It’s the 4th of July, so we got a day off from the institute to spend time however we wished. A group of us decided to take the day as a holiday, and we drove up to Park City, UT, a ski resort neighborhood north of downtown Salt Lake City. Pretty much every Lyft driver, random stranger, or hotel employee had recommended Park City to me as a tourist attraction, a “must-visit” while in SLC. So, given other participants’ interests in checking out Park City for ourselves, the decision to make the trek was an easy one!
It turns out that July 4th in Park City is quite the affair: the town hosts a parade so the entire “Main Street” stretch of the town gets closed off as local civic societies, businesses, high school cheerleading teams, and other town leaders march or drive down the wide expanse. Revelers park themselves on lawn chairs, curbside, with their Americana apparel, their coolers of snacks and beverages, and their unbridled enthusiasm for supporting the town’s efforts. While I’ve been to other local town parades before, this one felt unprecedented in the sheer dedication that locals clearly had to the event. It had appeared that some people had camped out for hours to claim their sidewalk spot! My cynical side felt deeply skeptical of the whole affair: its noise, its crowds, its superficial spectacle of community-building all made me viscerally want to turn away at first. But another side of me felt heartened that people could get excited about supporting their community members, that people could still feel energized and engaged by their own hometowns and resources.
What I actually found to be the most fascinating spectacle of all, however, was not the parade itself, but Park City’s re-purposing of the ski chair lifts during the summer. Summer in Salt Lake City, if you don’t know already, is hot. Like, many days over 100 degrees hot. SLC is in the high desert, after all, so the heat is also dry and the sun is intense. That means that most people are cowering into the shade as much as possible, writhing away from the sun as we might imagine vampires would do. So, exposed mountainsides, where skiiers would clearly flock in the winter, were not exactly the places that people were visiting. Indeed, the chair lifts designed to take skiiers and snowboarders to the tops of the mountains were largely abandoned, and yet they still made their rotations up and down the mountains. I found them striking and beautiful. Every time we encountered a ski lift while wandering through Park City (even after the parade was over), I found myself drawn to those empty, resilient ski lifts.
An empty, but still functioning, ski lift in Park City, UT.
For the whole day, I couldn’t really pin down what I found so fascinating about them. For starters, I had never seen an operating ski lift outside of a snow resort during winter, so it seemed oddly out-of-place to see a ski lift jutting up a grass-covered mountain where clearly no one was going to go skiing. The fascination I had with the empty ski lift reminded me a bit of how I feel when I see an abandoned carnival on the side of a freeway: I know there are supposed to be people squealing and laughing on the carousels and rollercoasters, and yet everything is silent. The biggest dissimilarity was that the ski lift still operated, the chairs still careened up and down the pulleys, waiting to shuttle people up and down the mountain. Technically, one could ride the ski lift (attendants informed us that we could pay $25 to have the lift take us up to the top of the mountain), but why?
It struck me that what I loved about the ski lift was not the creepy factor of seeing a place that typically teems with people abandoned, but was that the summer ski lift could do something fundamentally different than the winter ski lift while staying altogether the same. In the winter, a ski lift serves a rather utilitarian function: it takes skiiers up the mountain so that they can begin their downhill adventure. In summer, the ski lift can transport people upwards, but that’s not really the point of it. It stands more as a testament to the beauty and grandeur of the mountain itself. It is a rather (in my opinion) poignant reminder of how small humans are in the face of nature. It is a way to understand that, even while skiing is not possible, finding ways to access nature, to be in it and part of it, is. Sure, cynically and practically speaking, a ticket fee to ride up the mountain on a ski lift feels a little steep. But I appreciated that it still operated, still offered the promise of going above and beyond our expectations of how we might navigate a new space.
I focus on this story of this seemingly mundane detail of my day because I actually think it has something to do with books too. All too often, we allow books to become invisible to us, utilitarian tools to convey information. Indeed, we take for granted that a book’s form exists as it does, just as we might take for granted that a ski lift is an incredible feat of architecture and engineering. I hope that, in a digital age, we can gain an altogether new appreciation for the book form and what it offers. The fact that we can so quickly, easily, and accessibly get into a new idea simply by cracking open a book’s spine is nothing short of wondrous. Indeed, a book is a mobile technology, one that allows us to transport ourselves anywhere at any time. With the Internet at our fingertips, the wonder of portable information may seem totally mundane (and easily reproducible; our cell phones can do the same thing). And yet, the process of defamiliarizing these mundane things is important to unpacking and understanding them, not to mention critically assessing them and understanding their roles in our lives.
Abandoned spaces are fascinating, and I always appreciate when they’re re-purposed resourcefully. I wonder whether, in the evolution of reading technologies, we might find ourselves re-purposing books for different reasons and what those re-purposing moments might look like. Maybe they wouldn’t look that different at all, but to think of all of the capacious ways we could use reading technologies to offer us different ways into our experiences is pretty exciting (to this nerdy brain)!