpet billowing west, so many miles she can’t believe she’s traveled across.
I’m here, she says. I was there in Decatur. And now I’m here.
You’re here, Rhiannon repeats.
Billie closes her eyes. Hears nothing but the sound of swiftlets, their soft wings beating against the light wind.
What are you going to do? she hears Rhiannon ask.
The same question. What Rhiannon has already asked. What Billie doesn’t know. But where there was fear sprouted to anger the last time her sister posed the question, there is now only calm: if nothing else, their mother’s work done through this.
Red-tailed hawks can live up to thirty years, she says. Alabama was a fledgling when I got her. Maybe she’s still flying around in Illinois somewhere.
Rhiannon smiles. Maybe she is.
Billie watches a pair of cinnamon teals slide cautiously from the shore into the waiting lake, water slicking across their feathers. She doesn’t know if she wants to train birds again, if she even wants to stay in Illinois. The gray of the sky. A land of ghosts. Her memories caught in every cornfield. But it is enough to know she could. The feather, Alabama’s jesses in her bag. The span of shorebirds beyond the boardwalk. It is enough to know she holds a pilot flame inside her, the memory of muscle. That she’d still know gauntlets and hooks and anklets. That she’d know how to draw a falcon back to her arm.
AFTER THEY’VE STAYED by the lakefront until the sun pushes toward late afternoon, Billie sits beside Rhiannon inside the car with the engine off but the radio on, a salted breeze blowing in through the open windows. The voice of an NPR broadcaster reporting exclusively on the crash in Wyoming: airports shut down. Every single one in the continental United States. A black box recovered, far more quickly than any of the other seven planes, investigators moving fast given the frequency of their work across the past four months. Confirmed: clear-air turbulence. Loss of control. Despite the flight’s routing around thunderstorms sweeping the plains of Nebraska. Interstate 80 closed indefinitely for debris and cleanup. Every family notified. And accompanying the newscaster’s voice: a guest spokeswoman for the EPA. Her voice asserting that beyond all reasonable doubt every single crash is due to shifting weather, no matter what analysts or talk-show hosts speculate to say. We are facing a global crisis, Billie hears the woman declare. We cannot ignore this any longer.
Fuck, Rhiannon breathes.
They’re just going to stop all flights?
Rhiannon looks at her. What else can anyone do?
Billie watches out the window as a flock of Franklin’s gulls lifts from the lakeshore and takes flight, a bird she knows winters in Central and South America. A bird she wonders while the radio drones whether it will make it to Argentina this year. Warming temperatures. Light pollution. Constellations a bird can’t see if city lights and thick thunderstorms block them out.
I don’t know, she says. Maybe there’s nothing anyone can do.
Rhiannon watches the waterfront through the windshield. Mom couldn’t have planned this. She couldn’t have known this would happen while we were out here.
But she knew it was happening. It was already happening when she got sick. And long before that. Rhee, it’s clear she was at least partly studying climate at the quarry.
But what are we supposed to do with that?
I don’t know. Like I said, maybe she just wants us to pay attention.
Like paying attention is going to bring back all those passengers.
Billie sighs. What do you want to do, Rhee? Head back now? Make it as far as we can and stop for the night?
I guess I-70’s the best route, even if it’s a detour. It will take us right to St. Louis. Rhiannon looks at her. We don’t have to stop for Mom’s ring. If it will bother you to see Oscar. I can just drive down sometime after we’re back.
That’s pointless. We’ll be passing right through. We may as well stop.
Are you okay with that?
Why wouldn’t I be?
The words spoken out loud let Billie know it’s true. Oscar’s face: everything like Tim’s, but nothing more now than another face. A man decent enough to take a phone call, to track down a plastic box. Nothing else. And Tim: another life, one Billie can’t believe she once lived.
How long will it take to get back to Illinois? she asks.
I mapped it this morning. From Salt Lake City, with a detour south adding a lot of extra miles, twenty-five hours. Sixteen hundred miles. We can do it in three days, getting us home on Thursday night just liked we planned. Or we can push it if you really want and get back on Wednesday night. Rhiannon gestures toward the radio. Assuming nothing else happens along the way.
There’s no rush, Billie says. Let’s just do it in three.
What Billie doesn’t say: that she’d rather prolong this trip if she can. That she prefers the highway to mandatory therapy. That even in the grief of their reason for being out here, there are still salt shores. There are still mountains and birds.
What will we do with Mom’s ring? Rhiannon says. Dad said we could have it.
I don’t know. Billie
sighs. How about you keep it. For now. If you know you’re staying in Illinois. It should be kept near home.
