by Bill Graves
The temple shows no sign of age or weather. The lawn, which could sod a couple of football fields, has no brown spots. Obviously, its keepers care for it a great deal.
I knew the temple was closed to me and even to some Mormons. But the glass, revolving door showed a tastefully decorated foyer that had an inviting look about it.
The sun had just set and the lights were on inside. Other people were going in, so I did too. I was greeted warmly by Mr. Greenhalgh, a soft-spoken, retired schoolteacher, immaculately dressed in a white suit, shirt and tie.
We sat in a quiet corner. {I am sure the temple has no other kind.} Mr. Greenhalgh told me that 560 volunteers run the temple. It’s open five days and evenings a week. After it closes, an eight-person crew works all night scrubbing, vacuuming, and polishing.
So much for what happened yesterday. Now that I have thawed out my water hose in Yogi Bear’s shower again, the news is looking good. The snow has gone elsewhere. The sun is shining this morning.
“It’s easy to find. Follow the feathers along the side of the road. They blow off the turkey trucks. And if the wind in right, just follow your nose.” The cook at the senior center was giving me directions to a turkey farm.
She was right. White feathers line the roads wherever the flatbed turkey trucks have been. The trucks all go to Moroni, twenty miles north of here, where the birds are made oven-ready. This county produced 4.4 million turkeys last year, or 72 million pounds.
Pulling into the Shand farm in a little truck on loan from Yogi Bear, a tail-wagging sheepdog greeted me along with a million frantically gobbling turkeys. I learned later there was only 14,000 birds. They came hopping, running, half flying to crowd the fence. None of them faced me head on. With their heads cocked, they all stared at me, each using just one eye. More than have ever stared at me before.
A hawk flew over. Silence, for a few seconds. Then the gobbling began anew, but with a higher level of twitter.
Eighteen-year-old Travis Shand stuck his pitchfork in the ground. He appeared happy to stop what he was doing and talk with a stranger. He and Jeremy Keller, age nineteen, look after turkeys on two adjacent farms that belong to Travis’s dad and his uncle.
Every year, well over 100,000 turkeys grow up here. The birds arrive as day-old chicks, the first brood in February. {The farm is closed in December and January.} How a chick producer can get 20,000 or so eggs to all hatch on the same day is beyond my comprehension. But they do. It takes seventeen to twenty-six weeks, depending on how big they want them, before the birds are trucked off to Moroni.
“If a little thing goes wrong, you can be sure they’ll make the worst of it. Turkeys are dumb,” Travis remarked. “I picked up a hen today that sat in a puddle and drowned. Maybe she fell asleep, I don’t know. Anyway, she’s history. They have heart attacks and just plain die if life gets to be too much for them, like if a jet flies over or a siren goes by.”
The turkeys, the temple, and the nice folks of Manti were now behind me, where the winter winds blow. Rusty and I were on U.S. 89 again, headed south toward Interstate 15.
Now there I was, dead in the road, stopped behind a froth of bleating sheep. There must have been 200 of them. Three men on horseback and two happy dogs skillfully kept them tightly packed on the road and off the shoulders. The sheep, their woolly coats puffed up for the coming Utah winter, appeared to follow directions well. Ahead, they streamed into an open field.
Rusty perked her ears. She stood on the dashboard, taking it all in. Her tail wagged her body. She let out an occasional bark. I had to agree with her, it was a remarkable sight.
I guess sheepherders are a considerate bunch. Evidently, they did not want to del ay a waiting cement truck and me. They pushed the sheep to move faster than the sheep wanted to go.
“Take your time,” I said. Only Rusty heard me. “No hurry. Fact is, the cement probably has more important things to do today than we do.”
61
Columbus Day is Transferable
Beaver, Utah
All city and county employees here work on Columbus Day, a national holiday. But come to Beaver two weeks now, the first Monday of the deer hunt, and you won’t find a government office open, except the post office. Even the schools will be closed.
