My friend Alison works for Etsy and has begun a new blog for them, a compendium of assorted delightful oddities from around the world.
This week’s is particularly great.
The bus-cozy is one thing, but the figure sculpted from tobacco products is like a deranged Muppet. I fucking love it. It reminded me of this childhood gem:
Promontory Point, Utah. September 2008.
This was sort of the culmination of our road trip, the capstone of remote and gorgeous Americana. Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork sculpture has only been exposed from the Great Salt Lake for a few years after a decades-long period submerged. As we were there at the end of the summer, the lake’s edge was actually two hundred yards beyond the sculpture. What looks like whitish water here is deposits of salt. The border between lake and shore is more indistinct than any other sizeable body of water that I’ve seen; the shore is pure crystalline salt, strange underfoot, and gradually becomes more more and more moist as you approach the lake proper. I guess the lake is probably super-saturated and exists beneath the salt along the shore. Amazing.
We had the site to ourselves for the entire two hours we were there, and passed two vehicles arriving as we were on our way out. It was a hot afternoon, our water was hot in our bottles, and the weird and silent terrain was magnificent. It takes forever to drive there–at least an hour from Golden Spike National Historical Site, 12 miles away–because you have to keep below 10 mph on roads that are not only unpaved but have basically been cleared only of boulders. There was no sign of human civilization, not even a radio tower, to be seen. You get a good grasp of why the original Mormon settlers could have felt convinced of their relationship with the Israelites. That part of Utah looks like Judaea, by the Dead Sea.
I picked up a small rock from around the Jetty and threw another one from the hillside to balance it out. Elliott took a naked Polaroid of me and I actually like it. Trying to think of a more ambitious place to reach by car, there’s nothing that comes to mind. After the shithole that was Salt Lake City (where I was yelled at in a motel parking lot by a woman pushing a shopping cart out of her room) it couldn’t come at a better time.
Suck the Rainbow 