I didn’t realize I was walking toward the sign until I found myself standing beneath it. It had lured me into the parking lot despite the danger.

I wondered if the Fresh Market corporation wanted to erase all traces of their store in this neighborhood–hence obliterating all signs of their failure. If so, it will never work. Everyone still refers to this as the old Fresh Market–or if they’ve lived here awhile, the old Albertson’s. The place doesn’t lose its association just because someone paints over the sign. Even when a new store moves in, old-time residents will call this the “old Albertson’s” or “old Fresh Market.” That is part of how cities stay alive. I remembered when I visited Rome and I could not understand how a city just kept building on top of itself, covering old ruins. This. This is how.

Or maybe Fresh Market just wanted to stop drivers from turning into the lot, only to realize the store has closed. Since I cannot drive, I forget sometimes how different the city appears from a car. Pedestrians can sense a store has closed without any warning: no lights, no crashing of carts in the front entrance, no sugar scents from the bakery, no employees lighting up on break behind the store, no life inside the store. On the street level, the place feels like a corpse. No need to check the sign for store hours; we pedestrians already know the Fresh Market is dead. Drivers, on the other hand, never know until they turn into the lot and park the car.

But then another blacked-out sign appeared across the street, where an auto shop went out of business. Of course, the sign did not literally “appear”; it always stood there. But I never noticed it–never really noticed it–until someone blacked it out, erased it, obliterated it.

This time, whoever did it obliterated all signs of the store name–no abstract shapes traced around the letters. Something about the intersection of the two blank slabs gives me chills every time I walk past this sign. Is this the crossroads at which Salt Lake City stands? This corner feels ghostly and prescient. From beyond the grave, the store warns us about empty storefronts to come. I imagine every sign on the street blacked out, blank. Even ghost towns don’t look like that.

I try not to feel bleak. Instead, I think of the City Creek revitalization project just a few blocks to the east. It promises a shiny new mall, towering condos and a Harmon’s grocery store. And to the west, there is the new Sunflower Market. To the south, a gigantic new Whole Foods. The neighborhood is alive. But what about these ruins? What happens to a city that obliterates its history–even seemingly insignificant fragments like the name of a grocery store or tire shop? When Roman engineers dug tunnels for new subways, they uncovered the ruins of imperial houses–complete with kitchens–and even an old copper factory. Who back then recognized the significance of those places in Rome’s history?

Granted, an old Fresh Market feels like a far cry from an imperial house, but even still, think about what a grocery store could tell future archaeologists about life in 2011. Think about how the store nourished the neighborhood for so many years. Surely another business will move in someday and crash a wrecking ball into the bricks, and then everything will be gone. But somehow, that feels fundamentally different than blacking out the sign. That would be an act of life, not death–of hope, not failure or shame or denial.

As I walk past the obliterated signs, I find myself clinging to memories of what once was–if only because the blacked-out signs force me to remember. It’s just like the old game: Don’t think of an elephant. You cannot help but picture that elephant, despite your best efforts. The signs say, “don’t think of ______,” but I do.

Although I am not Mormon, this ritual appeals to me. It is the ultimate second chance. More than once, I have walked past the temple and wondered if anyone was down inside the baptistry, submerged under the water in the giant elliptical tub. I have wondered what it would be like to do that for someone–to believe that you could do that for someone. I wished that I believed in it–not the religious doctrine, but the faith that I could send a telegraph to the heavens, show a lost loved one he is wanted back in the fold.

This is also why Mormons obsess over genealogy. They need to know the names of lost relatives so they can baptize them. They need addresses, as it were, for those telegraphs to the spirit world.

Once, when I toured the Salt Lake Temple visitor center, I logged onto the genealogy computers and searched for my oldest brother, dead for two years at that time, killed by a heart attack. I got a hit complete with his social security number, and I felt an irrational thrill: I could run a background check. I could find out things he never told me in life. I could learn enough to write his story–stand in for him. Resurrect him.

But I never ran the check. Computer databases, I thought, cannot communicate with the dead. What I really meant was I could not.

A few months later, I was searching online for an underground bowling alley where I spent many a weekend night as a child, watching my parents bowl in leagues. I was desperate to remember its name or even find a photograph of the interior. All I could remember was that it was underground, it had a daycare center adjacent to a video arcade, and it was the only place I ever saw the youngest of my older brothers before he committed suicide some thirty years before. I wanted to visit the alley on a trip home to Iowa. Maybe descending those steps again or touching the dingy wallpaper would help me remember more about this brother, the first one I lost. Maybe sipping a fountain soda at the same table where I shook his hand–just that once, “hi, nice to meet you,” not yet knowing he was my brother–would bring me some kind of closure.

