10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #2 Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s superb “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011). 

In this great piece, Dyer tells about his visit to two remote land-art sites – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” near Quemado, New Mexico, and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah. He structures his piece in two parts with an “Intermission” in between, consisting of four brief notes. 

The first part, titled “New Mexico,” describes Dyer’s “Lightning Field” experience. He’s at the site with his wife Rebecca, plus four others – Steve, Anne, Ethan, and Cristina. Here’s the first paragraph:

We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere. The windmill must have been turning, because the wind was sprinting across the plateau. The sky was not just clear or blue. It was as if we’d ended up in a future where there was no atmosphere, no sky—nothing to insulate earth from cosmos. Scrub extended into the distance and in the distance were mountains, but even the things that were near were far off. The land was camouflage-colored, the dust reddish brown. Near the cabin but still quite distant, almost invisible, were sticks stuck randomly in the ground—some in the far distance as opposed to the near distance, but none in the very far distance, where we could not have seen them even if they had been there.

I find that an appealingly weird beginning – almost as if Dyer is pretending to be an alien from outer space, trying to make sense of this strange place where he’s landed. He’s divested himself of all preconceptions, all prior knowledge. “We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere.” Seemed – key word. What are those sticks stuck in the ground? Dyer’s next paragraph brings us closer:

The air was thin, cold; the sun was hot on our faces. When the wind subsided, as it did every few minutes, it was still and quiet. As we walked toward the sticks, it became clear that there were more of them than we’d realized, though it was difficult to say how many, because many were hard to see and some were not seeable at all, and it is probably only in retrospect, once we understood that their being invisible was part of their function, that we knew they were there. The sticks, it became evident, once we got close to them, were not sticks but poles: polished steel, shining in the sun, three times my height, and as sharply pointed as javelins. They were two inches in diameter and cold to the touch. If they had been wooden sticks, they could have been stuck there thousands of years ago, but because they were stainless steel they were obviously of more recent provenance. Hundreds of years from now they would still gleam like the promise of a future.

What are these poles? What’s their purpose? Do they have meaning? Where are we? Dyer still hasn’t named the place. He and his companions convene at the cabin:

I was the last man in and could see the other members of our expedition sitting on the wooden porch in wooden rockers and on wooden benches, getting drunk on champagne, watching me walk toward them. It was the kind of hut you see people inhabiting in photographs from the nineteen-thirties by Walker Evans. What had seemed noble but squalid then seemed idyllic now, a boutique hotel, practically, especially with the champagne and laughter.

There’s that word “seemed” again. I love the infusion of champagne and laughter into the narrative. It comes as a relief. These guys are human! The reference to Walker Evans made me smile. Dyer is a fan of his work (see his brilliant The Ongoing Moment), and so am I. 

In the evening, Dyer continues to observe the poles. He writes,

As the sun began to drop toward the horizon, the poles sprouted shadows and the tips sparkled as if stars were perched on them. There were so many competing perspectives that they complicated each other and cancelled each other out. The poles were still slender, but they’d acquired bulk, solidity. There were far more of them than we had thought, and it became obvious that they were not scattered randomly but had been planted in rows. If you positioned yourself next to one and looked past it, you could see a dozen more, glowing, like a fence that let everything through—everything being the sunlight and the wind. The sun was sinking fast and everything began to change. The silver poles glowed goldly. There was a clear demarcation now between the area where there were poles and the area where there were none, even though the poles were arranged so sparsely as to have made the distinction imperceptible at first.

For the first time, Dyer mentions religion: “There was a sense—all the more palpable in such a remote and empty place—of something gathering. Absence had given way to presence. We were in the midst of what may once have been considered a variety of religious experience.”

The next two paragraphs are among my favorites of the piece:

The sky blackened after only a few minutes and we retreated indoors. We ate quesadillas and drank dark wine and looked at the flames of the pellet-burning stove as if it were a television. The vastness outside made the interior of the cabin seem the coziest place on earth, like an igloo.

Later, we went outside again, into the huge night. The poles were gone, but we knew they were there. The sky was nothing but a dome of stars. We were no strangers to the firmament, but none of us had seen anything like this. The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight.

That “The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away” is inspired. The last line – “The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight” – is among the most beautiful that Dyer has ever written.

Next morning, at sunrise, “the tips of the poles began to twinkle.” And then, as the sun emerged into view, “the poles stood stark and golden, even more sharply defined than they had been the evening before.” Dyer considers their meaning:

Places like Stonehenge had been designed with the solstice in mind, may even have been celestial calendars, attempting to synch man’s experience on earth with the heavens. None of that was relevant here. The placement of poles referred to nothing other than itself. Thousands of years of study would confirm that there was no intended relation between the poles and the equinox, the transit of Venus, or lunar eclipses. What was here was entirely man-made and appealed only to man.

