Who flies to Salt Lake City from Toronto? Junior sports teams and a lot of clean-cut people in jeans. Who advertises in Delta's in-flight magazine? Financial planners, makers of miraculous laser hair-growth hats, and the city of Louisville, Kentucky. Who sat next to me? First, a businessman who tried to read a broadsheet newspaper. Then, after he was promoted to first class, a nervous man who took a banana from the attendant's snack tray and then spent twenty minutes trying to get rid of the peel. He put it on the floor. He held it discontentedly. He tried to get busy attendants to take it away. He discovered how to take out his tray table, put it on that, and looked around triumphantly.
The mountains around SLC are brown and creased and stop very suddenly at the edge of a table-flat basin. West of the city is the Great Salt Lake, a blue blob with a complicated shape. Because the land is so flat, its coast depends on the exact water level of the moment. And because the area is a sort of flat-bottomed bowl, it has no outlet: rivers flow in, and the water stays there until it evaporates, which concentrates the salt and other minerals carried into it. The Dead Sea is the same sort of operation (an endorheic lake). It's so salty it has almost no fish, but is full of brine shrimp, which have developed the survival strategy of simply living where nothing else can.
About a third of this post will be about brine shrimp.
In the 1950s, someone started selling a strain of these shrimp through the mail as "Sea Monkeys". This was the golden age of advertising: selling brine shrimp cysts to children by mail order could seem like something other than a psychotic idea, because the product simply didn't matter very much. You could perfect a scam and deliver it to children directly, one at a time, in ads, and they couldn't share their disappointment on review sites or call you a dick on Twitter. There were order forms in the back of every comic book: happy cartoon Sea Monkeys in front of their undersea castle, with a human family grinning down at them beside a wall of slobbery ad copy: "Own a bowlfull [sic] of happiness! The most adorable pets ever! Instant life! So eager to please, they can even be trained!"
The "instant" part was managed by having kids add "water purifier", which contained some of the actual cysts, and then wait a day before adding the "eggs", which would seem to hatch almost instantly. The man who came up with this also sold hermit crabs (marketing them for their lovability) and invented the "X-Ray Spex" and the "Invisible Goldfish". Mail-order marketing is what evil people did with themselves between the death of Stalin and the invention of social media.
Generations of kids raided piggy banks and solemnly asked themselves, am I ready to rule a multitude of tiny pink cartoon people as a life-giving god-emperor? I think I'll start out fair and gradually become a crazed tyrant... And then: OK, these things are dead, whatever they were, but these X-ray Spex sound legit.
And somewhere in some seedy office, a man pours out their saved-up coins and wrinkled dollars and puts his feet up on the desk to think. "Water fleas? 'Ocean puppies', guaranteed to cure acne and return your friendship. Great listeners, and so on. Krill ranch... you raise them and sell them on, a thriving business guaranteed... tiny lasso and comprehensive business plan included... OK, no, some sort of crayfish, comes with a tiny top hat... predicts the future! By eating bits of hot dog! Accuracy guaranteed, not to be used for betting, wink wink... Hm, an invisible lobster that... sings inaudible light opera... no... some sort of psychic barnacle that... hm, helps you on dates by slipping you good lines? No. 'Lactose intolerant? This clam can help!' No..."
Anyway, in SLC airport, people were talking about football, restaurant staff wore bright t-shirts that said things like "Ask me about our smoothies!", and none of the ATMs, which belonged to something called Zion National Bank, would accept my card. I took the light rail into town. Half the car was full of travelers. The other half was oddly empty, except for one woman, so I went and sat over there. She turned to say hello, talked to herself for a while in what might have been a language of her own, then brandished a pink sex toy at me and asked where the hospital was. She disembarked and a couple of rough-looking young men got on, sat fifteen feet apart, and hollered to continue their conversation about chihuahuas and shopping malls. Yo, did you see that addition they put on? It's pretty bad-ass.
My hotel, just past a grand and expanding juvenile criminal court, was a huge complex with a posh central tower and some cheap and dowdy motel-style low-rises. Everything in my room was very old, maybe 1950s, and very tacky. There was a gilt mirror, big brass lamps with crooked shades, embroidered old throw pillows, and a once-rich red carpet fretted to nothing by people pacing worriedly about Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis and mail order marketing scams. In that era, people didn't worry without cigarettes, and the smell of deodorizer was powerful until it knocked out my receptors. There were always conferences going on; the main building lobby was always full of people who'd been hauled to Salt Lake City to talk to each other about IT.
