Mining salt; mapping Rust
let's take a moment to get oriented
So, salt is not a particular area of scholarship for me. I never considered it at all, in fact, until research in Detroit last month led me to stumble across the existence of the Detroit Salt Mine.
Lifelong residents of Detroit seem surprised to know that there’s a mine 1000 feet under their city; Detroit Salt is not held as an industrial narrative of core importance in a city of more industrial identities, and less contemporary importance, than really seems fair. Information is both scant and presented so matter-of-factly that the invitation is simply to acknowledge that the mine exists and to move on, a response that would be more tempting if every sentence about the project were not so utterly preposterous. Thus, further digging (let us assume, friends, that all puns in Rust shall be not only intended but celebrated) commenced, and within an hour of embarking on this exploration the web had become so tangled that I am still, weeks later, sorting out what to tell you, and what to continue learning about myself.
A sense of how to tell this story is emerging, and it’s bigger than I thought.
I know some of you (perhaps primarily my spouse? ) are eager to get on with the stories, but with only 1200 words each week with which to tell them, it feels project critical to to take a moment for orientation.
Here’s the thing: I am not a chef, and I’m not a geologist; my interest in either of those things is in fact barely-casual. I also don’t hail from or claim a salt-producing part of the nation.* In short, unlike, say, Mark Kurlansky, who has written an entire series of books on topics I didn’t know I cared about, I have fallen into the salt mine not in pursuit of white gold, but because there happens to be a human-caused hole in the ground. Stumbling across those, I suppose, is more within my wheelhouse.
And reckoning with these human-caused holes (I literally dream about those at this point) has led me, probably understandably, to some vocational questions. Such as, Do you really want to spend the rest of your life, or at least the arc of a career, absorbed in the documenting of destruction? And this is easily answered: of course not.
I haven’t, in the first place, chosen to dedicate my career arc to any one question, though a picture is becoming clear, two decades in, of the web of inquiry in which I find myself—what do we build together, what are those constructions in the service of, how do we fail to meet our goals and what alchemy happens in those rare examples when we surprise ourselves and succeed, when and how do we abandon our efforts, what are the costs and legacies we leave behind, and what is worth aiming for in, as Thurman put it, the moments of our high resolve?
And I have little interest in, and indeed probably the same reflexive horror as you do regarding, a survey of destruction for its own sake. What does engage me is the truth of healing, which I am increasingly convinced includes the work of reckoning as its prerequisite.
(This is the Kennecott Copper Mine, an open pit mine on the west side of Salt Lake City. You can see this from space, y’all, and if you want to be up nights, spend a few hours reading about its parent mining concern, Rio Tinto.**)
It is in the service of this project—the unavoidably theological one—that we find ourselves in a salt mine. The depths of the earth has turned out to be a surprisingly good vantage point for exploring the above questions, and indeed for putting a finer point on them:
What is invisibilized—what is it not only hard to observe, but important that we not observe- about the pieces of modern life?
What resources and materials is modern life made out of?
Whose stories are our own modernist story written on top of?
Is understanding the industrialist legacy a modernist project, or a postmodern one, and does that matter?
Because this is to be a shared conversational exploration, I don’t want to sound too much like an academic- and this is a tough line to find and hold. Using ‘imaginary’ as a noun leans too far to the one side. (There’s an academic drinking game with serious possibility right there, however.) Communicating only by Facebook post felt too far in the other- I intend something more substantial than that.
And so, here’s where I think we are going.
City Museum is a touchpoint for the adventures of my adulthood, and for a vital spirit of adaptive reuse among the ruins, and its unofficial motto has long been “No Maps!”
This, then, is a making-visible of a landscape, vs. defining its boundaries or even its contours, and I make no promises amid these predictions. We truly are exploring together, and if we end up in the middle of the ocean for a time, it was only to be expected.
Things that seem likely to matter:
In the service of what: what was industrialism about?
Follow the money: who bankrolled industry, officially?
Externalize costs; outsource risk: how the public pays for industry
A million machines under the ground: a recent history of extraction
A corporation to rule them all: what’s a conglomerate, and why does it matter?
Morton Thiokol and American tragedy: how salt shaped the Challenger disaster
Distribution is the game: railroads, canals, and intermodal shipping
Subsidence: a scientific word for ‘oops’
We could have done this differently: Maras, the Mohawks, and Native America Calling
A company town: Retsof, Foster, and foxes in the henhouse
What is left behind: Caribbean colonialism and the salt industry
Cleaning it up: Superfund, supercession, and thou-shalt-nots
So those are core pieces of what I think we are doing here.
As to how, I shared last week that I am wrestling with the (apparently intentional) structural difficulty of citing sources in Substack. A commitment to fidelity in research combines here with my hope for you to launch some inquiries of your own; in considering both, I observe that Substack’s strengths lie with in-document web links. So, let’s try that. This will be a most unconventional system of citation, but new forms can link us with old knowledge; we’ll see how it works. Thus, you can expect a fair number of links in the coming weeks, and they will range from pop culture synopses like Atlas Obscura and its derivatives to news sources to, occasionally and when publicly available and generally comprehensible, academic journal articles.
Should we start at the beginning? Jump in in the middle and then work outward through the ensuing web of connections? Open to your thoughts—and I’d also love to hear what you know about salt. Comments, as always, are open.
See you next week,
j
**While I am taking a moment to outline a citation framework, I’ll share also that images featured in Rust and Reimagining are from Unsplash, which is a free and peer-supported resource for art photography (mostly), Wikipedia (a few), are my own, or are used with specific permission from their owner (this will be noted).