The next morning, I drove out to the Bonneville Salt Flats with Sarah and a few of her colleagues. Until 14,500 years ago, what is now Wendover was deep underwater in Lake Bonneville, a vast salty lake that covered nineteen thousand square miles, nearly the size of Lake Michigan today. Lake Bonneville has disappeared and re-formed a couple dozen times over the last five hundred million years; what remains of it at the moment is known as the Great Salt Lake, although it’s less than a tenth as great as Lake Bonneville once was. The lake’s most recent retreat left behind the salt flats, a thirty-thousand-acre expanse, utterly empty and far flatter than a pancake.

The snow-white ground was cracked like dried lips and crunched under my feet. I could smell the salt. I kept trying to think of what it looked like, but my brain could only find highly figurative similes. It looks like driving alone at night feels. It looks like everything you’re scared to say out loud. It looks like the moment the water retreats from the shore just before a wave rolls in.

Herman Melville called white “a colorless, all-color.” He wrote that white “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe.” And the Bonneville Salt Flats are very, very white.

Of course, everything on Earth is geological, but at the salt flats you feel the geology. It is not hard to believe that this land was once five hundred feet underwater. You feel like the briny, green-black water might rush back in at any moment, drowning you and your traumas and the town and the hangar where the Enola Gay waited for its atomic bomb.

Looking up toward the looming mountain ranges in the distance, I was reminded of what nature is always telling me: Humans are not the protagonists of this planet’s story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight. But in the age of the Anthropocene, humans tend to believe, despite all available evidence, that the world is here for our benefit. So the Bonneville Salt Flats must have a human use; why else would they exist? Nothing can grow in that dry, salty soil, but we find uses for it anyway. For the last hundred years, the flats have been mined for potash, which is used in fertilizer. And a long stretch of the flats has gained fame as a kind of drag-racing strip. A land-speed record was set there in 1965 when a turbojet car driven by Craig Breedlove traveled over six hundred miles per hour.

Racing season can still attract thousands of people to the flats, but most days the landscape is, above all else, a backdrop—for movies from Independence Day to The Last Jedi, and for fashion photo shoots and Instagram posts. While I was at the flats, I was one of several people trying to angle a selfie to make it look like I was alone in that emptiness.