Ephesus at the après-ski
Next to me at the bar, a young man, Mormon-seeming but drinking a beer, introduces himself as the Head of Hiring to two men from New York. One of them is failing to describe the drink he just ordered (“It’s bitters, I don’t know. Angostura. It’s in a lot of cocktails”) and name-dropping high-fashion brands (“Louis Vuitton, Prada, you know”) to inflate the importance of one of his friends, who works as an executive assistant to some photographer. This is all wasted on the young man, who smiles patiently. The other man is a banker, who immediately starts inquiring about the logistics of the lodge, in that way businessmen tend to, their curiosity and conversational abilities having long since been financialized into a kind of auditing routine, in which personal questions are bypassed for operational ones: “How many sous-chefs do you have?” “Where do you stay on the property?” “Why aren’t dogs allowed?” &c.
The young man is happy to oblige them (“No dogs in the canyon except by permit because of the watershed”). The guests are happy. The guests are having a good time. The young, birdlike bartender, with braided blonde hair and a red western shirt, pours rye from an embossed glass bottle, capped with a black plastic pour top that measures out the exact amount for drinks. The tabs all go straight to the rooms. Everyone beams at themselves and marvels at the record snowfall. The Head of Hiring describes the place to the banker as “luxury comfort.”
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Eventually their talk turns to the Great Salt Lake, which the young man points out has been shrinking for years. Not only that, he says, but the lakebed is full of toxic materials that will be blown about as dust as it dries. He says this with the serenity of a youth pastor, a blank hopefulness wanting for gravitas. Still, he sounds like he has stake in it. And he does have stake in it. He lives there. He and some buddies were shooting guns near there last week.
The banker does not live here, to such a degree that this place barely exists beyond his need for it. The Lake could be a saline puddle so long as the ski resort stays. He responds by recounting a Mediterranean vacation he recently took, to all these beautiful Greek islands, and to the ancient city of Ephesus, in Turkey, which he calls “Epheus.” The man explains that it “was the fourth-biggest city in the world,” but that the port disappeared—he couldn’t remember the details—and the city “went to zero.” There were mudslides involved, he thought. This was clearly a parable of history’s ineluctability, though he added that “now there’s so much technology.” The young man smiled and chatted a while longer and settled up and walked away.
Wealthy men are fond of cyclical history and soft techno-optimism because they validate their fortunes both as inevitable aspects of an inevitable history and, when it suits them, as the potential engine for a better future. That these things—Eternal Return and upward progress—are logically incompatible matters little: that fallacious space between them is the very stuff of complacency. The past and future set like back bar mirrors in which the present can admire itself. Its lucrative Goldman career, its vodka with bitters, its 400 inches of snow.
It is true that the great port city of Ephesus, the city that changed hands as empires rose and fell, the “second light of Asia,” the home of the wondrous Temple of Artemis, the final resting place of John the Apostle, declined due to the silting of its port. This decline happened over hundreds of years, exacerbated by invaders and earthquakes and failed attempts to reengineer the harbor. The silting was nothing like the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake, which is a result of climate change and population growth.
From the day the first stone of Ephesus was set at the mouth of the Kaystros River, its ultimate fate as a malarial swamp was foredoomed. It took a long, long time. The mean water elevation of the Great Salt Lake, on the other hand, has dropped 22 feet since 1986. As the water disappears, the Lake becomes saltier and less hospitable to the wildlife within. The bed of the Lake, bared to wind and sun as the water recedes, is filled with arsenic, copper, and other heavy metals, byproducts of commercial mining operations, which will fleck the air the nearby city breathes.
Legend has it that long ago, in Ephesus, during the reign of the Emperor Decius, seven Christian men were fleeing persecution. They found a cave near the city and sealed themselves within and wrote their testimony and went to sleep. When they awoke the next day, one of them went into the city to buy bread. Upon leaving the cave, he began to feel strange. There were masons outside he did not remember, laying stone. The city itself, once so hostile to men like him, was now fixed everywhere with crosses. Incredulous, he reasoned he must be in some other city. “Ephesus,” he insisted, “is all otherwise builded.” When he tries to pay for bread with ancient coins, it becomes clear. He and his friends have been asleep not for a day but for two hundred years. How lucky, how miraculous, for him to find the future more suited to him than less.
ben tapeworm