Rhiannon says nothing, doesn’t ask where Billie will be if not Illinois. The radio hums through the silence that forces its way between them until Rhiannon leans forward and shuts the dial off.
There’s one more stop I want to make, she says. A quick one. It’s not far, so long as we’re north of the Salt Lake. We may never be out here again.
Billie nods. Whatever you want to do.
Rhiannon’s mouth curves up, a smile tinged with sadness. She turns the key in the ignition and pulls away from the parking lot and Billie watches the birds recede.
GILLESPIE, JIM. THE SPIRAL JETTY. LOS ANGELES: TASCHEN BOOKS, 2000. PRINT.
CALL NUMBER: NB6392.A22 .B10 2000
THE SPIRAL JETTY
The Spiral Jetty is an earthwork sculpture constructed in 1970 by American sculptor Robert Smithson. Part of a land art movement, Smithson created works beyond the confines of museums that responded directly to the landscape.
Located on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, the Spiral Jetty is a fifteen-hundred-foot-long, fifteen-foot-wide coil rotating counterclockwise out into the lake. Built of basalt rocks, salt crystals, and mud, all materials from the Great Salt Lake itself, the sculpture’s visibility fluctuates with Utah’s climate, submerged when the lake’s water levels rise above 4,195 feet. Because the sculpture depends upon weather, preservationists have taken interest in the climate’s effects of flood and drought.
Widely influenced by geology, paleontology, and astronomy, Smithson described the land sculpture as documenting the earth’s history, as well as the lack of predictability in the earth’s processes. Smithson has said the sculpture responds to the landscape rather than imposing upon it, and that the artwork is meant to be engaged with rather than beheld.
Cultural criticism of the Spiral Jetty suggests that walking into the counterclockwise coil signifies traveling back in time and into the earth’s history, and that walking out clockwise signifies moving forward in time.
41.4377º N, 112.6689º W:
Spiral Jetty, UT
The Mustang contours farther down the road from the Bear River Refuge instead of routing back toward the interstate, a paved highway that becomes a dirt path that becomes windbeaten sand and dust. Rhiannon’s choice for their trip’s last destination: only forty-five minutes from the birds Billie chose. If Billie is surprised, she says nothing. The Mustang bumps across uninhabited miles of jagged roads, so far that Rhiannon wonders if they’ve made a wrong turn. Out toward the northern edge of the Great Salt Lake, the blue peaks of low mountains blend into pale sky on the opposite shore’s horizon, an azure gradient that reminds Rhiannon again of the ocean against fields of sand and salt, the lake’s water levels low. The shore itself all salt, the same makeup and bright white of the flats. What Beth told her about for so many years. An art book always situated on their coffee table. What Rhiannon never thought to open. What she realized at the Bear River Refuge was so close, a place she never thought she needed to see until now. Coiling out from the shore of the Great Salt Lake, visible from the rocked road: a wide helix of mud and basalt rock and salt crystal.
The Spiral Jetty.
An earthwork sculpture Beth described from their Urbana apartment, built with six thousand tons of basalt from the Great Salt Lake. Art made from the land, what Beth intended to do with her own work in Illinois. The bark of oaks and hickories. Her show this September. And out here, the black rock of a once-seascape. A sculpture in flux with the earth and with visitors, a curved fiddlehead meant to be walked out to the center. What Beth called land art, what never held Rhiannon’s interest until she realized how close she and Billie were to the sculpture. Rhiannon watching so many birds spiraling beyond the parked car and all at once she felt homesick, not for Beth’s apartment or the sweeping cornfields of Illinois. Homesick for a different kind of planet. One that could keep so many starlings swirling. One that could keep travelers alive. One that held human striving and the earth in one soft hand.
Rhiannon cuts the engine, the Mustang parked at the edge of a path leading down to the water. The shoreline deserted, no other cars. Beyond the windshield, the sculpture’s counterclockwise coil rotates out into the dried lakebed.
Billie leans forward beside her. What is this place?
The Spiral Jetty. Beth talked about it for years.
Can we actually walk on it?
Rhiannon nods. Come on.
When Rhiannon opens the driver’s-side door, a gust of wind pushes across the shoreline and dishevels her hair. The lake floods with sunlight, shorebirds surfing through the air in the distance. Rhiannon remembers what Beth said: a sculpture meant to respond instead of impose. Not domination. Not a landscape named after an artist or an explorer. A site intended for active walking, not a work to stand by and watch. Rhiannon leaves the radio’s news behind, what’s billowed through the car’s speakers from the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge to the isolated edge of the Great Salt Lake. She closes the Mustang’s door and begins walking toward the shore and Billie follows her, the daypack slung across her bare shoulders.
