by David Rakoff
Then, not twenty feet away, are interactive dioramas of scenes from The Book of Mormon, dealing with the prophet Nephi, a sojourn by the Nazarene Himself to the New World (there he is, blessing the Indians), and the Golden plates of runes revealed to and translated by Joseph Smith. In spirit, the particulars of the narrative are no more preposterous than the sagas that make up the cornerstones of Western society. This is not Scientology. Still, given this added liturgy and its narrative, found nowhere in the New Testament, it can be difficult to remember that Mormonism is a Jesus-based, Christian religion. (Over dinner, Morris Rosenzweig, a twenty-year resident, a composer and professor of music at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, tells me of the time he was teaching a seminar on Bach and mentioned in passing the kyrie eleison only to be met by blank stares. A fairly observant Jewish man, late of New Orleans and New York City, he then had to stop and teach the components of the Christian mass to his Mormon students.) But Christ remains the fulcrum, as evidenced when one walks the circular ramp to the upper level of the North Visitors’ Center. There, an eleven-foot-tall statue of Jesus stands in the center of a domed atrium. The walls and ceiling have been painted in a hallucinatory rendering of the universe not all that different from the backdrop of the Segway course in the Innoventions building at Disneyland. The lurid planets and surging nebulae may well reflect the Mormon cosmology, but they will also appeal to anyone who has ever been sixteen, attended a laser-light rock show at their local planetarium, or used Dark Side of the Moon as a rigid surface upon which to pick out stems and seeds.
The original, pioneer-era buildings of Temple Square—the Tabernacle, Assembly Hall, and Temple itself—are festooned with gold-rush frippery. With their Gilded Age flourishes and frontier-striver opulence of faux-marble columns and polychrome-plaster flowers, they are reminiscent of the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colorado. At the northern extreme of the square, on the other hand, are two buildings that call up less benign associations. One is an imposing structure of white stone with square columns that would not be remotely out of place in Fascist Italy. Diagonally across from this Mussolini edifice is another huge LDS headquarters, this one a near parody of Cold War–era brutalism, with huge relief maps of the globe on either side of the massive doors. A Cheneyesque building that broadcasts an agenda of world domination. Neither do the church any public-relations favors.
A shame, and often not true. For decades, Mormon boys (and some girls) have spent two years overseas on missions as a matter of course. The undeniable facts of delayed black membership and an over-representation of LDS influence and funding behind California’s Proposition 8, the state’s anti-gay marriage amendment notwithstanding, there is also a cultural value placed on learning other languages and encountering other people, a concomitant lack of xenophobia, and a focus on the often-forgotten Christian notion of welcoming strangers into one’s midst. On my way to the public library—an impressive Moshe Safdie–designed atrium for which the taxpayers dropped some serious coin—I am approached by an African American man who mistakes me for a resident and wonders if there wasn’t once a building at a now-empty corner. He hasn’t lived here for twelve years. He is back in town to find work as a cook, and is off to the library to work on their computers. “Oh, you’ve moved back,” I say. “Not really moved back. Washington State didn’t work out. California didn’t work out. I’m back at square one.” And Salt Lake City is about the best square one he can think of. That’s a bit of a surprise, I tell him, given the church’s only recent admission of blacks into its ranks. “That’s why,” he says, citing Mormon guilt as an explanation for the kindness. He has Mormon friends all over the country. The Mormons are good about treating people of color very well, he tells me. If they are so friendly and benevolent, has he himself become one? I ask.
“No way. That would be like joining the Klan,” he says.
According to Mary Jane Ciccarello, a lawyer who deals with the elderly, Salt Lake City was once known as a welcoming city all over the West, to the point where other towns would give vagrants the bus fare and send them here. We are sitting in one of the hearing rooms of the Matheson Courthouse. We play peekaboo with a Hispanic boy seated in the row in front of us, a beautiful child of about seven, nestled in the arms of his affectionate father, a man of twenty-five at the oldest. The boy smiles at us throughout the hearings and fixes us with his enormous chocolate eyes. His father’s left eye, by contrast, is occluded and milky with a neglected condition.
