Jesus, Make it Rain

living and dying in a state of drought 🖤 (this time with images!)

NOTE: the original email did not send any of my images due to a Substack error, (which we are currently trying to sort out) but here is the corrected post! With the actual comic!

Dear Jesus, please make it rain.

I’ve been feeling a bit bummed out lately. This comic felt like a nice way to fantasize about rain—both metaphoric and literal.

Lord knows we need it.

I live in a drought state. Our house is around an hour’s drive from the Great Salt Lake, which (according to a coalition of local scientists) might disappear within the next five years. Although we’ve already had 160% precipitation this year due to an unusual rain and snowfall season, we’re still on track to lose the lake.

Hundreds of species rely on the Great Salt Lake for food and shelter—birds, brine shrimp, flies, and a fascinating little life form called microbialites—rare bacterial structures that are considered one of the oldest life forms on earth. These ‘living rocks’ provide food for brine shrimp and flies who in turn feed tens of millions of shore and migratory birds.

One third of the Great Salt Lake’s microbialite structures are already dried out and dead.

microbialites! so cool! image from saveourgreatsaltlake.org

I haven’t even mentioned the arsenic-laced dust that’s already been released into the air as a result of the freshly-exposed lakebed. So far, toxic dust from the Great Salt Lake has been found all along the Wasatch front—from Southern Utah all the way up to Wyoming.

It was my ancestors who colonized this place. They came here to build Zion. Some faced violent persecution in their own communities and fled here, hoping they’d be safe among their own kind. Others were lured in by the false promise of immediate and immeasurable wealth—the type of prosperity and peace they’d read about in the Book of Mormon.

They were willing to build up the kingdom of god by blood, sweat and salt.

In the city where I live, over a hundred indigenous people were killed in the violence that escalated after a few white settlers murdered an indigenous man because he wouldn’t give them his shirt. The Timpanogots (the local band of Utes) offered some light retaliation by stealing corn and shooting at cattle. But tensions escalated and eventually the leaders in Salt Lake ordered a complete ethnic cleansing of the area.

After a few brutal and bloody years, they were successful.

Once the indigenous people were gone, my people polluted and overfished the lake until it became nearly unusable. Raw sewage was being dumped into the waters as late as 1967. A handful of fish and other wildlife have already gone extinct, and our portion of the lake is often unusable due to toxic algae bloom.

I’m not sure what to do with information like this—it sits on my chest like a slug of cement. I find myself googling endlessly—“best cities to weather climate change” and “urban rain barrel irrigation” and “native water-wise plants”—any random piece of knowledge that feels like a gesture towards something more sustainable.

I also don’t know how to make room for all this grief—of all the death that was put in place long before I was born. I’m watching these long-seeded deaths unfold and it feels too big to hold.

There are plenty of folks who are working hard save the Great Salt Lake—but it’s complicated and deeply embedded with the fraught history of this state. And even without the changes that need to happen, the air is already toxic, the water is already polluted, and the earth itself is already laden with poisonous dust.

The promise of Zion is gone.

When I was a child, we visited my grandparents in Utah once a year or more. It was usually summertime—a ten-hour drive from Los Angeles, and then a fourteen-hour drive from Seattle once we moved. One year we visited Antelope Island, hiking around the craggy sagebrush shore of the Great Salt Lake. We plucked yellow grass and held it in our teeth, pretending we were cattle ranchers and kicking around huge dried-out cakes of bison droppings. Look at this rock! we said. I’m so strong I can crumble it with a single stomp! And we dashed the droppings to bits.

We swam in the lake that day—something I’d never done before or since. Wading in, I felt a hot sting on every tiny scratch up and down my legs. Once we were past the sting, we waded deeper and deeper until all that saltwater pushed us up towards the surface like bobbing bits of driftwood. My sisters, my cousins, my parents, my aunts, my uncles—we dipped and bobbed together, a weightless chain of beings in the briny sea.

We couldn’t stay long. The salt stung and made everything itch miserably as soon as you got out of the water. The flies were almost intolerable.

But there was nothing as weightless as swimming in it. Wading in just waist-deep, you could pick your feet up off the lakebed and feel as though the water rushed up to meet you—the whole of you—limbs and trunk and all.

It felt like leaning into the sky.

That’s what it feels like to live here. It’s so brilliant to be held by all that is—the people, the mountains, the sprawling plains, the shivering bodies of brilliant water. And still, there are so many dying bodies, so much poison and theft and blood. Could all the saltwater in the valley hold what’s happened here?

Is it even right to ask?

I find myself constantly torn about making my life in these mountains, near these lakes. I can’t imagine staying forever, but I can’t imagine leaving, either. I’ve never lived anywhere as long. Most of my dead are buried here.

And anyway, what do you do when your friend is dying, when they’ve been given five years to live? How could any of us leave at time like this?

How could any of us fail to pray for rain?

Thank you for being here, my friends. It’s hard out there, no matter where you live. It means so much that you’re here with me—in salt and sweat and blood,

❤️Becca Lee, Haunted Librarian❤️

PS - If you want to stay informed about what’s being done and what needs to be done about the Great Salt Lake, this is an excellent resource. If you want to know my personal opinion, I think we need to focus on leasing water from the alfalfa farmers in Utah, who use the most water in this state.

Right now, the financial incentives in agriculture aren’t aligned with water conservation efforts, so a lot of water waste is happening when it really doesn’t have to. In addition to leasing water rights from farmers, if we want to keep alfalfa farming around longterm, we should provide them with the funds to convert their irrigation systems into more water-friendly systems (it’s estimated that these updates would take around 5 to 7 billion dollars, which far exceeds the mere millions in government money that’s been allocated to saving the Great Salt Lake already). It’s just not enough.

In more extreme measures, we probably ought to phase out alfalfa farming altogether (because although it’s the largest crop in Utah, it’s still not a huge industry) and find other ways to preserve the land and the livelihoods of these farmers. We don’t want to turn all our farmland into housing developments, because those aren’t exactly water-friendly (or eco-friendly) either. In my wildest dreams, I would love to see Utah’s farming families turned into nature conservation families—privately-owned land that’s subsidized by the government as nature corridors and cared for by the families that have lived there for generations. This, I realize, is not likely to happen, but a kid can dream, right?

I also think it’s worthwhile to pour more research into water-friendly farming methods like hydroponics, which have been used throughout Europe on smaller farms for decades. Hydroponics have been shown to increase crop output with less water, less fertilizer/pesticide usage, and less square footage, but these systems are not tailored to large-scale growing operations like we have here in Utah. More research and development needs to go into this sector before we can replace land farms altogether, but I think we should get started on that process so we don’t find ourselves in this water usage bind forever. I think this Utah farm’s experience with hydroponic growing shows incredible promise for the industry as a whole.

Mostly, our legislators need to get serious about saving the lake, or step aside for people who will. So far, they’ve seemed a bit squeamish when it comes to doing what has to be done for the lake to survive. For the lake’s sake, I hope their actions match up to their big talk.