Four minutes to read.
Inside and outside, my body is trembling. Like a human saltshaker.
Last year, I fascinated myself reading Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. Salt was the oil of its time—driving commerce, sparking wars, spurring transnational trade, affecting geo-political history. Words like salad, salami, salsa, sausage and salary are linked to the Latin for salt.
Hallstatt, Austria, is the site of the world’s first salt mine. Beginning circa 5,000 B.C., miners pickaxed, shoveled and sweated to extract ‘white gold’ which they traded, along with salted meat, to Greek city-states and the Romans. Hallstatt borders the river Salzach which means ‘salt river.’
The three-hour guided cave tour twists and turns through tunnels, tubes and corridors. An erotic connection to Mother Earth is inescapable. Return to the womb has new meaning. Any male worth his salt would feel the same.
The cave smells clean and crisp in the way that a first-rate supermarket fruit and vegetable section smells—fresh, damp, earthy. A steady 46 degrees.
The tour includes a ride down Europe’s longest wooden slide—210 feet. As far back as the Middle Ages, salt miners started using slides to rapidly reach their underground workstations. The salt mine website shows laughing, smiling, beaming families dashing down a slide to a soft landing deep inside the cave.
Tourists worldwide are divided between thrill-seekers and café-sitters—as different from each other as cats and crocodiles. For my part, I take rollercoasters and Ferris wheels with a grain of salt. I prefer an agreeably shaded bench under a tree—people watching or gazing at ducks paddling in a placid pond.
Teaching high school suits me because, at the head of the classroom, I am in charge. Amusement parks turn me off because I am required to give over control to some unseen, unknowable power—not to mention a distracted carnival ride operator who looks totally disinterested in my physical safety.
Our tour guide is a strapping young man dressed for spelunking. His sparkly new headlamp looks more for show than use. When he asks for questions, with a dry mouth I murmur ever so faintly, “If I die down here, will my body be preserved in salt?” If I like above-ground, worldly, sinful things, will I be turned into a pillar of a salt?
Waiting my turn, looking downward, I see the slide as a gigantic wood splinter. My skin tingles. My left eye twitches.
The image of a gutted sturgeon sacrificed to make caviar from salted roe swims across my visual cortex. My legs are limp. I want to pee.
I believe in being a tourist, a traveler, a man on a journey. I don’t believe in racing towards death in the middle of a holiday. I weigh humiliating myself by walking down the steps for pregnant women and the infirm. Even when death is close, my male pride dares me to prove myself.
My face is flushed. My breathing quickens. From the corner of my eye, I wipe away a single, salty tear of indecision.