A very large young woman with a Polynesian name is called to the front (Salt Lake City boasts a sizable population of Mormon converts from Tonga). The public prosecutor is willing to lessen the disorderly conduct charge against her. He tantalizes us with just a hint of the actual story. “She was more the one who aided and encouraged, rather than actually the one who cut the hair.”
A fellow in a county jail tan jumpsuit with greasy Wolfman Jack hair comes out from the holding area. Mouthing “I love you” to his elderly mother, he faces the judge. He has meth and domestic-violence violations. He has failed to show up for court-ordered counseling or treatment. “Any reason we shouldn’t revoke his probation and send him to jail?” asks the judge. The public defender mentions that his father is in ill health and it’s not certain how much longer he will be alive. The defendant wants to “straighten up his life and fly right.” But it seems he has had ample opportunity to do so on many occasions, the judge counters. His case manager stands up to address the judge. But even this angel of mercy is over it. She has tried everything. “He said he couldn’t urinate in front of other people, so we did hair follicles and it was off the charts. It was nine times the limit. He should stay in jail and do the program there,” she advises. The judge agrees.
“Put some money on my books,” the man tells his mother as he is escorted out.
There are windows and natural light in the courtroom. The walls are decorated with framed artwork by children. But the cultivated dignity goes beyond the decor. The judge is respectful to all the defendants who come before him, almost particularly to those who jangle in, their progress hindered by leg irons. No one here is getting rich from doing this work, but there is none of the exhaustion, squalor, or apathy one generally associates with the court system. The proceedings are run efficiently by the clerks, two blond women who tap away at their computers throughout, scheduling hearings and return appearances, etc. Mary Jane pegs them as church members.
“No doubt about it,” she says. “They probably have a ton of kids. The myth is that Mormon women don’t work, that they’re home being mothers. They all work. They have to.”
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Unlike some American Christian sects, for whom Halloween is a prime proselytizing opportunity, I am told that the holiday serves no similar purpose in the Mormon church, whose liturgy seems a good deal more heaven-than hell-based, as far as I can tell. Halloween decorations abound around the town in uncomplicated profusion. Even the Castle of Chaos, the local haunted house set up for the season, serves no evangelical purpose. Despite this year’s theme of the Seven Deadly Sins, it is an entirely secular entertainment. Neither the horrors of abortion and its inevitable painful death from botched surgery and immediate dispatch to Hades nor the evils of predatory, recruited homosexuality and its surefire dividend of AIDS are among the creepy attractions.
The castle began in 2001 to serve as a departure from the usual Halloween fare, given the troubled times. “With the tragedies of 9-11, we gave an alternative to the gore and terror offered at other local haunts. For the past 7 years … our haunt has become more and more intense … Our actors are trained in theory as well as movement and interaction to ensure that you are immersed in not only the scares, but the reasons behind the scares as well … We are here to terrorize, yet entertain you. We are intensity,” says its website.
The castle’s façade of stone arches is painted on a plywood front attached to a one-story building out near the freeway. The thrash-metal hit “Du Hast,” by a Germ
an band called Rammstein, splits the air: “Willst du bis zum Tod der Scheide, sie lieben auch in schlechten Tagen?” “Do you want to love her, until the death of the vagina, even in bad times?” (I still say Cole Porter should never have cut this from Anything Goes in New Haven.)
I head around the back to walk through the space and meet this cast of kinetic and theoretical adepts. Expecting a crack team of ninja therapists, or at the very least members of the Salt Lake City community of professional actors gigging for extra cash between regional productions of Les Miz, I find instead a group of kids under twenty, hanging out and smoking, wearing Goth teen-wear direct from Hot Topic, the mall franchise that has become the successful purveyor of prepackaged disaffection: black T-shirts adorned with safety pins and skulls, black pants designed with perpetually hanging suspenders. One boy has added a black cape in viscose, while another, who will be playing “Brian the Death Row Inmate,” wears orange coveralls glazed with fake blood.