Here in central Utah, as in small towns everywhere, people make trade-offs in their lifestyles—and their holidays—to get more of what they want. In fact, just living in a small town is a huge trade-off. Big-city amenities are given up: shopping malls, mail delivery, movie theaters, clinics, even the twenty-four-hour supermarket, access to which now seems an urbanite’s birthright. In return, they get life at a slower pace, one filled with what is, to them, truly important. This may be as simple as knowing every kid on the high-school football team, not needing a key because you never lock your doors, making jam with homegrown strawberries, or just knowing the first name of every person you meet today. You better know, because they always know yours.
Much of what is important, of gut significance to the people here, lies in the Tushar Mountains just east of town. Peaks over 12,000 feet and places like Mount Holly, Puffer Lake, Big John’s Flat, Elk Meadows, and Merchant Valley give a map-reader’s view of what’s up there. A slick brochure tells of a “Mecca for recreation,” the “state’s largest mule-deer and elk herds,” and “unsurpassed trout fishing.” But all that’s just a hint.
The wild sounds and scents of the high country and the memories of the excited laughter of his kids are what the mountains mean to John Christiansen. He has never seen them. He is blind. But he knows what’s up there, how beautiful it is. On many visits over many years, his family has told him what they see.
The popular county attorney here for thirty-six years, John now has a private practice at age sixty-nine. He was pecking at his typewriter when I walked into his one-man office. John asked me to sit while he finished typing.
Those brief moments, watching him type, brought a jarring revelation. For a person who does not see what he types, to interrupt John in the process could disrupt his continuity. You and I can stop at any point and pick up where we left off simply by reading our last thought. John has to remember not only his last thought but also the last words he typed.
I looked around his basement office. Two small windows were near the ceiling. They did little more than indicate whether it was day or night outside. For John, I suppose, they did nothing at all. A big fluorescent fixture lit his office.
John lives five blocks from his office and walks it alone twice a day. He does not use a cane, doesn’t even own one.
“There are no sidewalks here for a ways, so I walk on the side of the street,” John explained. “What’s under my feet tells me where I am. The road has a smooth, oiled surface, and it slopes to gravel. I can anticipate intersections pretty well.”
“Ever get disoriented?”
“Oh, yes, but not often. I just stop and listen. The traffic tells me where I am,” he said with a grin, “if there is any.”
John answered the phone, apparently a client. Again, what you and I might write down as notes he has to commit to memory, even a phone number. He says that his typing was not as error-free as it once was. His part-time secretary checks it.
“The lights?” I ask without thinking.
Instantly I regretted it, knowing that I was prying and dwelling on his handicap. But John rescued me.
“You ask why I turn them on?” His warm smile got me through it. “If I don’t, people think I’m not here. And, I confess, I do that once in a while.” I think John enjoyed sharing a secret. It was a rich moment for me.
The merchants on Main Street look to the mountains for much of their business.
“Increasing mobility the last fifteen years has changed people’s buying habits. The big out-of-town discounters have made it worse,” the owner of a clothing store told me. “Now the tourist dollars determine for most of us if we have a good year, a bad year, or even if we will be in business for another one.”
Clarence Pollard works his business on Main Street business in bib overalls. Below the bib, the overalls flow around a bulge that has developed over fifty-two years. He and his wife Kristine run Beaver Sport and Pawn. Among things lettered on the store’s white front: Free Advice on Any Subject. Clarence and Kristine sell guns, fishing gear, and out-of-pawn items and run a small-loan business, accepting as collateral anything from real estate to a CD collection.
Complaining that nobody pawns things any more, Clarence pulled a power saw off a shelf. “This saw has been in this store six times. Each time I give him more money for it, because I want it. But it never fails, he always picks it up.”
A lady next door, a joint auto-parts and Radio Shack store, came in to weigh a box on Clarence’s bathroom scale, which he uses to weigh fish. “Did you hear Hugh got his elk with a bow and arrow?” she asked.
This is October. Hunting season.