I relish that last line. Dyer is grappling with the meaning of the place. At this point, he drops the “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” approach and names the place he’s experiencing:

We were—as many of you will have guessed by now—near Quemado, New Mexico, at “The Lightning Field,” by Walter De Maria (completed in 1977). The answer prompts another question—why the subterfuge of inconceivable ignorance?—which can best be answered with further questions. Most visitors who come to see De Maria’s masterpiece these days know roughly what they are in for. But what if we came to “The Lightning Field” and had to try to work it out for ourselves, with no art-historical backup? Asked about the consequences of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai is said to have replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” That’s the response that comes to mind when pondering the significance of the great land-art projects of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies.

The key word here, for me, at least, is “response.” Dyer is trying to get at how he responds to “The Lightening Field.” He’s working through his responses:

There’s a lot of space, but, even as a figure of speech, there’s no room for God. “The Lightning Field” offers an intensity of experience that for a long time could be articulated only—or most conveniently—within the language of religion. Nothing about “The Lightning Field” prompts one to genuflect. Rigorously atheistic, geometrically neutral, it takes the faith and the vaulting promise of modernism into the wilderness. Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate these responses.

Near the end of the “New Mexico” segment, Dyer describes how he and his companions accessed the “Lightning Field” site:

You leave your cars at Quemado and are taken up, in a van, at two-thirty in the afternoon. The drive takes half an hour, so you arrive at the least impressive time of the day. As we approached, a groan of disappointment swept through our party: we didn’t know exactly what we were expecting, but we expected more. And then you get it, but gradually, in an experience of space that unfolds over time. A narrative is at work.

“An experience of space that unfolds over time” is an excellent description of Dyer’s response to “The Lightning Field.” His writing enacts it. 

The next section of “Poles Apart” is called “Intermission.” It consists of four brief notes on landscape. In Note 1, Dyer remembers an area in a recreation park called the Hump, where he played when he was a kid. He says, “It was the first place in my personal landscape that had special significance.”

In Note 2, he considers how certain places in the landscape “develop a special quality.” He offers the example of a piece of land that becomes a fertility site, how it eventually falls into disuse and ruin, and how, even as a ruin, it retains “what D. H. Lawrence called ‘nodality.’ ” This idea of nodality appears again in the piece’s third section on the “Spiral Jetty.” 

In Note 3, Dyer remembers a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he saw a painting by Elihu Vedder called “The Questioner of the Sphinx” (1863), showing “a dark-skinned traveller crouched by the head of a sphinx that emerges from the sand in which it has been submerged for centuries.” Dyer describes it as “an early depiction of the post-apocalyptic world: one could easily imagine that it’s not the head of the sphinx poking above the sand but the torch of the Statue of Liberty, “Planet of the Apes” style.” He says, “We study the painting closely: a depiction of the effort to work out what certain marks on the landscape mean; what they are trying to tell us; what we go to them for.” 

Note 4 tells about D. H. Lawrence’s experience of New Mexico – “ ‘the greatest experience from the outside world’ that he had ever had.” Note 4 functions as a segue to Part 2 of “Poles Apart” – “Utah.” Dyer writes,

In the American West you can travel hundreds of miles and calculate your arrival time almost to the minute. We turned up for our rendezvous in Quemado at two o’clock on the dot. From Quemado, we drove four hundred and sixty miles to Zion, Utah, and got there exactly in time for our dinner reservation at eight-thirty. Our itinerary was as precise as De Maria’s measuring.

From Zion, we were going to drive north to the “Spiral Jetty.”

Part 2 differs conceptually from Part 1. In Part 1, Dyer’s focus is on the experience of “The Lightning Field.” The journey to the site is secondary and is covered in a few lines near the end of the piece. In contrast, Part 2 is a road trip that ends at “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We drove north—Rebecca and I—toward Salt Lake City. No need for a compass. Everything screamed north: the gray-and-white mountains looming Canadianly in the distance, the weather deteriorating by the hour. Opting for directness instead of scenery, we barrelled up the featureless expanse of I-15. Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder. Then Salt Lake City, doing its level best to come and meet us before we got anywhere near it—and reluctant to say goodbye even when we were well beyond. 

That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired! I read it fifteen years ago when the piece appeared in The New Yorker. It’s stayed with me ever since. Every time I see a piece of tire on the road, I think of Dyer’s vivid phrase – “snakeskin shreds of tire.” 