Climbing the wooden stairs of the loading dock, I enter the backstage area and approach the only grown-up there, thinking he is the evening’s impresario, with whom I’d spoken on the phone. After a mere ten words exchanged between us, it becomes clear that I am speaking to a friendly but severely mentally challenged man. His role is that of a cadaver. When I ask him his name, he takes out some sort of Utah social services photo ID. “What that says,” he tells me, pointing to the laminated card. Even though he’ll be playing a corpse, he is wearing fake contact lenses, the irises eerily light-colored and disconcerting. Another boy, age fifteen (“I put people in coffins and send them down to their deaths in the chain-saw room”), is also wearing the fake lenses. His face is such a ruin of acne, a parody of adolescent skin, that I spend an interval wondering whether the star map of pustules has been applied like the eyes. I want to tell him that his pimples will be only slightly less temporary than the lenses, and that he shouldn’t worry because underneath it all he has the face of an angel, but I know to say so would be much creepier than anything the Castle of Chaos could offer up. Instead I ask how much he’s making. He diplomatically tells me, “Some of the actors get paid.”
Outside the costume room is a list of rules, number three of which is “No inappropriate language.” It makes me wonder what the fellow having the sickeningly realistic ax gash in his head perfected might say that could possibly offend. The castle experience, like all haunted houses, is set up like a journey. I take a brief walk through the rickety particle-board labyrinth and the words “fire hazard” ring through my ears. The plan had been to stay and hang out, to watch patrons get the shit scared out of them from behind the scenes, but it is all too much: the blaring German music, the simulacra of spattered crime scenes, the Victorian insane asylum-meets-Abu Ghraib menace of it all. I can’t get out of there fast enough.
How is it, in this huge-sky landscape where just crossing the road is an airy jaunt that sings with openness and possibility, or is at least meant to, this place where one could start walking in any direction and just keep going, that I should have such a dispiriting sense of confinement?
It’s a paradoxical feeling to have in the City of the Saints, since the streets of Salt Lake City are a steppe-like 132 feet wide. This breadth was decreed by Brigham Young so that a team of oxen and a covered wagon might be able to turn around in a full circle unimpeded. (An almost identical pronouncement was attributed to Cecil Rhodes when he was overseeing the layout of the city of Bulawayo in Rhodesia. Is this bit of hypertrophic urban planning just a standard issue paleo-Trumpism? One of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nineteenth-Century Men with Big Ideas?) The avenues yawn open, human proximity is vanquished, and the nearest people seem alienatingly distant. Such space between souls, such an uninterrupted vista of sky must imbue a populace with a sense of possibility—lebensraum and all that jazz. And yet, walking back to the car from the Castle of Chaos, I think of these teenagers, and they couldn’t look more fettered—a world away from the crowds at the Gateway Mall, a bi-level outdoor shopping center constructed to look like an Umbrian hill town (if Umbrian hill towns had California Pizza Kitchens). If landscape shapes character, then it is never more clear than here, where I encounter the closest thing resembling a crowd in Salt Lake City. People, many of them in Halloween costumes, stroll eight abreast like one of Brigham Young’s mythic team of oxen, never moving faster than the speed of cold honey. I have never been in a public space in America where a sense of how to walk among others was so completely and confoundingly absent. People stop abruptly, cut across lanes, and generally meander as blissfully unaware as cows in Delhi.
Perhaps it’s not just space but the idea behind it that informs this entitlement. Human history has always been subject to the random and anarchic interactions of rock and water. Settlement succeeds or fails according to an unwritten checklist: Is there a felicitous dearth of malaria-bearing insects and wild animals? A convenient absence of marauding locals? Does that vengeful and quick-to-ire volcano god routinely incinerate our children and bury our homes beneath an infernal slurry of lava? No? Let’s stay awhile.
Many places are colonized and consecrated in the name and glory of the Almighty, but what makes Utah unique, singularly so in the Americas, at least, is not just that those who settled it felt they could live there but that they should live there. It was upon receiving the reports from his advance men of this paradoxical region of arable land hard by an inhospitable desert and a crop-killing inland sea that Brigham Young then received the divine revelation that this was the true land of the Saints. Topography as God-given destiny.
