After you’ve Googled the Sun Tunnels and copied the coordinates from The Center for Land Use Interpretation website into your phone, and driven two hours around the Salt Lake from the Spiral Jetty, accidentally by way of Snowville, Idaho, where no one wants to make you a milkshake, you will find yourself dangerously close to Nevada on a dirt road for over an hour. The sky will be gray, ominous, and you will be surrounded by nothing on all sides. Even the mountains are out of reach. No buildings, no people, no more cows. A bleached sign claims a hillside for the Bighorn Sheep Reintroduction program, by all indications a failure. Finally, Lucin, the nearest town to the tunnels: railroad tracks and an abandoned shed. Five more miles, it should be.
You follow copper signs for the Sun Tunnels wobbling in the wind. They’re wobbling on purpose, they’re whimsical. You don’t see the last sign, hand-written, pointing to a rockier road off to the right. Keep driving, driving. The only thing you see now is the gas gauge tapping E, your phone maps flashing on and off: Rerouting—gray—Rerouting—gray. Up ahead, a building, is that a house? Civilization? Thank god. No, no, that’s some kind of compound, lots of outbuildings, abandoned cars, chain link fence. Turn around. Turn around right now. Drive back the way you came, see the hand-written sign this time and just keep driving. Your memory of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels is fear, sheer terror of unclaimed land and the men on that compound, surely there were men, and the man who tries to follow you to the bathroom after you finally find a gas station. When people ask, you tell them maybe Nancy Holt didn’t want them to be found.