They spend the night in Ogden, Utah. Dyer rereads Lawrence’s essay on Taos, New Mexico. He quotes a passage which begins “Taos pueblo still retains its old nodality.” Dyer comments, “Like Vedder’s painting, this bit of writing—analytical, hypnotic, profound—tells us much about the power that some places exert. In their different ways, both De Maria and Smithson were attempting to create nodality.”

The next day, Dyer and Rebecca continue their pilgrimage to “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We had been given enigmatically precise directions on how to find the “Spiral Jetty”—“Another .5 miles should bring you to a fence but no cattle guard and no gate”—only to find that the route was discreetly signposted. The gravel road was corrugated, washboarded. We jolted and rattled at fifteen miles an hour, past calves the size of big dogs, and cows the size of cows, all of them black and resigned-looking. The sky slumped over a landscape that gave constant reminders of Britain, that Dartmoor feeling of worn-down ancientness. Seagulls, too. Wordsworth might have had this place in mind when he coined the phrase “visionary dreariness.” Suddenly, there was a single brown cow and, to the south, in a gap between low, dull hills, a pale glow. Light bouncing off the salt flats? That was where we were headed.

We drove more and more slowly as the potholes and trenches increased in width, depth, and frequency. The road continued to deteriorate until it finally gave up any claims to being a road. We left the cocoon of the car and began walking. There’d been no signs for a while, but there were, allegedly, three things to look out for as markers: an abandoned trailer, an old Dodge truck, and—interestingly—an amphibious landing craft. No sign of any of them. But that glow we’d noticed earlier? It wasn’t just the reflection on the lake; the sky itself was brightening. To our left, the lake looked congealed, like a dead ocean on a used-up planet. There was a faint smell of sulfur. It was the kind of location that might have been scouted for the closing scenes of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” where the shining sea turns out to be just a further extent of desolation. Protruding from the lake’s edge were the remains of some kind of enterprise, long since aborted. Was that the “Spiral Jetty”? If it was, then it was in far worse shape than we’d anticipated, not exactly a spiral and barely a jetty at all. I remembered that there had recently been a certain amount of debate on this score: whether to try to preserve the jetty, to raise it up and stop it from disappearing again, or just to leave it to its own devices, to gracefully decay and commend itself to the shallow-looking deep. But, no, it couldn’t be that far gone. We kept walking in that state of foiled uncertainty: had we already had the experience we were eagerly anticipating?

No. Because there it was, a ring of black rocks—not white, and far smaller than expected, but exuding unmistakable “Spiral Jetty”-ness.

I’m tempted to keep quoting. I think I will. This is an eminently quotable piece:

We walked toward the circles of stone and could see that these circles were actually part of an unbroken spiral. We were no longer coming to the “Spiral Jetty.” We were at the “Spiral Jetty,” waiting for the uplift, the feeling of arrival—not just in the getting-there sense but in the way Lawrence experienced it at Taos Pueblo. And it sort of happened. The weather had been quietly improving. The sky, in places, had turned from lead to zinc. Patches of blue appeared. And now, for the first time that day, the sun came out. There were shadows, light, a slow release of color.

We clambered down to the jetty—there was no path—through a slope of black rocks, where someone had fly-tipped an exhausted mattress. The jetty extended in a long straight spur before bending inward. The water was plaster-colored, slightly pink, changing color as it was enfolded by the spiral, at its whitest in the middle of the coil.

Dyer’s response to “Spiral Jetty” is fascinating. He says,

Compared with Angkor and the Pyramids, the jetty has aged at the rate of housing projects put up in a hurry. It had existed for only forty years and already it looked ancient. Which, actually, is the best thing about it. It’s fast-tracked to become a contemporary incarnation of Vedder’s sphinx. “The Lightning Field” looks perpetually sci-fi; in next to no time the “Spiral Jetty” had acquired the bleak gravity, the elemental aura, of prehistory. 

He invokes Lawrence’s notion of nodality:

The sky continued to open up. With the sound of birds and lapping water, it was lovely now—in a subdued, melancholy sort of way. It felt desolate, but this was not a place of abandoned meaning. It had retained—or generated—its own dismal nodality.

“Poles Apart” shows Dyer extracting meaning from two great works of land art – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty.” It’s one of his best essays. 

Postscript: “Poles Apart” is included in Dyer’s excellent 2016 collection White Sands. Part 1 “New Mexico” is titled “Space in Time”; Part 2 “Utah” is titled “Time in Space.”