Searching for the Land of Salt

Sadness is the salt that gives happiness its taste. - Mahmoud Emam

Salt happens. It pervades our waters and diet and bodies. It flavors our language: Taken with a grain of salt. Salt of the earth. Worth your salt. Don't spill the salt. Salt brings life to food, heals wounds and relieves sore throats. It transforms the harvest into pickles and salmon into sweet jerky. It even sees us to the end of life - salt embalms the dead. What is it about salt that is both poetic and common? 

There's an easy-to-miss turnoff on the Hwy 1 that blurs into forest and becomes a trail beside the sea. This place possesses a vast and lonely beauty. Nothing about it soothes the senses or offers comfort or softness, yet somehow that coast and its nameless waves restore the spirit. Hope glimmers there like salt caught in the rocks.

The first pilgrimage - each time is a pilgrimage, never just a trip - was on a chicken-skin-raising, windy winter afternoon. I went with a dear friend who knew that place and also knew, intuitively, that harvesting salt and seaweed could help to heal and gather the spirit. We drove seven hours that day to share just four hours on the rocks, but it was enough. The second was in June, when I brought my parents visiting from the Philippines. Their hair tossed by the wind, they bravely and half-reluctantly followed the winding trail as I insisted we keep going, to find one bright seam of salt we could symbolically gather from together. My mother's province is Pangasinan, which literally translates to "The Land of Salt" (asin means salt). We were cold and tired, yet I felt half-superstitious this trip could strengthen the wavering bridge linking our two worlds. 

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. - Isak Dinesen

Just before the fall solstice, I returned to the point once more in search of the small pools we had spotted in the spring. After a long sunny summer, the pools were now thickened and crystallized, the surface cloudy and still. We fell into a quiet meditation, wielding dinner spoons to separate flakes from water and scrape crystals from sandstone. Curious, I dipped a finger into the water and tasted it. It was nearly unbearable, an entire ocean concentrated into a brine that brought tears to my eyes.  

The bag of salt from that day still sits in my kitchen, untouched. Next to it rests a pouch of red clay sea salt I've carried for years from the Big Island, and a large-grained salt from Pangasinan. I tell myself these are to be used for guests, for celebration or for gifts. While our household liberally uses boxes of store bought Kosher or sea salt, I hoard these talismans, these traces of another place and shared moments under the sun.

Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all. - Nelson Mandela

My promised land is not one of milk and honey, but of salt. It is the substance of my mother's home province, and a point off the map on Hwy 1 where I remembered how to come alive. In some inexplicable way, this last pilgrimage also helped to recover my creative salt. It reminded me I am worth my salt only when I return to things that refuse to be abandoned, to heed an inevitable pull to the kitchen and the blank pages of my journal.

We write, cook and salt to affirm a place in the universe. Our lives can be scrawled or simmered, set in loaves or stanzas, recipe or verse. They sing the same words in different languages: I am here, I am here. 

Happy Filipino American History Month!