What will you lose?

The water in the Great Salt Lake is receding rapidly this year, exposing new mud every day. Sometime in the spring, I spotted a manmade object emerging in the shallow water as the lake levels dropped. Just last week I noticed it was still out there, now baked into the mudflat and very far from the waterline, so I went to investigate.  A pair of muck boots. I can picture these boots getting slurped off the feet of someone who just hopped out of the boat for a second into the shallow water, maybe to push the boat off the mud. That’s why we wear muck boots, right?

These are not my boots, but I can relate. The mud at the Great Salt Lake can be treacherous. You’re just out there enjoying your first-world adventure and wearing all the right clothes, and you take one wrong step, and suddenly you’re going down, coring through biological detritus and industrial sludge and other people’s boots into prehistoric slime layers akin to crude oil. As you stare into the empty eye sockets of a dead grebe on the shore and instinctively raise your camera overhead, you suddenly understand exactly how it happened at the La Brea Tar Pits.

Then you pull yourself together and remember you are like a couple feet from solid land, and really the most dreadful thing is that you smell like you just climbed out of a pit toilet, and you might possibly have to smear your phone with the foul detritus and hold it next to your face to call for help. And your boots are gone.

Speaking of boots. These boots probably belonged to a hunter. There will be no ducks near these boots when hunting season rolls around again. There might not even be a place on the Great Salt Lake where you can launch a boat.  Without a couple of big snow years and some rapid action on the local water policy front, there will be no Great Salt Lake at all.  If that happens, will you know what it is that you have lost?