Salt of the Earth

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

Inside and out, my body is trembling. Like a human saltshaker.

Last year, I fascinated myself by 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 derived from the Latin for salt.

I am in Hallstatt, Austria, 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 100 meters underground through tunnels, tubes and corridors. The erotic connection to Mother Earth is inescapable. Returning to the womb has new meaning. Any male worth his salt would feel the same.

The cave smells clean and crisp in the same way a first-rate supermarket fruit and vegetable section smells fresh, damp, earthy. A steady 46 degrees.

The Hallstat salt mines have the world’s oldest surviving stairs. Staircases, I’m learning, allowed salt miners to keep both hands free for lugging loads of salt up to the surface.

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.

As it happens, 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 stationary bench under a shade 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’m in charge. Amusement parks turn me off because I am required to give over control to some Deity or omnipotent power in the form of 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 illumination. When he asks for questions, with a dry mouth I murmur ever so faintly, half to myself, “If I die down here, will my body be preserved in salt?” If I pursued above-ground, worldly, sinful things, will I be turned into a pillar of a salt in darkened, dead-end mine shaft?

Waiting my turn, looking downward, the slide looks like a gigantic wood splinter. My skin is tingly. My left eye twitches.

Images of a sturgeon gutted to make caviar from salted roe swims back and forth across my visual cortex. My legs go limp. I want to pee.

I believe in being an adventuresome tourist, a bold traveler, a man on a journey. I don’t believe in racing towards death in the middle of a holiday.

But even when death is close, my male pride dares me to prove something—I don’t know exactly what—to myself. I weigh humiliating myself by walking down the sturdy, safe staircase provided for pregnant women and the infirm.

My face flushes. My breathing quickens. From the corner of my eye, I wipe away a single, salty tear of indecision.

Click here for more short stories set in Austria.