Dragon of Drought by Leif Ravnsen

There comes the dark dragon flying,

the shining serpent, up from Dark-of-moon hills;
Nidhogg flies over the plain,
in his wings he carries corpses.1

“One seizes the spiral, and the spiral becomes a seizure.” wrote the Spiral Jetty’s creator

Robert Smithson. That Spiral Jetty twists off the shore of Great Salt Lake into the dry lake bed,

exposed to the wearing winds and temperatures of the desert, in a drought apocalypse. The

seizure vision Smithson experienced as he looked out on the red water unmoored his perspective,

he saw in his mind the rhyming correlations of blood and creation in the recurrence of time. 2 My

own rapturous seizure grasping the spiral reveals more immediate concerns, and the spiral

becomes a dragon’s tail in my hands and I cannot help but follow the spiraling line to the great

beast’s indomitable waking form.

The Atomic Age brought with it terrors we had scarcely understood before in our species’

natural ignorance, and in our new understanding attained the ability to destroy ourselves utterly.

Popular culture jumped at the opportunity to personify these new threats in the forms of giant

animals and insects, avatars of nature’s wrath, and it is little wonder that the atomic testing of the

Pacific and the bombing of Japan would give rise to an atomically powered dragon. Wheresoever

man did mettle a new monster of our own creation sprang forth to bring about our destruction

and instruct us on our hubris.

Interdisciplinary experts recently published a report on Brigham Young University’s

website detailing the reckoning invoked by our mismanagement of the watershed feeding Great

1 Carolyne Larrington, trans, The Poetic Edda, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 13.
2 Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty: The Essay” in The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Exploring Robert
Smithson's Earthwork Through Time and Place, ed. Hikmet Sidney Loe (Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 2017), 15-20.
Salt Lake. Drought and consumption has uncovered a substantial portion of the lakebed,

worsening air quality, stirring up toxic waste into that air, and decreasing the efficacy of our

strained water ecology, setting us into a negative feedback loop that will only right itself with our

intervention.3 The catastrophe is half awake, but we may yet lull it back to sleep if we can cover

our misdeeds under a protective blanket of our vital water turned sacrificial brine. The desert

climate and salt waters of Great Salt Lake have always required sacrifice to survive. This is not a

soft land, as much as our technological achievement comforts us into believing otherwise until

the wolf is crossing the threshold.

Local painter Alfred Lambourne had his own visionary seizure about monsters while

homesteading Gunnison Island in winter:

Sometimes, indeed, a feeling of awe is upon me. Often, as in the Norse Mythology, the
sun comes up, all faint and wan, sick nigh unto death it seems, and languidly looks o’er
the world of white. What thoughts are mine! In the dim, uncertain, and mysterious
twilight, when all surrounding objects expand to the sight, I half expect to see, looking
upon me from out the western desert, some angry deity of the Indian’s forgotten
pantheon; or, as my thoughts revert again to the olden world, to see, springing from that
Nifelheim in the north, the gaunt, gray form of the Fenris Wolf, and to behold his fiery
eyes as he passes onward to his terrible feast, when the Asas, Odin and Thor, and the
lesser ones, too, shall become his prey in Ragnarok, the last, weird twilight of the
Northern gods.4

The wolf is often synonymous with the perilous aspects of nature; exposure claws and bites at

our warmth, draws us out thin, and pulls us down to the dirt. If we were absent from the

watershed and drought still brought the lake so desperately low, the bird habitats would still

come to ruin, the brine shrimp perish, the churning air filled with dust. Nature as wolf only

hungers, it consumes men and gods alike.

3 Benjamin W. Abbott, et al., “Emergency Measures Needed to Rescue Great Salt Lake from
Ongoing Collapse,” BYU, accessed November 30, 2023, https://pws.byu.edu/great-salt-lake.
4 Alfred Lambourne, Our Inland Sea: The Story of a Homestead (Salt Lake City, The Deseret
News, 1909), 24-25.
 In Norse Myth there is a far more dire figure associated with Ragnarok, which feasts

upon the very roots of the cosmos and the bodies of traitors: the dragon Nidhogg. Its corpse

covered flight heralds the end of the gods, just as the full drying of the lake would signal ours.5

Another name for this creature is entropy, the inexorable decay that erodes the world. Some day,

the lake may have dried up on its own, but our thirst has accelerated and compounded the

problem. “Great Salt Lake is facing unprecedented danger,” heralds the BYU report, because we

have embraced entropy’s dogma of consumption.6

Among the roots of the world tree, Nidhogg is not alone in his feast, “more serpents lie

under the ash Yggdrasil than any fool can imagine.”7 The roots of Great Salt Lake are the

waterways that feed it, and we are the serpents that gather and feed upon them. We have mantled

the dragon too long and brought about its coming through like action. Who should rule a land of

serpents but the greatest of serpents? There are exceptions, there is a turning away from blind

hunger and toward caretaking.

Shannon Musset, in her explorations of entropy and its meanings, highlights the Ancient

Greek idea of entropia: “(1) a turning toward, (2) respect or reverence, and (3) shame or

reproach.”8 The concept urges us to turn our attention to the things that should have our serious

consideration. In Norse myth there are figures that act in this way, turning their attention to the

needs of the land: the Norns, who “shape men’s lives,” water the world tree to ward off rot and

decay.9 Just as we must water the lake, for only water will quench the dragon’s thirst. Let us be

like these nurturing mothers of fate and care for that thing upon which our “world” is built.

5 Larrington, The Poetic Edda, 9, 13, 57.

6 Abbott, “Emergency Measures,” BYU.
7 Larrington, The Poetic Edda, 56.
8 Shannon M. Mussett, Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation (Lanham,
Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), 6-9.
9 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, translated by Anthony Faulkes (London, Everyman, 1995), 18-19.
 Bibliography

Lambourne, Alfred. Our Inland Sea: The Story of a Homestead. Salt Lake City: The Deseret
News, 1909.

Larrington, Carolyne, translator. The Poetic Edda. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Mussett, Shannon M. Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation. Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2022.

Smithson, Robert. “The Spiral Jetty: The Essay (1972).” In The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Exploring
Robert Smithson's Earthwork Through Time and Place, 13-21. Edited by Hikmet Sidney
Loe. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017.

Sturluson, Snorri. Edda. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. London: Everyman, 1995.

Abbott, Benjamin W., Bonnie K. Baxter, Karoline Busche, Lynn de Freitas, Rebecca Frei,
Teresa Gomez, Mary Anne Karren, Rachel L. Buck, Joseph Price, Sara Frutos, et al.
“Emergency Measures Needed to Rescue Great Salt Lake from Ongoing Collapse,” BYU.
Accessed November 30, 2023. https://pws.byu.edu/great-salt-lake.