The basalt rock forms a raised path and Rhiannon steps onto it, a curled spiral rotating straight out and to the left. The dried lake a desert surrounding the sculpture, and beyond the desiccated sand, the Salt Lake an endless blue. The horizon marbled in purple and the pink against the mountains in the distance. Rhiannon walks. Closes her eyes. Hears the pulse of the wind and Billie’s footsteps following. Their mother. A constellation of coordinates shot across the country, like the points a laser located in the sky. A lit pattern. A journey. A way of making meaning from nothing. Navigation. A way home. Rhiannon walks the jagged rocks as they curve toward the spiral’s center. An IV drip. The slow leak of life from her mother’s palms. Dental picks. Rock axes. Crinoids. The smallest fragments of stegosaurus plates, what lined the desk of her mother’s home office. Tango lessons. Plant identification. Alliums and daylilies and daffodils. A car’s garage. The scent of diesel. Oil and dusted rags. Summer humidity. The Mustang gunning across a dried sea at maximum speed. Daughter, go west. If Rhiannon keeps her eyes closed she can almost hear her mother say it. How their mother has pulled them from the rockbed of Illinois and thrust them into the otherworldly ridgelines and campgrounds of the West, a place that was never theirs but out here walking the thick band of a spiraled path feels almost like home.
Their mother’s playground. A place she didn’t even want her husband to visit, a place all her own. A salt raceway. A western landscape humming Rhiannon back. Billie’s birds. Alabama’s jesses. Hawks swirling above the highway, swiftlets circling above the refuge’s boardwalk. Rhiannon follows the path as it grows tighter in concentric rings toward the center. A to B. How she might have driven straight across the country if Billie weren’t here. The sound of her sister’s footsteps beside her blends into the roar of the wind, a sound like the pulse of a sea’s waves.
A once-ocean. The mystery of flood or famine or poison. Their mother’s lifework. The eighth plane. Rhiannon walks and wonders if this is the beginning of their own age of mass devastation, a mystery for another era to mine. A planet beyond tilt. A planet leaving no trail of bread crumbs behind, only metal and wreckage. Only debris. A closed highway. Everything shut down. Only notified families. Rhiannon feels her hand travel to her chest, an ache beneath her breastbone as she walks.
Mother.
She almost hears her mouth form the word.
She wishes she’d said it back.
Mother, you are so loved.
The basalt path coils to the bull’s-eye center and Rhiannon stops when she can’t walk any farther, Billie standing beside her.
Goddamn, Billie whispers. A hand shielding her eyes, her gaze on the distant line of blue mountains, the rippled waterfall of scars pouring down her bare arm. Rhiannon stands where they are. A Kansas riverbed. A cone of swirled bats. A mountain valley. So man
y ridgelines their mother once walked. And from the Jetty’s center, a span of sea salt and coral and blue.
Did you know only brine shrimp live in the Great Salt Lake? Billie asks.
Rhiannon shakes her head.
Billie points to the sky, a flock of beach-white birds. Western sandpipers, she says. This lake sees five million shorebirds each year on seasonal migrations.
Rhiannon says nothing as Billie pulls her daypack from her shoulder and rummages through its contents. Billie takes none of the objects from the bag but Rhiannon knows everything their mother left for them has traveled with them to the center of the spiral except her ring. Two jesses. Jigsaw piece. Astronomy pointer. Hawk feather. Fossilized bone. Locket. Billie pulls out the GPS instead. Presses buttons. Waits for it to calculate before unearthing a pen and their mother’s journal.
Rhiannon watches as Billie crouches in the sand and opens the journal and flips it to the blank page beyond their mother’s last entry. An open white sheet that threads the hurt in Rhiannon’s chest. What seemed like a slight. Billie glances up at Rhiannon. Leaves the sheet blank and turns to the next open page.
Rhiannon watches as Billie marks the coordinate: what the GPS reads, the latitude and longitude of standing in the spiral’s center. She draws the laddered slats of the Bear River Refuge’s boardwalk. Beside it, the nautilus scrawl of a backward coil.
She marks her initials, the same as a hiking ledger, and extends the journal and pen up to Rhiannon, in Billie’s care since they set out in Illinois. The wind whipping between them, the scent of salt and sea swirling in the desert heat. Six states. Eight planes. A trail of coordinates across so many western highways. There is no geocached box left to find. Rhiannon takes the journal from Billie’s hands. From her mother’s hands. The ghost of her fingerprints everywhere, upon the dust-gray plastic of hidden boxes and upon the scrawled drawings and coordinates of a notebook. What she once held. What she slid across a prison table to Billie’s waiting palms.