SLC has wide streets and large blocks. There's a story that this is because Brigham Young wanted coach drivers to be able to turn around without swearing. Many of its early buildings survive, which give a 19th century feeling to the place. Its pedestrian crossings have a flag system; there are cups full of red flags posted on either side, so you can wave one at cars while you cross and then drop it off again.
After Joseph Smith was killed, Brigham Young led a group of Mormons west, pulled up here, and said (reportedly) "this is the place". When they left the eastern U.S., the site of Salt Lake City was in Mexico; by the time they arrived, the U.S. had more or less annexed it. Maybe not accidentally, SLC's foundation is like a story from classical myth, with an exile and a divinely-inspired site selection.
Temple Square is the heart of the Mormon church. The Temple itself is a white granite building like a pocket cathedral. It's closed to tourists. To enter, you need a 'temple recommend', which requires baptism, a wait of one year, a confession, tithing, assorted religious duties, an interview with a bishop and a stake president to determine one's worthiness, and the wearing of the 'temple garment, which is a suit of special white underwear. On balance, this seemed like excessive hassle for a look around, particularly as there's a cutaway scale model in one of the visitor centres.
Screens near the entrances enjoin you to take tours, which are offered in 40+ languages and which reportedly elucidate God's plan for families. There are gardens of bronze sculptures of Church Fathers, stone benches, and a gilt statue of seagulls. Huge orange sweepers like land zambonis brush the walks and staff in little yellow golf carts scoot around hoeing and planting and cleaning. At the back of the temple is a set of three prominent inscriptions carefully praising governments in general and the U.S. government in particular ("the Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard..."). This was probably an important clarification at the time, as the government and the Mormons were close to armed war a couple of times in the 1840s and 50s. A gentle, bearded man beamed at me happily when I stopped to read these. Brother, I have a great curiosity about your faith. What's up with the seagulls?
The LDS church's focus on families is distinctive. Mainstream American Christianity is keen on families; the LDS church is obsessed. In the early morning, people are waiting around for entry to a large Family History Library, which represents the "genealogical arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints". It exists because deceased ancestors can be baptized by proxy, which gives them the option of posthumous membership in the church. If you're a member of the church, this probably seems like a nice thing to do for your ancestors, who are presumed to be shivering outside LDS heaven like people waiting for a family history library to open early on a cold October morning. But to ensure your deceased ancestors' eternal happiness, you have to identify them, which makes genealogical research a matter of unexpectedly urgent interest to the church. Of course, it also means that you have the option of leaving a conversion to LDS to your descendants.
The visitor centers are very interesting. There's a row of candy-coloured dollhouses with inset screens that say things like "How can we be truly happy?" If you want to know how to be truly happy, you press a button, and a face appears on the screen and starts explaining. Along the walls are placards, in that script-like font that only religions and greeting cards use, explaining God's views on social issues, and also TV screens showing speeches by the church's podgy current president.
There are rows of large, not-very-good paintings of biblical scenes and, downstairs, a quiet museum-like place with odd mannequin displays, more placards, and quiet groupings of chairs and tables like you'd find in the waiting room of an expensive medical specialist. In the middle, a circle of individual pods with big TV screens, for mainlining Mormonism. There's a small movie theatre, too, where one woman sat watching a film history of the church; an early Mormon (Joseph Smith?), played by an actor with piercing blue eyes and a saintly manner, was upbraiding a stricken-looked disbeliever.
Somewhere in there, there's also a life-sized statue of Jesus against a purple 1970s sci-fi background of comets and galaxies.
Upstairs, tour groups were moving through, and clean-cut well-dressed church members were smiling contentedly at each other and talking about praying. Earnest people. Earnestly good humoured. Earnest jokes. Earnest laughter. Earnest clothes.
After the temple complex, I hiked up into the foothills north of the city. I found a trailhead for the Bonneville Lakeshore Trail. I wasn't especially prepared and didn't have a map, but followed it anyway, in the fine old spirit of "duh, I wonder where this goes". It went through groves of stunted oaks with leaves of bronze foil and climbed in switchbacks high up into the hills. It runs along steep slopes. On treeless sections, you have to remind yourself how wide and smooth the trail really is – falling off it is no more likely that suddenly falling off a city sidewalk for no reason, but it's hard to forget that, if you do, you'll go cartwheeling down a mountainside. Three or four trail runners passed, all going the other way, which meant a) I was being a baby about the exposure, and b) the descent was probably worse in the direction I was going.