But the alley closed years ago, and the owners sealed the stairwell with cement, like a tomb.

In an online forum, some people from my hometown claimed the alley was still fully operational. One just needed to break into the back service entrance and flip a switch for private underground bowling. One man claimed he had done it.

In my mind, my brother existed only inside that alley, and now it was his tomb. Endless proxies for his friends and family broke inside for illicit bowling tournaments with a ghost. If I had to break in to see the alley again, so be it. I would find a way. I would even bowl down there alone.

And then I found out the truth: someone stripped the guts of the alley long ago. The graphics on the side walls are all that is left. No pin setters. No lanes. Just an empty hole.

I slipped down a random street today and was rewarded with a new “oxen” message.

The same “oxen” tag a little closer up:

Seeing “oxen” lay claim to a brick, I cannot help but think of Temple Square–in particular, the museum exhibit of oxen carts used to carry stones from local quarries to the temple construction site. The very word “oxen” carries a religious connotation here in Salt Lake City–a connotation I am just now beginning to grasp. It took a visit to Temple Square to (start to) understand it.

Every time I see an “oxen” tag now, I picture the literal beast loaded up with stones on its back. Or the baptismal font in the temple basement, with twelve oxen arranged in a circle, backs facing in, a baptism pool held aloft on their backs. The oxen represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

But I suspect this vandal means something radically different: political critique instead of religious proselytizing.  No matter where I find a new “oxen” tag, it always feels like a confrontation. Am I one of the oxen? Am I a beast of burden? Whose burden do I carry? Why? It also feels like a stab at the LDS–using one of the faith’s own symbols to mock(?) its followers.

Maybe I am making an assumption based on the medium (graffiti), but the whole “oxen” project feels anarchistic to me. When I wake up to new tags in the neighborhood, I wonder when “oxen” creeps out from his underground hiding place. I wonder what burden he carries that drives him to spread this (the?) word.

Please excuse the mess while I clean up internal links and re-upload missing photos.

Finally, a wheatpaste campaign I can get behind: Free rides on TRAX (SLC light rail) during dreaded “red air days.”

But the more I think about it, the more this campaign feels typical of the car-oriented culture here in Utah: public transportation as a last resort. If more residents rode TRAX (or biked, walked, took buses) in the first place, then SLC could reduce pollution before the air reaches red-alert levels. Why wait until a public health emergency to finally make public transport affordable, attractive and feasible?

That is not necessarily a critique—more an observation of how deeply ingrained car culture really is here. After all, knowing how far to push an issue is half the battle, and there is very little political will in Utah to sacrifice pickup trucks and SUVs for the public good.

I used to think of this as the only permanent oxen tag — not spray paint, not a sticker, not wheat paste, not stencil. Permanent.

Until snow buried it for days and days.

And slush melted and refroze, glazing over all but the “N.”

And black sludge in the wake of receding snow filled in the letters.

And then a toy wheelbarrow appeared, abandoned on the sidewalk after an unusually warm winter afternoon, covering oxen. Riding on oxen’s back. I could have pushed it away, but I sort of loved it there. Filled with rainwater, it would be like a miniature Mormon baptismal font—like the one in the Salt Lake temple basement. I imagined a child playing out the scene.

So much depends on this oxen.

I need it to mark distance. South: to alert myself that a certain dangerous street corner looms. North: to know I am almost safe, almost home.

One day, leaves covered most of the letters, and I kneeled down to brush them away. I needed to see it. My mind flashed on the time I helped brush snow from my grandmother’s grave marker. Here lies oxen.

Sometimes, I cannot help but hear songs in my head:

Step on a crack, break oxen’s back

Ollie Ollie Oxen Free

All’s out come in free.

Yes, that.

Of course, even the spray paint and wheat pastes never truly disappear. The city paints over sprayed tags, and ghost letters show through. Business owners blast tagged sidewalks with toxic chemical paint removers, but faint traces of letters still appear, sunken below the porous surface of the concrete. Wheat pastes simply reappear — sometimes in the exact same spot, sometimes across the street.

There is no “permanent” or “temporary” for oxen. Just seasons.

In the few minutes it took to snap these photos from a balcony in my building, the familiar metallic taste crept across my tongue like I was sucking on a dirty penny or licking blood from a wound. My sinus headache came back. My lungs still ache.

