As I have mentioned, Lake Erie didn't do all that much for me, except for the part where all the water in it fell over a bunch of rocks and flowed into Lake Ontario. Lakes really aren't my thing.
I now live in a city with the word "Lake" in its name. I haven't spent much time at the Great Salt Lake, I confess, and I didn't make it a priority to visit it when I got here. There have been a few times on visits to SLC in the past when, driving past the lake on the way to the airport, the sulfurous stink of the lake was so unpleasant, that I wondered why anyone would ever visit it at all.
But then, in March, I needed something to do on a pleasant Friday afternoon, so I went to Antelope Island, a state park on an island in the northern part of the Great Salt Lake, reachable by a long causeway.
It's a scrubby little island devoid of trees, but it has plenty of wildlife (at least, I'm told it does) and an acceptably informative museum thingy.
And it has great views--really spectacular views of the Wasatch mountains, which, back when I drove out to the island, were covered with snow.
I took some photos, which I never posted, because I often don't get around to posting pictures I've taken. But this evening I was listening to my ipod, and "Roundabout" by Yes came up on it, and I listened to the line "in and around the lake, mountains come out of the sky and they stand there," and I thought, that's a pretty damn great description of what it feels like to stand on Antelope Island.
I have these inchoate thoughts that are somehow relevant to all of this. They have to do with beauty and fastnesses and solitude, and they are relevant, really they are, but they are also inchoate, so they'll go unexpressed. I'll just say that I really like places where mountains come out of the sky, and they stand there. They're pretty much my favorite places in the whole world.
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