Salt

I've been on a road trip with a good friend of mine. We took my stepfather's van from Colorado to California and tonight I'm falling asleep in the top bunk of this VW Eurovan. We're in wine country, parked by the dumpsters of the Fremont Diner. It's cold outside and stuffy inside but we're too afraid to keep the vents open. My feet are stuffed inside the short end of the pop-up tent. We drove from Denver, up into Wyoming, through Utah to downtown Salt Lake City, where we ate breakfast from mason jars on the edge of the lake: the dry salty lake that extends all the way to the road. We walked ten minutes over salty wet sand, skipping over hundreds of dead birds. The water was filled with brine shrimp, tiny little shrimp, the only thing capable of living there. Then we drove through the salt flats, stopped the van and jumped out onto the vast fields of thick crystalized salt. We ran in circles on the salt beds, tried to carve lines through it. The sky was a perfect blue with white fluffy clouds, like a painting in a child's room.