You end up in the hilltops at the north end of SLC, with terrific views of the city, the outlying warehouses and industrial areas, and the shore of the Great Salt Lake. A woman who had hiked up the other way was here taking photographs, and a local man was bellowing into his phone about how his cat kept waking him up last night. Getting down again meant stutter-stepping down a steep gravel trail, counting the steps and not looking up, until it met up with a dirt trail with a split-rail fence running alongside and turned down into the northern suburbs.
The streets I came down into were eerily quiet and eerily perfect. Every lawn perfectly mowed, no activity of any kind. There's a slight sense that you've wandered into some cheesy Twilight Zone scenario and that humanoid robots might come out and seize you at any moment: you built us to create the perfect neighbourhood and you were imperfect. As you move south through the inconveniently indirect and looping streets, things start to liven up a bit. There's an angry dog, a mostly-closed garage with a religious broadcast booming out from within, and a few cars. Twice, the sidewalk just stops and force you to walk on the road for a while. The sidewalks here are as ornamental as the gardens. Nice neighbourhoods have them, so they put them in, but no one uses them. If you're serious about sidewalks, you should make them, you know, continuous.
In the grocery store, there's a beer fridge (stores may sell beverages up to 4% ABV). Above it are signs encouraging you to drink water or soda, instead. What would sci-fi Jesus say? There are also liquor stores, run by the state of Utah. But the state of Utah doesn't actually want you to drink liquor, so it's a weird retail experience. The state accepts that you have the right to buy liquor, and feels that it should probably be the one to sell it to you, so things don't get out of hand. But it's not going to make it fun. Other stores are stylish and colourful. They're designed by experts to attract and please you. The SLC liquor store is deliberately aversive. It is inconveniently located. Its shelves are rickety and awkward. Its signs are home-printed. Its cashiers are nice, but you know they're not supposed to be.
Even so, there are big lines at 5PM on a Tuesday, and some of the city's alcoholics are hovering outside. A couple of cops are on the sidewalk trying to reason with one. He wants to know where else he can buy liquor ("just not here"). There are two more hanging back at the far side of the parking lot. They sway towards people who pass close by, saying things no one can make out.
On the road to the liquor store is a billboard asking you not to give money to panhandlers: part of a heavy ad campaign. They ask you to give your money to charities that work with the homeless, instead, and point you to a web site that argues that begging is a sort of organized crime racket. There's also a Hooter's with the top half of its H unilluminated ("nooter's"). It seems like you'd want to get that fixed as a matter of urgency, unless it's some local experiment to serve a prudish customer base ("our server was so listless and androgynous! I loved it!")
The mountains around SLC are brown and creased and stop very suddenly at the edge of a table-flat basin. West of the city is the Great Salt Lake, a blue blob with a complicated shape. Because the land is so flat, its coast depends on the exact water level of the moment. And because the area is a sort of flat-bottomed bowl, it has no outlet: rivers flow in, and the water stays there until it evaporates, which concentrates the salt and other minerals carried into it. The Dead Sea is the same sort of operation (an endorheic lake). It's so salty it has almost no fish, but is full of brine shrimp, which have developed the survival strategy of simply living where nothing else can.
About a third of this post will be about brine shrimp.
In the 1950s, someone started selling a strain of these shrimp through the mail as "Sea Monkeys". This was the golden age of advertising: selling brine shrimp cysts to children by mail order could seem like something other than a psychotic idea, because the product simply didn't matter very much. You could perfect a scam and deliver it to children directly, one at a time, in ads, and they couldn't share their disappointment on review sites or call you a dick on Twitter. There were order forms in the back of every comic book: happy cartoon Sea Monkeys in front of their undersea castle, with a human family grinning down at them beside a wall of slobbery ad copy: "Own a bowlfull [sic] of happiness! The most adorable pets ever! Instant life! So eager to please, they can even be trained!"
The "instant" part was managed by having kids add "water purifier", which contained some of the actual cysts, and then wait a day before adding the "eggs", which would seem to hatch almost instantly. The man who came up with this also sold hermit crabs (marketing them for their lovability) and invented the "X-Ray Spex" and the "Invisible Goldfish". Mail-order marketing is what evil people did with themselves between the death of Stalin and the invention of social media.
Generations of kids raided piggy banks and solemnly asked themselves, am I ready to rule a multitude of tiny pink cartoon people as a life-giving god-emperor? I think I'll start out fair and gradually become a crazed tyrant... And then: OK, these things are dead, whatever they were, but these X-ray Spex sound legit.
