Bonneville Salt Flats

There was something calming riding on a motorcycle—the roar of wind whipping by your hair, the thunderous rumble of the engine. The noise is deafening, and yet there is a sense of calm that sits in your gut like the empty feeling in your lungs after a sigh of relief.

Once you get to a certain speed, you could compare the wind to the fluidity of water in a way—the rush, the feeling as it splits to pass the forms of your face and shoulders. The main difference I would say is that water clutches to your skin and hair like a clingy ex and it has to be burned away before it leaves. Wind holds no such grudges—one light kiss on the cheek and the breeze is gone.

Out in front of me sits the vast expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats, stretched out in every which direction. It’s a bit jarring for a girl like me—I’m used to vast blue-green rolling waves and frothing foam, the occasional pelican dotting its surface and the fish swimming by your feet if you stay still in the shallows long enough.

There is none of that here—nothing except the white sandy ground beneath rubber tires, nothing except the faint mountain ridges in the distance. I heard that this too was covered with water once, a lake that had long since dried up that left only the salt to cover the cracks of what it used to be. Oceans and Deserts are much similar than most might expect: Both seem vastly empty until you look under their surface—whether it be under rocks or underwater. But there was none of that here, the salt had driven them all away, driven by the anguish of their own abandonment. There is an inherent emptiness to the salt flats that isn't found in other deserts or the ocean. You feel truly alone out here, except for the wind and the roar of the motorcycle.

God, maybe I should get my hearing checked with all the noise though, and maybe my head while I’m at it. I’m starting to sound more like a fancy poet every day that passes. Maybe it’s the quarter-life crisis kicking in.

I arrived at my destination:  A bit closer to the mountains than I was an hour ago, a bit farther from the town from which I left. In the middle of nowhere, anywhere is a destination. So I parked my motorcycle a ways along the side of the road and waited. I watched the orange fiery tendrils flare out against the blue skies, before subsiding to a lulling, ocean green. Purple shadows joined in the dance, mixing together like a messy patchwork. There it sits—the sky as we know it. I’d argue that we know the evening sky better than on a lazy afternoon. After all, when all we hear about is a “bright blue sky” then what is the point of looking up? We wait until the sky paints itself in a rainbow to notice how beautiful it is. Too often do we forget the edges of the world don’t end at skyscrapers—too often do we not look up to see that the ceiling of society we have painted doesn’t exist at all. And so I waited.

Ever since I was a child I always loved the sky—A Wednesday afternoon’s blue was loved just as deeply as a beachy sunset’s red. But there was one sky that I had never seen: A sky filled to the brim with stars. The city life was too filled up with other stuff to give me stars: it had streetlights and car alarms and phone screens. Eventually there was so much everything that I decided that I wanted to experience the raw nature of nothing but stars. So I set myself a goal: one day, when I felt ready, I would drive out to the salt flats, where no life stood, where there was no sound but the wind and no lights except the stars, and I would wait for them to appear.

In a rush, the twilight fireworks show was over, and the colors receded as quickly as they came, and yet what proceeded it was arguably more beautiful. There, in the vastness of nothing but salt and a girl and her motorcycle, arrived the stars—countless of them, like the best parts of creation had been spilled into a pool of ink and left there for everybody to appreciate. The ink, I decided, is what made them stand out. Without space you would not notice the stars, without the silence you would not notice the wind. I decided that the city life lost more than it realized by giving me everything—it took away the nuance of the absence of everything, the appreciation of things that can only be seen when all else cannot.

An emotion hit me like a freight train, a total and utter awe with existence itself—the emotion you really strive for in life, the experience of feeling everything at once. It is one that you miss afterward too, the one that gets replaced with nostalgia since it can never be replicated. The one you get when you look up to find yourself thinking “I’m going to forever miss this moment”. That’s how I felt looking at the night sky at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

I sat there for hours, unable to sleep. I guess it could be considered a shock—I was dumbfounded that this existed, that this could happen. That the world could look this way. I watched as the stars collected themselves and disappeared back into the early silvery morning rays of sunrise until the fiery glow of red and orange greeted me again.

There was a smile on my face, and tears in my eyes. I had done it. I had seen the night sky in its glory. When I rode back along the desert road, back to my hotel room in the town I had left to get just a little farther away from, I’ll have a newfound appreciation for the world to keep stowed away in my memories, just for me to forever enjoy. And when the nostalgia hits me and I remember my ride out to the desert, I can paint a smile on my face once again with the little pocket of knowledge I had earned long ago: The look of a night sky painted with stars.