Formulaic

We’d walked a long way out onto the salt before the sun got low, partly because the polygons get cleaner the further you go from the boardwalk and partly because the people thin out at about the same rate. Underfoot it’s crunchy and brittle and dry, and while it did no lasting harm to my boots, it got into my truck and stayed there for weeks.

For most of early golden hour the sky looked clear in the way that never holds, and the wind was pushing a bank of low cloud straight at the sun, so I’d more or less written the evening off. What happened instead was that the light found a gap underneath and lit the higher layer for about five minutes, which gave us fiery orange running over blue-grey and the whole salt floor taking the colour.

There were four of us out there that night — my friend Dalton off working his own compositions, my wife and his girlfriend along for the sunset — and it was cold enough to make the walk back welcome.

As for the name, those hexagons are the product of a very particular set of chemical and environmental conditions repeating themselves across the whole basin, and standing on a floor of them 282 feet below sea level, it’s hard not to read the place as a formula working itself out.