And somewhere in some seedy office, a man pours out their saved-up coins and wrinkled dollars and puts his feet up on the desk to think. "Water fleas? 'Ocean puppies', guaranteed to cure acne and return your friendship. Great listeners, and so on. Krill ranch... you raise them and sell them on, a thriving business guaranteed... tiny lasso and comprehensive business plan included... OK, no, some sort of crayfish, comes with a tiny top hat... predicts the future! By eating bits of hot dog! Accuracy guaranteed, not to be used for betting, wink wink... Hm, an invisible lobster that... sings inaudible light opera... no... some sort of psychic barnacle that... hm, helps you on dates by slipping you good lines? No. 'Lactose intolerant? This clam can help!' No..."
Anyway, in SLC airport, people were talking about football, restaurant staff wore bright t-shirts that said things like "Ask me about our smoothies!", and none of the ATMs, which belonged to something called Zion National Bank, would accept my card. I took the light rail into town. Half the car was full of travelers. The other half was oddly empty, except for one woman, so I went and sat over there. She turned to say hello, talked to herself for a while in what might have been a language of her own, then brandished a pink sex toy at me and asked where the hospital was. She disembarked and a couple of rough-looking young men got on, sat fifteen feet apart, and hollered to continue their conversation about chihuahuas and shopping malls. Yo, did you see that addition they put on? It's pretty bad-ass.
My hotel, just past a grand and expanding juvenile criminal court, was a huge complex with a posh central tower and some cheap and dowdy motel-style low-rises. Everything in my room was very old, maybe 1950s, and very tacky. There was a gilt mirror, big brass lamps with crooked shades, embroidered old throw pillows, and a once-rich red carpet fretted to nothing by people pacing worriedly about Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis and mail order marketing scams. In that era, people didn't worry without cigarettes, and the smell of deodorizer was powerful until it knocked out my receptors. There were always conferences going on; the main building lobby was always full of people who'd been hauled to Salt Lake City to talk to each other about IT.
SLC has wide streets and large blocks. There's a story that this is because Brigham Young wanted coach drivers to be able to turn around without swearing. Many of its early buildings survive, which give a 19th century feeling to the place. Its pedestrian crossings have a flag system; there are cups full of red flags posted on either side, so you can wave one at cars while you cross and then drop it off again.
After Joseph Smith was killed, Brigham Young led a group of Mormons west, pulled up here, and said (reportedly) "this is the place". When they left the eastern U.S., the site of Salt Lake City was in Mexico; by the time they arrived, the U.S. had more or less annexed it. Maybe not accidentally, SLC's foundation is like a story from classical myth, with an exile and a divinely-inspired site selection.
Temple Square is the heart of the Mormon church. The Temple itself is a white granite building like a pocket cathedral. It's closed to tourists. To enter, you need a 'temple recommend', which requires baptism, a wait of one year, a confession, tithing, assorted religious duties, an interview with a bishop and a stake president to determine one's worthiness, and the wearing of the 'temple garment, which is a suit of special white underwear. On balance, this seemed like excessive hassle for a look around, particularly as there's a cutaway scale model in one of the visitor centres.
Screens near the entrances enjoin you to take tours, which are offered in 40+ languages and which reportedly elucidate God's plan for families. There are gardens of bronze sculptures of Church Fathers, stone benches, and a gilt statue of seagulls. Huge orange sweepers like land zambonis brush the walks and staff in little yellow golf carts scoot around hoeing and planting and cleaning. At the back of the temple is a set of three prominent inscriptions carefully praising governments in general and the U.S. government in particular ("the Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard..."). This was probably an important clarification at the time, as the government and the Mormons were close to armed war a couple of times in the 1840s and 50s. A gentle, bearded man beamed at me happily when I stopped to read these. Brother, I have a great curiosity about your faith. What's up with the seagulls?
The LDS church's focus on families is distinctive. Mainstream American Christianity is keen on families; the LDS church is obsessed. In the early morning, people are waiting around for entry to a large Family History Library, which represents the "genealogical arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints". It exists because deceased ancestors can be baptized by proxy, which gives them the option of posthumous membership in the church. If you're a member of the church, this probably seems like a nice thing to do for your ancestors, who are presumed to be shivering outside LDS heaven like people waiting for a family history library to open early on a cold October morning. But to ensure your deceased ancestors' eternal happiness, you have to identify them, which makes genealogical research a matter of unexpectedly urgent interest to the church. Of course, it also means that you have the option of leaving a conversion to LDS to your descendants.