In Beaver and the Tushar Mountains, nothing all year compares to it. First, it’s elk season, followed by deer season, including a time for both archers and muzzleloaders. But the big hunt, the really big one, is the rifle deer hunt. It lasts only seven days.
“When it starts, this town will float in people with orange suits and California license plates,” Clarence said. “It’s probably the most festive time of the year. People prepare for this for months. Anticipation gets so hot, it will melt snow.”
“It’s not just a male thing, either,” Kristine added. “Although it’s a great sport that a father and son can do together, the whole family gets involved. It’s the only time all year that the kids clean out the garage. They know if the truck backs in, it’s loaded, and there better be room for a big buck.”
The hunt begins at dawn on Saturday. The ladies tell me they will take over for the next couple of days. They will run the businesses. They will run the town. They will also shop.
“We figure if our husbands can spend $500 to go hunting, we probably can find something equally worthwhile for $500,” Kristine joked.
When I came down Interstate 15, I had seen signs for a cheese factory in Beaver. I remembered the warm curds that I was introduced to in Bandon, Oregon. I knew the chance of getting them fresh was slim. Now I saw the factory from the interstate, so I took the next exit and backtracked.
The curds were packaged and in the cooler. People there told me to pop them in the microwave for ten seconds. That was supposed to recreate my experience in Bandon, Oregon. Still in the parking lot of the factory, I took out a handful and gave them a quick zap in the microwave. They tasted great and even squeaked, but they were not the same as the fresh curds I tasted in Bandon. a recreation. Rusty, of course, is not as discriminating.
We spent the next couple of nights at a campground run by four ladies who came here from Phoenix. They all had jobs there in the Sunbelt and decided over a bowling game one night to start their lives over. They became partners. After some searching, they bought the Camperland RV Park here. That was over twenty years ago.
After the Columbus Day holiday that never was, this day started much the same but colder. Rusty and I walked from the campground as far as the H&H Rock Shop, named for Hattie and Hartley Greenwood. Their front yard is one rock pile After another, maybe a hundred, all separated by type. One was a pile of snowflake obsidian. Hattie said it is found only in Utah.
“We’ve been at it eighteen years,” said Hattie. “The uglier the rock on the outside, the prettier it is on the inside. Did you know that?” Hattie showed me bookends made from various cut and polished rocks. She handed me one. “This is called petrified iron. You try and cut it, you will know where it got its name.”
Two young kids were buying some sulfur from Hartley. They told us that they wanted to see if it really burns.
I asked Hattie if it did.
“Never tried to burn it. What I know about rocks is that they don’t eat and they don’t spoil. Nobody steals them, either.”
She told me about another rock house here, reportedly the birthplace of Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy.
Barbara Bradshaw’s grandfather was Butch Cassidy’s cousin. She knows all about Butch Cassidy. While Rusty waited outside, Barbara and I sat in her living room and talked about Butch.
“When Butch would get in trouble,” she recalled, “he would come over the hills. Grandpa would hide him in a shack down in the creek bed. Or he would cover him with hay, if the posse was close. Grandpa always said that Butch was a fine boy and a happy-go-lucky lad who never killed anyone. He got the name ‘Cassidy’ from a man he took up with who taught him to steal cattle. Then he started running with those four guys. They robbed trains and banks from Canada to Mexico. The Wild Bunch, they called them. One was the Sundance Kid. Sundance died up here around Pleasant Grove. Butch died around here, too, but nobody knows where.”
“But the movie had them killed in Bolivia.”
“Oh, forget that! They had to have a Hollywood ending, you know. He died at a different place and a different time. Butch visited up here when he was sixty-four years old. He always had a place to stay and a grubstake. Everybody loved Butch. I’m proud of him.”
62
Truck Attack on the Library
Monticello, Utah
Before leaving Utah and going back home for winter clothes, I first wanted to visit Monument Valley. I stopped just north of there, on Highway 191, in a quiet little town named for the Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson. I never found out why, but I hung around long enough to turn up some other interesting things. It was all that easy.
