Solar Salt Love

By Anna Polonyi

There’s a Hungarian version of King Lear I grew up with: an old, short-tempered king summons his three daughters to ask how much they love him. The two eldest vie to outperform each other with flowery language, but the youngest simply says: “I love you as much as salt itself.”

Insulted, her father banishes her from the kingdom. After wandering the wilderness alone, the princess meets a prince, who instantly falls in love with her. He invites her father to a meal, without revealing that his spurned daughter is in the house. The king is served one elaborate, mouth-watering dish after another, but they’re all terribly bland. When the king comments on this, the prince exclaims that he was under the impression the old man did not like salt. The king finally understands his mistake. Cue the daughter, who slips into the room. A teary reunion ensues.

As the youngest of three, I was convinced this story was made for me. Early in my childhood, my father went from a regular, if somewhat unobtrusive, presence in my life to a very noticeable, aching absence. My mother’s line was that he’d abandoned us. It would take me nearly three decades to untangle that small word: “us”.

*

The land is flat, studded with pools of water that throw the sky back in patches of clear blue. It’s a fine May morning when I trail my father towards the salt marshes of Guérande. At 70, he is surprisingly fit and easily outpaces me on the long stretch of flat road. The sun cream he’s lathered on is still visible in white streaks across his forehead, rendering him uncannily ghost-like whenever he turns back to check on me.

He’s never been to Guérande before, and as we approach the wide, cracked-open fields, I’m oddly apprehensive. I’ve been drawn to this place ever since I first laid eyes on it, but it’s the kind of landscape that needs you to keep paying attention before it will yield its charms. I worry that my father will not be so easily moved by the power of salt.

*

The earth we stand on is brown, veering into grey—the color of dead things, plumbing and canal beds. And yet, it’s the reason we are here.

“Sea. Wind. Sun,” François says, counting them off on his fingers. “That’s all you need.”

François works for the local salt cooperative. He’s burly and sunburnt, with a wide-rimmed straw hat and a booming, thespian voice.

“You will now make salt,” he announces, and, bemused, my father and I line up so he can squirt last year’s sea water onto our palms. He tells us to hold them steady and wait.

We keep our hands dutifully outstretched as we trudge along behind François, and soon, mud sticks to our shoes. It forms squelching frames around our soles that start to slip and slide.

“Careful,” François warns as we venture out onto a narrow bank of land between two pools. “The mud is a lot less sturdy than it looks. Try to put a digger on here and you’ll need a second digger to dig the first one out.”

I picture it, and imagine that second digger sinking too. A third one would then be needed to dig that one out, but it, too, would sink. I haul a fourth digger out in my imagination, and there’s something joyful about picturing this endless line of diggers being swallowed by the earth.

*

I could tell you about the ecological benefits of marshland: how they’re spaces of biodiversity, sanctuaries for both fish and birds. How they sequester and store carbon at a rate ten times that of mature tropical forests. How they’re also the first defense line against flooding and rising sea levels. But what draws me to Guérande is something else that I have trouble articulating. It has to do with the way it embodies something we all know but keep forgetting: how supposed flaws—the softness of mud, the honesty of the princess—are also our greatest strengths.

What was once an annoying feature of this landscape has proven to be its saving grace. Since the water-logged soil could not be built on, land came cheap and salt farmers could fashion the bogs into basins to serve them. It’s one of the largest examples of man-made ecosystems, with pools, canals and dams stretching across 6,000 acres, all fashioned by hand nearly a millennium ago.

We stand alongside a pool that Francois has found on a map from the 17th century. “Put your salt farmer from 1690 here,” he says, “and he’d recognize it immediately.”

*

The part I loved most about the Hungarian fairy tale was the end when, thanks to salt, the king finally realizes just how much his daughter loves him and they fall into each others’ arms. This was the secret yearning that took me years to name: the hope that my father would, one day, come back to me, and see me clearly for who I am.

*

Because of the soil, the labor could not be mechanized. Harvesting salt remains a resolutely human endeavor, done with rakes and sieves mounted on long, hand-held poles. I think of all the people I know, teachers, writers, journalists and other so-called knowledge workers, who are worried about the effects of AI on their livelihoods. Who are reckoning with the ways their professions are evaporating, shrinking to high-end hobbies. It’s a near-physical relief to stand here amid the piles of salt, quietly drying underneath layers of tarp, alongside the herons and frogs and pickleweed.

*

To move through a landscape unchanged since pre-modern times is a rare thing. It disrupts our linear idea of time, about how porous the past and the present may actually be. It opens us up to being haunted. If we squint, we might even glimpse that old king, erring through the bushes, regretting his decision, scouring the lands for his daughter.

Our palms now glitter under the sun. Francois’s promise has held up: when I run a finger across my skin, I feel tiny grains. The salt has been summoned by invisible forces as old as time itself. My father and I lick our palms. He makes a face and shudders. Too salty for him.

*

Fleur de sel is the saltiest of salts, and its power lies in how good it is at disappearing. It melts on the tongue so fast, you hardly taste it, but it shakes up your taste buds on the way, throwing everything into sharp relief. It can draw out the sweetness of a melon, a tomato, or the darkest piece of chocolate.

It’s a late riser, blooming on the surface of these pools after 4 o’clock in the afternoon on sunny days; by nightfall, unless harvested, it will dissolve again into the water.

I think of fleur de sel as the most successful of magicians. Over hundreds of thousands of summer days, it has flickered in and out of existence, titillating our senses so that we continue to serve it, even when elsewhere, the industrious have found cheaper ways of replacing it on our plates.

*

My sisters and I saw my father once a fortnight growing up. On occasion, he would sit us down and explain why things were the way they were. Why my mother could not be trusted. Why a much younger woman had now appeared in his life. How he was doing his best at being our father, even though it felt to us, his daughters, like he was constantly disappearing.

He has since had another, fourth, daughter. She has grown into a serious, sensitive young woman who likes to sing classical music and eat breakfast alone. She has shouldered his desires lightly, taking on his vocation and playing the piano just like he’d always dreamed of doing. She has never had to worry about being banished from the kingdom and because of this, she is comfortable telling him he chews too loudly and should not sit next to her at the breakfast table.

Recently, when I pointed out to my father that he’d never said ‘I love you’ to me, he laughed.

But those are just words, he exclaimed. Surely, actions are stronger than words.

Then say them, I prompted. Go ahead.

*

My father is a good student, standing near the front of the group and nodding to signal agreement with our speaker. He smiles obligingly and when someone cracks a joke, he laughs along with everyone else.

But once it’s over, he confesses he understood only half of what was said.

“Did our guide have an accent?” he asks, and because I want to preserve him, I tell him yes. When I fill him in on the bits he missed, he makes a throaty, incredulous noise. Ludicrous isn’t it, he muses, to go to such lengths for something that, at the end of the day, is just salt.

Anna Polony is a Hungarian-French-American writer and journalist based in Nantes, France. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a former Fulbright fellow. You can find her non-fiction in Hidden Compass, Craft and Foreign Policy, among others.