The next morning, I drove out to the Bonneville Salt Flats with Sarah and a few of her colleagues. Until 14,500 years ago, what is now Wendover was deep underwater in Lake Bonneville, a vast salty lake that covered nineteen thousand square miles, nearly the size of Lake Michigan today. Lake Bonneville has disappeared and re-formed a couple dozen times over the last five hundred million years; what remains of it at the moment is known as the Great Salt Lake, although it’s less than a tenth as great as Lake Bonneville once was. The lake’s most recent retreat left behind the salt flats, a thirty-thousand-acre expanse, utterly empty and far flatter than a pancake.
The snow-white ground was cracked like dried lips and crunched under my feet. I could smell the salt. I kept trying to think of what it looked like, but my brain could only find highly figurative similes. It looks like driving alone at night feels. It looks like everything you’re scared to say out loud. It looks like the moment the water retreats from the shore just before a wave rolls in.
Herman Melville called white “a colorless, all-color.” He wrote that white “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe.” And the Bonneville Salt Flats are very, very white.
Of course, everything on Earth is geological, but at the salt flats you feel the geology. It is not hard to believe that this land was once five hundred feet underwater. You feel like the briny, green-black water might rush back in at any moment, drowning you and your traumas and the town and the hangar where the Enola Gay waited for its atomic bomb.
Looking up toward the looming mountain ranges in the distance, I was reminded of what nature is always telling me: Humans are not the protagonists of this planet’s story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight. But in the age of the Anthropocene, humans tend to believe, despite all available evidence, that the world is here for our benefit. So the Bonneville Salt Flats must have a human use; why else would they exist? Nothing can grow in that dry, salty soil, but we find uses for it anyway. For the last hundred years, the flats have been mined for potash, which is used in fertilizer. And a long stretch of the flats has gained fame as a kind of drag-racing strip. A land-speed record was set there in 1965 when a turbojet car driven by Craig Breedlove traveled over six hundred miles per hour.
Racing season can still attract thousands of people to the flats, but most days the landscape is, above all else, a backdrop—for movies from Independence Day to The Last Jedi, and for fashion photo shoots and Instagram posts. While I was at the flats, I was one of several people trying to angle a selfie to make it look like I was alone in that emptiness.
But after walking for a while, away from the road that dead-ends into the flats, I started to feel really alone. At one point, I thought I saw a shimmering pool of water in the distance, but as I approached, it proved to be a mirage—an actual one. I’d always thought they were just fictional devices. As I kept walking, I thought about that blackjack dealer, and how bone-deep terrifying it is to be a child and know that you cannot decide what adults do to you.
Sarah called out to me. I turned around. She was so far away I couldn’t hear what she was saying at first, but she was waving me toward her, and so I walked back until I could hear: I was getting in the way of a drone shot they needed for the show; could I walk over to where she was? So I did. I stood next to her, and watched the drone flying over the salt flats. Our gazes entwined. I felt calmer. I was thinking about the people I used to be, and how they fought and scrapped and survived for moments like this one. Looking with Sarah, the salt flats seemed to change—they no longer had the menace of indifference about them.
I give the Bonneville Salt Flats three and a half stars.
HIROYUKI DOI’S CIRCLE DRAWINGS
ONE WEIRD THING ABOUT ME is that I have signed my name over five hundred thousand times. This effort began in earnest back in 2011, when I decided to sign the entire first printing of my fourth novel, The Fault in Our Stars. To do this, I signed sheets of paper that were then bound into copies of the book as they were printed. Over the course of a few months, I signed about 150,000 sheets. Sometimes I listened to podcasts or audiobooks, but often, I just sat there, alone in my basement, signing my name. I never really found it boring, because each time I was trying to realize some ideal form that I have in my head of what my signature looks like, and I can never quite achieve it.*
Paying attention to the very slight variations of repetitive behaviors engages me in a way I struggle to explain. There is a very specific itch within my brain that repetitive action scratches. I realize there may be some connection there to my having obsessive-compulsive disorder, but then again, lots of people enjoy doodling, which is what my signing boils down to. Doodling is good for brains—it relieves stress in ways similar to pacing or fidgeting, and it can help with attentiveness. A 2009 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that people given license to doodle recalled more information than non-doodlers, perhaps because doodling requires just enough brainpower to keep the mind from wandering.
I wouldn’t say I enjoy repetitive tasks, exactly, but I do benefit from them. Sometimes, when I feel burnt out and exhausted and I don’t know what to do with myself or whether my work matters or if I’m ever going to do anything of use to anyone, I ask my publisher to send me ten or twenty thousand sheets of paper, and I sign them just to have something specific and measurable to do for a week or so. I don’t even know whether those sheets end up in books. I hope they do, and I hope they make readers happy, but to be honest, I do it for myself, because it makes me . . . not happy, exactly, but engrossed. I think engrossed is what I really want to feel most of the time. It’s such an ugly word, “engrossed,” for such an absolutely beatific experience.
* * *
I first saw the ink drawings of Hiroyuki Doi in 2006, at the American Folk Art Museum’s show about obsessive drawing. Doi’s drawings are epic conglomerations of circles, thousands—or maybe tens of thousands—of tiny circles tightly packed together, combining to form vast, wildly intricate abstractions. Some people say they look like teeming masses of cells, or like galactic nebulae. The one that struck me most was an untitled 2003 drawing shaped vaguely like a human eye turned on its side, fifty-six inches high and twenty-seven inches wide. At times, the circles branching off from one another resemble blood vessels; at others, they seem to swirl around centers of gravity. As I looked longer at the circles, the drawing took on a third dimension, and I felt like I could step into it, like the circles were not just before me but also above and below and behind and within.
Doi did not set out to be an artist; he was a successful chef when, in 1980, his younger brother died of a brain tumor. Overwhelmed with sorrow, he began to draw circles, and found that he could not stop drawing them, because they helped him find “relief from the sadness and grief.”
What fascinates me about Doi’s drawings is partly their glaring obsessiveness. They look like circling, recursive thoughts made visible. You lose yourself inside a Doi drawing, which is maybe the point. But they also communicate that desire to find relief from the consuming pain of loss. In interviews, Doi uses that word regularly: relief. And that is what I’m also desperate for whenever I’ve been knocked over by grief. Loss can be so encompassing—it’s a job where the hours are all hours, every day. We talk of grief in stages—denial, bargaining, acceptance, and so on. But for me, at least, grief is a series of tightly packed circles that fade over many years, like ink exposed to light.