The visitor centers are very interesting. There's a row of candy-coloured dollhouses with inset screens that say things like "How can we be truly happy?" If you want to know how to be truly happy, you press a button, and a face appears on the screen and starts explaining. Along the walls are placards, in that script-like font that only religions and greeting cards use, explaining God's views on social issues, and also TV screens showing speeches by the church's podgy current president.
There are rows of large, not-very-good paintings of biblical scenes and, downstairs, a quiet museum-like place with odd mannequin displays, more placards, and quiet groupings of chairs and tables like you'd find in the waiting room of an expensive medical specialist. In the middle, a circle of individual pods with big TV screens, for mainlining Mormonism. There's a small movie theatre, too, where one woman sat watching a film history of the church; an early Mormon (Joseph Smith?), played by an actor with piercing blue eyes and a saintly manner, was upbraiding a stricken-looked disbeliever.
Somewhere in there, there's also a life-sized statue of Jesus against a purple 1970s sci-fi background of comets and galaxies.
Upstairs, tour groups were moving through, and clean-cut well-dressed church members were smiling contentedly at each other and talking about praying. Earnest people. Earnestly good humoured. Earnest jokes. Earnest laughter. Earnest clothes.
After the temple complex, I hiked up into the foothills north of the city. I found a trailhead for the Bonneville Lakeshore Trail. I wasn't especially prepared and didn't have a map, but followed it anyway, in the fine old spirit of "duh, I wonder where this goes". It went through groves of stunted oaks with leaves of bronze foil and climbed in switchbacks high up into the hills. It runs along steep slopes. On treeless sections, you have to remind yourself how wide and smooth the trail really is – falling off it is no more likely that suddenly falling off a city sidewalk for no reason, but it's hard to forget that, if you do, you'll go cartwheeling down a mountainside. Three or four trail runners passed, all going the other way, which meant a) I was being a baby about the exposure, and b) the descent was probably worse in the direction I was going.
You end up in the hilltops at the north end of SLC, with terrific views of the city, the outlying warehouses and industrial areas, and the shore of the Great Salt Lake. A woman who had hiked up the other way was here taking photographs, and a local man was bellowing into his phone about how his cat kept waking him up last night. Getting down again meant stutter-stepping down a steep gravel trail, counting the steps and not looking up, until it met up with a dirt trail with a split-rail fence running alongside and turned down into the northern suburbs.
The streets I came down into were eerily quiet and eerily perfect. Every lawn perfectly mowed, no activity of any kind. There's a slight sense that you've wandered into some cheesy Twilight Zone scenario and that humanoid robots might come out and seize you at any moment: you built us to create the perfect neighbourhood and you were imperfect. As you move south through the inconveniently indirect and looping streets, things start to liven up a bit. There's an angry dog, a mostly-closed garage with a religious broadcast booming out from within, and a few cars. Twice, the sidewalk just stops and force you to walk on the road for a while. The sidewalks here are as ornamental as the gardens. Nice neighbourhoods have them, so they put them in, but no one uses them. If you're serious about sidewalks, you should make them, you know, continuous.
In the grocery store, there's a beer fridge (stores may sell beverages up to 4% ABV). Above it are signs encouraging you to drink water or soda, instead. What would sci-fi Jesus say? There are also liquor stores, run by the state of Utah. But the state of Utah doesn't actually want you to drink liquor, so it's a weird retail experience. The state accepts that you have the right to buy liquor, and feels that it should probably be the one to sell it to you, so things don't get out of hand. But it's not going to make it fun. Other stores are stylish and colourful. They're designed by experts to attract and please you. The SLC liquor store is deliberately aversive. It is inconveniently located. Its shelves are rickety and awkward. Its signs are home-printed. Its cashiers are nice, but you know they're not supposed to be.
Even so, there are big lines at 5PM on a Tuesday, and some of the city's alcoholics are hovering outside. A couple of cops are on the sidewalk trying to reason with one. He wants to know where else he can buy liquor ("just not here"). There are two more hanging back at the far side of the parking lot. They sway towards people who pass close by, saying things no one can make out.
On the road to the liquor store is a billboard asking you not to give money to panhandlers: part of a heavy ad campaign. They ask you to give your money to charities that work with the homeless, instead, and point you to a web site that argues that begging is a sort of organized crime racket. There's also a Hooter's with the top half of its H unilluminated ("nooter's"). It seems like you'd want to get that fixed as a matter of urgency, unless it's some local experiment to serve a prudish customer base ("our server was so listless and androgynous! I loved it!")