I ordered a stronger air filter Saturday delivery, so as of yesterday afternoon, I could breathe inside my apartment, but what happens when I leave for groceries? How long will I have to pace around indoors, hiding from the blue smog?  How long until a storm finally frightens it away?

And when the “clouds” finally leave, where, exactly, do they go?

Contrast the blue cityscape with the vivd brights close up.

By the afternoon, the same buildings looked like this:

The mountains act like the rim of a bowl, letting the toxic stew simmer in the valley:

At night, the inversion pulls a blue curtain across the mountains:

That bluish haze? Not clouds.

The dreaded inversions have returned. With the winter sun lower on the horizon, less warmth penetrates to the ground. Warm air higher up in the atmosphere acts like the seal on a bell jar, trapping cold air beneath it. Unfortunately, it also traps car exhaust, factory fumes, and other pollution until the smog thickens into a bluish soup.

Unless they sport gas masks or stay locked inside air-filtered homes, SLC residents have no choice but to breathe – and taste – that smog soup. The air feels and looks as though we live in a sealed garage, and someone has left the car idling. The air leaves a film on my teeth and skin. It tastes like a decaying tooth cap or sinus infection. It burns my eyes, throat, and lungs. It keeps me awake at night, light-headed and dizzy, even with an air filter running in the bedroom. I pace in front of the window and wait for a storm to blow the toxic “clouds” away. I stare at the vague outline of the mountains (barely visible now through the smog), wishing they would disappear for real. Poof! The mountains, you see, act like the rim of a bowl, holding in all the soup, preventing it from leaking and draining away.

I long for high winds and precipitation – even snow, which I despise – just to chase the “bad air” (as locals call it) away.

Yesterday on the news, a reporter referred to smog-induced lung inflammation as “pollution tickle.” The same reporter said he had seen far worse inversions and shrugged off the burning in his throat. That smog might look creepy, he said, but it is “really just what’s supposed to happen in the Wasatch Front” this time of year.

No.

While he is right that inversions occur naturally, he is wrong that they “should” result in toxic smog. Salt Lake City has simply made a choice to live this way. Inefficient, uninviting public transportation, combined with wide streets, long blocks, excessive parking lots, a car-based culture, and motorists hostile to pedestrians are not “natural.” It actually takes conscious planning (or conscious avoidance of good planning) to create a city this averse to changing its driving behavior.

I griped about the wide streets and long city blocks (660 feet compared to 200 feet in downtown Portland) to an acquaintance the other day, and she remarked how they go back to the plans created by Brigham Young. “They cannot change,” she said. “It is part of the religious plan.” She is not a Mormon, but she understands the significance.

“Yes,” I said. I knew that from my research into Salt Lake City planning. I also respect and admire the geometry and precision of it—how every inch of street and sidewalk can be measured in spiritual as well as geographic meaning. “But nobody can pretend the city currently follows the plan completely.”

Young envisioned gardens thriving in those large blocks, not giant parking lots. The wide streets? Those were designed for ox carts and covered wagons to turn around—an early nod to the u-turn. “The city has to be willing to acknowledge this”—I gestured to the toxic soup outside the window—“was not part of the plan, either.”

Just for comparison, here is a photo of my balcony view with actual clouds instead of smog:

As I think about this, I find myself once again comparing Salt Lake City to Portland.

Portland changed at such a rapid pace that by the time I left, it was nothing like when I first arrived nine years before. I occasionally check city blogs there to read up on new developments and public transportation routes. Even from afar, I can see how Portland has continued to evolve. Heck, evolve is not even the right word. “Evolution” suggests a slow place. Portland planning is more akin to a steamroller.

Here is SLC, change seems to happen at a glacial pace, and in part, that stems from the divine plans for the city grid and the deep spiritual significance. Of course, it also stems from the culture overall—more conservative, less ecologically focused, less biker and pedestrian-friendly, less obsessed with being “green.”

On the other hand, Portland could drive a person mad with the constant changes. It sometimes felt as though the city changed for the sake of it — with little regard for negative consequences such as long-time residents priced out of their homes. Near-constant protests crying for change leave many residents with hangovers and headaches, even if they initially sympathize with the politics.

Which is worse? Change so fast it leaves residents behind to breathe its dust? Or change so slow a city literally chokes on the lack of it?

On a side note, if you want to see how bad an inversion can really get, check out this photograph from Time Science:

The tops of the bars remind me of the Salt Lake Temple spires, and even though “The Other Place” is a Greek restaurant, I cannot help but think it means something more-that “oxen” chose this gate for a reason.

If I pass through to the other place, where exactly do I go?