Monticello is the seat of San Juan County, the largest county in the state, 7,884-square miles. Still the courthouse, the sheriff’s office, and two floors of county offices rarely make enough news in a week to fill half a page in the San Juan Record, which comes out every Wednesday.
This town of 2,000 has a conforming, laid-back way about it. And keeping it that way is probably the only thing that would get it exercised.
Here in Utah, seven out of every ten people are Mormons. In Monticello, it’s closer to nine of every ten. If there is one tenet of the Mormon Church that is apparent to this outsider, it is the preeminence of the family. This may be why Utah has a literacy rate among the highest in the United States: 94 percent. The importance of good schools and libraries is obvious. It’s especially true here in Monticello.
Their library is more than a book repository. Much of the town’s heritage is there. In its foyer is a handmade replica of the town in miniature as it was about a hundred years ago. It covers a Ping-Pong-size table and is encased like a museum piece. Its layout was taken from old pictures, but its realism comes from the memories of those who made it.
TV tabloids will never find a lucid human drama here. Most people have never heard of Geraldo Rivera, or can’t pronounce his name and don’t care to be corrected. They live by the rules. Theirs are traditional, ordinary lives. Only ordinary things happen here.
That was until an eighteen-wheeler came into town with a driver who did not do the ordinary, even the logical, thing. He didn’t set his brakes. He was parked next to the Texaco station on Main Street, better known as the Black Oil Parking Lot. It’s a dirt lot that gradually slopes toward the street. Truck drivers park in the back of it all the time and go in the gas station for coffee or whatever.
Across the street from the lot is the San Juan County Library. It was a straight line the truck took, coasting across Main Street, over the curb, crashing into a huge tree. Had the tree not been there, the rig would have gone right through the front door, into the foyer of the library.
Rusty and I walked past the library last night. She was checking things with her nose. Even by streetlight, I could see where another truck had done the same thing. Except it hit a different tree and took off a major branch.
Dorothy Adams was the chair of the group who built the library in 1962. She is eighty-seven now.
From her front door, Dorothy lead me to the kitchen of her comfortabl
y furnished home. It has belonged to the Adams family for almost a century. Beautiful Navajo rugs cover her hardwood floors. They have been here sixty years. She has never taken them up. Dorothy never shakes them, claiming it breaks the weave. Cleaning is done with an electric broom, never a vacuum cleaner. Occasionally they get a shampoo, which Dorothy does on her hands and knees.
In the kitchen, Dorothy and a helper were busy cleaning up, putting dishes away and food in the refrigerator. I asked about the wild-truck attacks while nibbling on leftovers from a lady’s luncheon that had just finished. Dorothy had ordered it from next door, an obvious advantage of living on the same block as Wagon Wheel Pizza.
“They leave the engines running in those big trucks, even when they are not in them,” Dorothy said. “Don’t you suppose things vibrate? Something gets them started so they roll freely like that.”
“Possible. Once I can understand. But twice?”
She turned. A few red grapes went rolling across the floor. “Who told you twice? It has happened seven times.”
“Seven times?”
That seemed impossible, at least beyond mere chance. Dorothy talked about it so casually, as if it were an everyday event. As yet, I’m not sure it wasn’t.
“The last time, it was a brand-new truck on his first trip,” a Peterbilt, coming from Idaho. “It crashed right into the reading room with a full load of potatoes. Books went all over the floor. Scared folks in there half to death. Can you imagine? That was in August, and the library is still closed.”
“Covered by insurance?”
“Yes, but things are more important than money. We have no library now. And what if it had crashed into the foyer, if the little town had been destroyed? Well, that skill is gone. No one is left who could reproduce it.”
While I was on my knees collecting grapes, Dorothy changed the subject. She told me that she has lived in this house since 1936, when she got married. It was the home of her husband’s family. He was an attorney. As for her, “I’m a builder. It’s an obsession. I have to build something all the time.”
