On the Salt Flats every shot is the same. The ball sits on a stiff white carpet of salt crystals, so you tee it up and hit the driver.

Thwack! The ball flies off toward the mountain, and then drops and disappears into the lake. It looks like the shore of the Great Salt Lake, but it’s a mirage. You walk toward the shot, and the shoreline stays 100 yards in front of you. The ball is always there, sitting on a stiff white carpet of salt crystals.

So you tee it up and hit the driver. Thwack! And so on, for miles and miles.

The mountain in the distance is called Floating Island. Up high there are animals, trees, and fish. But down here, nothing—no rocks or bushes, no ditches—there are no real hazards, except for the bombing range, which is big but easy to avoid, and the mental hazard of being spooked by the emptiness. It can make you feel uncomfortable, but then it can also improve your concentration on the ball.

Thwack!

I climb to the top of Deseret Peak, a thousand feet above timber line. It is a clear day, just after a storm, and the air is cold like a trout stream, snow-covered peaks 100 miles in the distance seem to be within my reach. Down below I can see the smooth sloping basin floors of alkaline mud and sagebrush.

To the west, I see lines laid out on Skull Valley and the desert beyond—some lines in a grid pattern, others in concentric circles, targets for bombing practice. In 1941 and 1942, the United States Army and Air Force took more than 2,000 square miles of the Great Salt Lake Desert for bombing ranges and work with biological and chemical warfare.

The land changed—not just the 2,000 square miles, the whole desert. It went from being considered worthless, to being considered to have value in its worthlessness. It offered open space and absolute silence—what better place to drop bombs and spread disease and poison?

At the Dugway Proving Ground, Army and CIA personnel tested aerial and ground dispersions of nerve agent, dangerous viruses, the microbes that cause anthrax and the plague, as well as the hallucinogens LSD and BZ. A nerve gas accident in 1968 killed 6,000 sheep. By some estimates one-third of Dugway’s 1,000 square miles is con-taminated and will be off limits forever.

To the southeast, in Rush Valley, I see rows and rows of concrete bunkers, like little houses in suburbia. That’s the Tooele Army Depot, where chemical nerve agents are stored, enough to kill every living thing on the planet. You get just a tiny bit of this stuff on your skin or in your lungs and pretty soon you notice some difficulty breathing, then you begin to slobber and drool, then you urinate, defecate, and fall down on the floor and writhe about in convulsions until you go into a coma and die. The Army is now building an incinerator to destroy this poison, and it’s none too soon either, as the containers inside the bunkers have started to leak. Habitual dumping of hazardous solvents has polluted a large aquifer.

Beyond Tooele to the east, lies the Kennecott Copper smelter, Kennecott has also polluted an aquifer, one that could have supplied water to 50,000 people a year.

To the north, I see Magcorp, a magnesium plant spewing a long plume of chlorine gas into the air, and to the northwest, the West Desert Hazardous Industries Area, a special 100 square mile plot of land set aside for incinerators and landfills.

At the Dugway Proving Ground, the tests are now done indoors under very anxious safety regulations. I talk with Dr. Gary Resnick of Dugway’s Baker Lab inside the level three containment room

“This is where we do our aerosol work,” he explains. “This is a class three glove box. Remember that there are three types of safety cabinets. This is the highest level, and you can see there are glove ports, it’s totally sealed when it is in operation, and they test it with freon to make sure there are no leaks. So we have three layers of containment:the room is a layer of containment, the chamber is a layer of containment, and then the aerosol itself is actually inside that aerosol system inside the glove box.”

“What kinds of aerosols do you test? Could you run through them?” I ask.

“Yersinea Pestus, attenuated strain; coxilli burnetti, which causes Q fever; bacillius subtelus variety niger, which is a simulant; ms two coloflage which is a simulant, it doesn’t cause disease; botulinum toxin, which causes botulism; staphlococcus enterotoxin B, which causes the food poisoning that’s common from eating potato salad that’s been left at room temperature. I think I got them all.”

“Yellow fever?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Is there cholera here?”

“How do you mean here? Do we have samples of cholera in the building?”

“Yes.”

“That’s correct.”

“ Well, how about anthrax?”

“Bacillus anthracis?”

“Yes.”

“It’s an organism that causes a serious illness, and there is treatment, there is a vaccine for it which appears to be very effective, and there is treatment for anthrax. Once again we use attenuated strains when we can. And we actually have a very good simulant for anthrax. So we don’t use anthrax all that often.”

“So there is treatment for anthrax?”

“Uh-humm.”

“So what you are saying is that it’s safe, and the public shouldn’t worry.”

“I’d recommend you come to the citizen’s advisory committee for Dugway testing meetings,” he says, while ushering me out.

I didn’t go to the citizen’s advisory committee meeting. Instead I went out into the West Desert. It seems obvious that no one would live out here, but then, people do live out here.

John Conrad lives in Eskdale, Utah, a religious community in Snake Valley, just across the border from Great Basin National Park in Nevada. “How did your group come to the desert?” I ask him.

“Well, one of the writings said to go into the land of the earth and build a place in an effort to live together, all things common, similar to Acts II,” he says. “So in the community no one really owns anything, but we all own it. Of course, personal items—clothes, those kind of things—are owned by the people, but cars, houses, all those things are really commonly owned.”

“Can you tell me about the man who founded this faith community?”

“He was a fellow named Maurice Glendenning. He came to Utah in the late 20s and he had received revelations from an angel...It began as a boy, he’d just hear music, and then a voice stood out in a choir. This went on for years as he was growing up. Finally he could hear the voice, and he wrote down what the voice was saying. And these revelations that he wrote, everyone said they were demonic, which, of course, they’re not, but we do believe that the Lord through angels, through many other sources of inspiration, continues to speak to people.”

