Roads I’ve Traveled: The Spiral Jetty and the Beauty That Survives a Hostile Land

Roads I’ve Traveled: The Spiral Jetty and the Beauty That Survives a Hostile Land

by a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads – Art & Other Odd Adventures

 Dear Henry,

There are roads I’ve travelled that are meant to be one-way.

The road to Northern Utah is one of them.

Everything terrible that ever happened to me seemed to root itself somewhere between the Wasatch Front and the salt flats. The air there is thin and sharp, the light almost cruel. It’s a place that feels like it’s still waiting for forgiveness. For a long time, I wanted nothing more than to leave it behind; to drive until the dust of that part of the country stopped clinging to me.

And yet, for all its hostility, Utah left me a strand of beauty. My marriage and my sons were born in that same landscape, shaped by that same sun. I’ve spent years trying to reconcile how such goodness could have come from a place that hurt so much.

"Memory is the salt of life."

- Honore de Balzac

North of the Great Salt Lake, near Rozel Point, there’s another strand of beauty, one made of black rock and white salt, coiling into the rose-colored water. It's called The Spiral Jetty. Robert Smithson built it in 1970. It's a man-made spiral reaching out into a dying sea. It disappears when the water rises, then returns again, ghostlike, when the lake recedes.

I’ve always been drawn to that artwork, the way the Jetty hovers between being seen and being lost, like memory itself. Smithson said he built it to explore entropy, the slow unraveling of all things. Maybe he didn’t mean for it to become a mirror for grief, but it has become so for me.

My own life feels mapped along that same salt-crusted shoreline. When I look back on Northern Utah, I see it in waves; moments of bitterness that flood and moments of grace that glimmer just before sinking again. Some days, I can only taste the salt of what was done and what was lost. Other days, the sun catches on the water, and I remember that beauty never left entirely; it just hid beneath the surface.

"Time is a spiral, not a line."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Spiral Jetty sits in a hostile place, no shade, no softness, just rock and wind and a lake too salty for much of anything. But standing there, I imagine, the silence feels almost holy. You could trace that curve of stone and feel time folding in on itself. It’s art that surrenders to weather and still endures.

Maybe that’s what draws me back. I want to see it once more, not to forgive Utah or the ghosts that live there, but to stand in the presence of something that survived the same landscape I did. To look at that spiral and think: this, too, was built from what the world discarded, what has been forgotten, and somehow, it’s still here.

There’s a strange mercy in that.

"Some roads we only travel once, but they travel with us forever."

- a.d. elliott

Every road I’ve traveled has changed me, even the ones I swore I’d never travel again. Maybe that’s the quiet lesson of the Jetty. The past doesn’t disappear; it only shifts with the seasons. Beauty and pain share the same coordinates, and sometimes the only way to see one is to accept the other.

So yes, Henry, I’ll go back. I’ll drive that long, lonely road to the lake’s edge, watch the light fade over the salt, and walk the spiral one slow step at a time. I won’t stay, but I’ll see it; the thin strand of beauty that still winds through the salt and the years and me.

xoxo a.d. elliott

PS:  There's a YouTube video for this post as well!  Check it out here:https://youtu.be/uXF0ihlWebM

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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller based in Tontitown, Arkansas.

She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.

You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.

✨ #TakeTheBackRoads

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