Time and a place: Utah's Spiral Jetty

Spiral Jetty — artist Robert Smithson's wonderful leap of imagination — coiled its way into my consciousness quite by accident long ago. I think I caught a broadcast of his film about the 1970 project on public television. But maybe I saw it during a presentation of arty flicks at the University of Utah. I can't be sure anymore.

The result was a vague consciousness that the Jetty was out there.

Somewhere.

In Utah.

Beneath the briny waters of the Great Salt Lake.

At one with "mud, salt crystals, rocks, water," as the artist reiterated some 20 times on the film's narrative track.

And I had to see it.

So began a haphazard search, one that I've found puts me in good company, for tracking down the remote, usually drowned Jetty has been a small adventure — and a literary/artistic subgenre — for 30-plus years.

Smithson's own film had something of "the quest" about it, featuring as it does such an otherworldly locale, and sprinkled as it is with intriguing maps and a pickup truck rattling down dusty desert byways.

British artist Tacita Dean chronicled her search on an audiotape. Its title: "Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty." (She didn't, I understand, but came close.)

John Dickie wrote about smirking "Mormon cowboys" encountered during a 2002 pilgrimage with friends to the Jetty. His travel piece, "Something in the water," was published in the British paper The Independent.

In fact, the ephemeral Spiral Jetty has long been shrouded not only by a blanket of water but by a sense of mystery.

Now both are evaporating. For perhaps more than ever before, the Jetty is generating a pretty good buzz, in Utah and around the world. And that buzz is putting it on the map. Literally. (It was already on the art-world map, figuratively speaking.)

Because of the West's long drought, the pale tips of the long-submerged Spiral Jetty's topmost boulders started poking up near the declining Great Salt Lake's northern shore last year. It slipped beneath the waves again over the winter and spring, but has risen even more forcefully this summer.

Now the Jetty is in crystalline metamorphosis, thoroughly coated with sparkling white salt, floating in a strange wine-red, mostly dead sea, like a reborn outpost "on the edge of Atlantis," a Smithsonian phrase.