Center for Land Use Interpretation, or how I learned to love the land

Woke up.
Discovered a mountain white and blinding out the window. Surprise!
Mountain!
(It looked bigger in person.)

One thing I like about the morning is that you realize mountains and also you realize all the stupid things you did the day before. I think I sent an email to everyone on this summer trip to East Africa listserv about how King has me thinking about racism as the opposite of experimentation. He's responding to the "separate but equal" slogan that clothed the inequality of racial segregation. The guy who reads it has such delight quoting King's "There is no such thing as separate but equal." Which, I think, King follows through to question the concept of "separate" (and especially its associations with race in America). He is clearly not naive in recognizing differences of lived experience, but I think he had deep questions for institutionalizing practices that divided people growing out of separate water fountains, separate schools, out of the time at the airport where he was asked to sit alone in his own section because everyone else on the plane was white and it made him sad. Against that, he's proposing a well-organized and awkward anarchy. A kind of figuring out, from the historically shaped truth of where you are in the moment, how to be present to others and how to work collectively toward a greater good. Something beautiful about the size of that work... you could spend your life on that.

Anyway, I'm so glad I can be the inarticulate white girl sharing theories on racism via email to a listserv. King talks about meeting Kennedy running for president and he remarks that Kennedy was intellectually invested in civil rights, but not yet emotionally invested. I think it's useful to be curious. But it's not the only way to engage the world. What is the system of power that helps me to feel comfortable to impulsively share my unformed and not felt through ideas? Anyway, am of no use.

I am trying to change the subject in my mind so I put on a CD in the car that Jubilith gave me by Ada Mendoza. She's an experimental guitarist who, in this record, uses popular songs as places to hang out in, take wrong turns, stop at historic markers, admire vistas. An inspiration for travelers at how to move playfully.

I am driving to Wendover, Utah. A small town across the border and a timezone from Wendover, Nevada and the home of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. It's an old school operation " Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived." They have a center in Wendover for artist residencies and it happens to be that two artists are beginning residency this afternoon and founder Matt Coolidge has graciously invited me to accompany the tour.

My afternoon at CLUI could be a novel. Am taken up by the place and by Matt Coolidge's pervasive personableness and his patience for complicated connectedness.

According to Matt, tumbleweed is actually Russian.

CLUI's main residences are located next to a big hanger where they held the planes that test dropped replicas of the atomic bombs before dropping the real bombs. Apparently, this is something that happens here. There is a fake German town designed by Eric Mendelsohn, apparently a famous architect! no relation - somewhere in Utah, built for practice bombing Germany in WW2.

Wendover, Nevada has a casino and an airport where the casinos fly people in - from Salt Lake City - and buses them to the airport. As if nowhere. Nowhere run by workers from Mexico.

The airport has so many flights for the casinos that they got a whole lot of money from the government and they built a museum. In the museum is the most accurate model of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki made over the course of 10 years in the spare time of a truckdriver. And he took it to a convention and had the original pilots sign it. And something interesting here is that it's a document of camaraderie - a moment where these men celebrated their doing a thing together, and having it acknowledged in this personal way by the truck driver. It feels like a weird moment to walk into, given the sad thing, given the towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the people who lived in them. I also feel the people in the museum/airport office are so friendly. I hope they like me/us and give us the key to go exploring on their land.

CLUI has a residence inside military land. This one is hardcore with a compost toilet and a special bike to ride to pick up water. This is where my friends Jen Hofer and Rob Ray stayed and made some art. Once there was a residency that coincided with an army practice - for a thing, that I don't remember and so am ruining the story - and the military gave them clearance to hold an artist residency in the space anyway, saying I understand you have a job. And we have a job. Just don't go any higher than 10 feet off the ground cause you'll get fried by radio waves.

The land is beautiful. Salt hard and blank. And used for target practice.

I am skipping the part about the real fake plane from ConAir, the Russian housing units full of abandoned artifacts for the men who came over to inspect nuclear disarmament, the bunkers, the strip joint that served alcohol next to the strip joint that had full nudity and the window between them, even the salt flats themselves, the miles of white nothing that don't look like distance and a rose petal lying by itself on the salt.

It's getting late, but Matt pulls up into a pot ash processing plant. The plant pumps water full of pot ash out of the salt flats and brings it here. We drive where we're not supposed to, down a small road, up a small dirt hill that levels out onto - not what I expected. Thin blue aqua as far as the eye can see, cut by a dirt road. Inside aqua, the growing grey of the clouds. I never imagined industry as ... beautiful.

It reminds me, at the start of the day, we pass a truck full of copper ore - bound to China, Matt tells us. He knows the route it takes too and the amount of round trips this particular truck makes every day from the mine to the train, was it? Sara, a documentary photographer who likes to take pictures of paintball parks, comments about the ravaging of the world. Of standing inside the hole of a copper mine. The shocking ugliness of hole. Sure, Matt says, but you like wiring, right? You like electricity? The shock of that hole, yes, but think of how much copper comes out and what it can do. And perhaps the shock itself is a gift. An aesthetic experience true to the world in which we live.

When we arrive back at the base. It is already 5pm. Maybe 6. I get confused because of the time switch. I am meant to be in Denver, 10 hours away, tomorrow morning, and I'm excited to do something hard and to be here. I'm excited to be nowhere.