My name is Nan Seymour. I'm a poet and an activist who's lived in this lake bed for 47 of my 55 years. I want to tell the story of the vigil that we kept this winter and how the vigil came about, and the poem that resulted from keeping vigil from a community who is willing to show up at the actual lake shore and bear witness to this essential heart of our ecosystem.
A turning point for me was listening to the interview that Dr. Bonnie Baxter did with Doug Fabrizio. It was a real eye opener, startling and sobering. I just left that experience obsessed, concerned, and started writing about the lake pretty much every day, and inviting other people to write about the lake. Well, in the fall, I actually had the idea that if we collectively made a poem of praise, that that would be a way that a community could pray for the lake, or acknowledge the lake would be to collectively praise the lake.
So I started working on some praise choruses, where I would invite people in a setting to give me specific details about their experience with the lake. Then I would weave those details together into praise choruses. I was also writing verses and I thought that I would have to write most of the verses because I wanted the poem to be at least 1700 lines long. There's scientific disagreement about this, but probably at a minimum, a fully restored present day lake would occupy 1700 square mile area. The lake bed is 2200 square miles. I thought if the if the poem echoed the vital, the stored size of the lake that there would be some magic in that maybe, but I had no idea what would unfold.
The poem is called "Irreplaceable" — it is one way of understanding the lake. I was working on "Irreplaceable" and writing all the time and I started dreaming about the lake every night. Sometimes it was just dreaming, just the experience of water and there weren't words. Sometimes I wake up with words that made their way into the poem and felt like we were having kind of like these night time conversations.
Sometime in December, the conversation was an invitation. I felt like receiving an invitation in the mail, like not an idea that I was making up myself. But the invitation was to just be with the lake to keep vigil. At first though, the idea was from full moon to full moon. I kind of woke up a little baffled by that and I looked in my calendar and I saw that the Wolf Moon, that first full moon of the year, was the opening of the Utah State Legislative session. Those were essentially the first four weeks of the legislative session. When I saw that there were two other weeks for the legislative session, I thought that six weeks was more than I could pull off by myself. That led me to reach out to community — other people were willing to spend some of the nights because I couldn't spend all 47, although I ended up spending 40 of them for the whole legislative session.
We were there collectively 24-hours a day, seven days a week just in the campground there at Bridger Bay. But I went out every day and walked to the water. But then people started coming and we invited them. So we just invited people to come out and walk to the water with us, watch the sunset in silence with us. Right with us. Through the six weeks more than 400 people came, people came staggering distances sometimes to bring me a burrito. It was very like it's very moving. And that kind of energy flows toward the poem as well. So the miracle of the poem is that over the course of that time, people start bringing complete verses, sometimes they would physically bring them like, it's hard to even talk about the poem because it's so epic. It's really an epic community work.
There's, I think, more than 450 voices in the poem, it has 80 parts, there are more than 2,500 lines. It's probably the longest love letter in the world, and it's all directed to Great Salt Lake. It has its own life force. The poem does. I think that the lake beckoned it and you know, there's praise and lament, there's grief in this poem as well. I think it's really important to say that because I feel like some people will turn away because it's really hard to bear. It's hard to be with a great body, dying of thirst. It's hard. But if we look away, we won't change it.