And what topography! My friend Wyatt Seipp drives down from Idaho, and we head out of the city. Barely an hour from town, all is harsh and huge. We drive past the flaming smokestacks of oil refineries, past small towns in the foothills. For the non-alpine dweller, “foothills” seems an oddly reductive term for such incline and sky-blocking mass. The tiny houses nestle toylike against the slopes, and highest of all, by design, the local LDS temple, the golden pin dot of its Moroni statue gleaming.
We’re heading for Promontory Point, home of the Golden Spike National Historic Site, about a hundred miles northwest of the city. It was there, on May 10, 1869, that the tracks of the Central Pacific line met those of the Union Pacific and were joined to form the first transcontinental rail system. The landscape is as large as the Golden Spike’s museum/restroom/gift shop is inconspicuous and unprepossessing. It can be hard to fathom that we are at one of the most important places in the United States, but it was here at the Golden Spike that the country turned into, well, a country. The first transcontinental telegraph had been completed eight years earlier (in Salt Lake City, in fact) in October 1861, which was a boon to communication, to be sure. But you can tap-tap-tap “Mother ill. Come soonest. Stop” all you like, and if you’re still relying on the stagecoach to get you to the deathbed in question, I’m afraid I have some bad news. The effect of the railroad was felt far more strongly and with shocking immediacy. This is not metaphoric. The Pony Express ceased operations two days later. With the railroads, the trickle of settlers coming by wagon train was suddenly upgraded to a flood of terrifyingly efficient westward expansion. Manifest destiny was transformed from the merely notional into reality at a speed never known theretofore. Just ask the Indians.
Scrub plain stretches in all directions to the suede-brown hills in the distance. Even seen from above, the satellite images on Google Earth reveal an expanse as beige and unvaried as a slice of bologna. One has a sense of how delayed the gratification of congress must have been for the Central and Union Pacific teams. No doubt, they must have had each other in their sights for weeks before they could consider the job done. Then again, the sight of anyone new, even if only in the distance, must have been a welcome tonic after months of laying track out in the middle of nowhere.
F. Scott Fitzgerald stopped too soon when he wrote about the fresh green breast of the New World (affectionately known as Long Island) that bloomed before Dutch sailo
rs’ eyes as being the last time man came face-to-face with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. There was a whole continent beyond the eastern seaboard to slake the thirst of those seeking such adventure.
Standing at the squat commemorative obelisk, I try to conjure the mind-set that beheld this vast, sere pan of brown dirt—with the bare foothills rising in the distance and the far more forbidding gray, snow-capped mountains rising farther beyond, all under a sky whose unbounded immensity proclaims one’s insignificance with an irrefutable and terrifying truth—but I cannot do it. How does one take all this in and still think, Yes, I will go ever gaily forward. I will endure a pre-industrialized trek over hundreds of miles on a rocking, hard-slatted wagon bench, or in a saddle, or on foot. I will leave my children behind, or watch them succumb to scarlet fever, rickets, or infection. On those special occasions when I do wipe my ass, it will be with leaves. I will have an abscessed molar extracted by some half-blind chuck-wagon drunkard wielding a pair of rusty pliers, and I will employ my own just-past-Neolithic tools to make this railroad, this house, this town. And one fine day, with my remaining teeth, I will bite down on a leather strap while they amputate my leg without benefit of anesthetic and then I will hobble twenty-two miles on foot—one foot!—so that I might then climb a scaffold in order to carve a tribute to His glory into the unyielding granite escutcheon of a cathedral. How did they do it? The monks and abbots who hauled the rocks to build their monasteries on craggy Himalayan peaks and kept at it until the job was done. Ditto the conquistadors who, even fueled with the promise of gold, saw those jagged, stratospheric peaks of the Andes and didn’t just say, Oh fuck this, I’m going back to Spain. It seems frankly remarkable that anyone anywhere ever attempted anything.