Fifty miles to the north at Granite Ranch, Keith Allred says, “I guess the original name given to people believing in polygamy would be fundamentalist. Socially, if that was practiced, and practiced in a Godly manner, not after lust or to benefit man’s desires or stuff like that, you wouldn’t have harlotism, you wouldn’t have abortion, you wouldn’t have society in the way you have it today in a whore-mongering-type-lustful society. It takes care of the widow, the orphan, it takes care of the old unmarried woman, it gives a woman an opportunity that she can choose a good man, not setting up any man that he’s better than another man or something like that, but it sets it up that a woman can have a righteous head, or a righteous leader. I think if you would look through the world today they are few and far between. I mean, if you just use the Boy Scout rules, most men come far from reaching that.”

Cecil Garland lives in nearby Callao, Utah, on the edge of the salt desert., at the base of the Deep Creek Mountains. “We are in the process here in the United States, we have already in fact recreated the fall of Rome,” he says. “Little doubt can be had in that regard. We've lost control of our money. We've lost control of our borders. We have lost control of our courts. If you want justice, don’t expect to find it there. They are a farce. The founding fathers of our nation, who tried to create something new and different, something that the world could behold and cherish and keep, would come back to this country and go absolutely nuts.”

Three men are standing by a pickup truck behind the only store/gas station/post office/pay phone on the Goshute Indian Reservation, which straddles the Utah-Nevada border.

One of them says to me:

“Mitch, a quer kee. Store, ma ne we ha han. Mail, wo te yan. Tab geh wi non he. You know what that means?”

“I think you said I’m Mitch and this is my brother Mel.”

“No, I said we’re waiting for the mail to come in. White people don’t hurry, I said. And the mail is already here.”

“So what are you going to do this afternoon?”

“I’m going to Wendover this afternoon. Going to cash this checks and going to have some big tits I want to go see.”

“Dancers?”

“No, girlfriend. You know Dolly Parton don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. Is she in Wendover?”

“Uh huh. Second Dolly Parton.”

“So do you guys gamble?”

“Oh yeah, bet.”

“What do you mean, bad?

“You bet, I said.”

“You bet?”

“We play black jack.”

“And do you win or do you lose?”

“Lose every time, just like donating money.”

“Well, why do you do it then?”

“Why? Cuz we got the money and we just want to go have fun. As long as I fill up my gas tank and I end up making it back home.”

“You don’t care if you save your money?”

“That I cannot answer. I don’t know about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. We go down to Wendover to have fun, see. If not, we just stick around here.”

“What do you do for fun around here?”

“Looking for some womans. But here’s nothing around here. All this girls are related to us, so we have to go all the way to Wendover,or go all the way to Wells, to Donna’s Hacienda. Hey, Scott, I’m going to go over to the store, I’m going to take them over to see if we can cash these checks then I’ll come back over, because, I don’t know.

“You might have to give us a jump because my truck is kind of acting up.”

“All right see what happens.”

The truck’s motor turns over slowly. The battery is weak and getting weaker. Then it catches with a full-throated, unmuffled roar.

Iask former Tooele County Commis-sioner, now Justice of the Peace, William Pitt, what he thinks about the county’s image as a dumping ground.

“I think Tooele County is an excellent place because of the vastness of the area and the small population,” he says. “The water is so thick you can cut it with a knife. You'd never be able to use it for any purpose. And the land is virtually useless for anything.

“It's a viable business. It went through the scrutiny of the EPA, the State Health Department. Now the cry of the environmentalists throughout Utah that we was making it the waste capital of the United States.

“We are part of the United States.”

Historian Orrin Miller talks with me at Pioneer Park in Tooele.

“This is where the first pioneers settled in April, 1849,” he says. “ You can see what a beautiful area it is.”

“Let me ask you this. How old are you now, seventy?”

“Eighty-three,” he says.

“You're 83. OK. Have you lived here all your life?”

“I've lived here all my life.”

“All right.You've seen Tooele go from kind of a farming community, I guess there was some mining when you were a little kid, the smelter up here, to a county that houses a lot of dangerous chemicals, and ammunition....”

“Hazardous wastes,” he adds

“Hazardous wastes, bombs. There's a bombing range over there. It's had a number of industries that have polluted the environment. So that now there are millions of dollars being spent to clean it up.”

“Yes, the military is spending that money.”

Right, but what I'm wondering is, do you regret the military coming in here and turning Tooele County into that kind of a place? I mean it must have been really beautiful and completely clean and pure back when you were a boy.”

“That's right, except there wasn't any jobs for the young people, so we don't regret that. That Tooele Army Depot is a boon to Tooele, it provided jobs for our youngsters.”

“You think those are good things to have in your community?”

“Yes. Yes. Definitely.”

Ican see one advantage to treating the West Desert like our national garage or basement. People think it’s creepy, and hardly anyone comes out to visit. And when shit happens, it has to go somewhere.

Of course, environmentalists say it’s a misuse of the land. Maybe it is.

But one result is that the animals that live here—mountain lion, elk, antelope, close to 400 species of birds—they’re really wild.

One morning I saw a golden eagle eating a rabbit on the road going down Skull Valley. He wouldn’t move for my car. I parked 20 yards away from him and he just kept eating, tearing off muscle, throwing it back down his throat, and looking at me with an unafraid, innocent, and vicious curiosity.

Where else can you see that look?

If you ask me, I think we should turn the West Desert into an endless golf course for the Japanese. They’re crazy about the game, but they don’t have room for it at home. We could rent them golf carts, sell them refreshment, and drive them into Wendover at night.

Scott Carrier writes and produces stories for radio in Salt Lake City.