‘We gotta Ben Lomond in Utah,’ said the guy suddenly standing beside me, ‘I’m gonna get you over there.’ I would like to say he looked like an angel, but rather he bore a passing resemblance to a pugilist. Other Scots than myself had been lured to Utah by angels. Here is the story of one of them from over 150 years ago, summarised by myself from his own account …
As he later told it, he was sitting in Whifflet station, having missed the first train of the day, when the Archangel Gabriel appeared. He was not surprised to see the angel as he had been having visions ever since being recently struck on the head by the cauldron of red hot metal in the ironworks. There was no injury compensation or sickness leave in the Coatbridge ironworks in the 1850s, places described as ‘the worst out of hell’, so he carried on working despite the burns and injuries. The angel (it was still dark and we should remember that even railway porters can seem like angels when we are in crepuscular distress caused by a late train) told him he would receive shelter until the next train arrived at a house in one of the miners’ ‘raws’ alongside the railway. Miners had once been labour aristocrats, but a series of strikes in the 1840s had been broken, along with their unions, and now they were in a state of near servitude.
He knocked at the house which he later stated the angel had indicated, intending to ask merely for a glass of water and shelter (it was raining a cold drizzle as so often is the case in Lanarkshire) until the next train. When the door opened he found the occupants in a state of turmoil, packing their belongings into wooden kists. Invited in, he sat on one of these while his request for water was attended to by a woman going to the pump outside the house. He watched the family as he drank and asked if they were emigrating as thousands then were. Told yes, he asked, ‘Canada?’ – the main destination at that time.
‘Na, man. Zion, beautiful Deseret, the Earthly Paradise, flowing wi milk and hinney, where you are guaranteed land, and to where the Saints pye your passage. The warld is comin tae an end and Zion alone will be spared. Come wi us! Dinna bide here in slavery and poverty, come tae Zion!’
He left the house, thanking the man and woman for the water, and walked back to the station. As he ascended the steps, Gabriel appeared again and said, ‘Go back, go with them!’ (or maybe the railway porter told him the 7.15 had been delayed as well), so he went back to the house, and instead of asking for another glass of water, he went to Zion.
My own introduction to Zion, to Deseret, or as it was now called, to Utah, had less of a miraculous intervention in its facilitation (unless the Lord is still hiding something from me over a decade later). But I was, like the Coatbridge iron-worker, at a difficult stage in my life. I had just undergone the trauma of a hip replacement operation and was slowly recovering, still using elbow crutches. In addition I had given up my college teaching job of over 20 years duration, to try and make a living working as a full-time writer. This was proving to be a harder and more problematic task than I had thought.
I had worked whilst still teaching, on the manuscript of a book called Scotland’s Mountains before the Mountaineers, a labour of three hard years. Bringing it all together on leaving teaching, I submitted it to my publisher, and, confident in the publication date given by him, had arranged to give the launch of the book with a lecture and slide show, (accompanied by mountain songs provided by my friend Jack Law) at a Mountaineering Literature Festival in Leeds, late in 1998. The date of the festival drew near, but the book failed to appear. Then, shortly before the event came the bad news; the book would not be ready in time – though the publisher could send me copies of the cover to distribute as advertising. A great believer in having to shoot the bear before you can sell the bearskin, I was preparing to cancel my appearance at the festival when my life-partner told me not to be stupid, insisting (as she usually does on any suitable occasion) that I should ‘Go!’. (The angel in disguise?)
Reluctantly I took the advice and headed south with a heavy heart. Despite my pessimism the event went very well – at least if measured by the number of book covers given away, although that may have been an unreliable indicator. The songs were enjoyed as were the images of mountains I showed, including a few of Ben Lomond in the Scottish Highlands. As Jack and I prepared to tidy up after the event a guy approached us. He said, (and I repeat verbatim), ‘We gotta Ben Lomond in Utah. I’m gonna get you guys across to do this show over there.’
We are Scots, Jack and I; cynical, pessimistic, and careful not to raise any hopes that might be dashed. We chatted politely about the possibilities to Mikel Vause, who told us he taught literature, (including, he said, the world’s only course on Mountaineering Literature) at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and we promised to send him a copy of my book when it finally appeared and expected never to hear from him again. A couple of months later (my book had by then been despatched) I got a phone call which went roughly as follows: ‘Hi, this is Mike Vause. We met in Leeds. You guys get your asses over here and do your show for a Wilderness Conference I am organising at Weber State. We’ll pay your fares and give you accommodation and an honorarium.’ It was more an order than a request, so we did as we were instructed. In February 1999 Jack and I were on a flight to Utah. And that is how it all started.
Ironically the flight, via Amsterdam, took us back over Glasgow in the dark, where I could see the lights of my street, 10 hours after having left the house; we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere – a bit like the ironworker in Whifflet station whose story I retold at the beginning of this chapter. Another dozen hours of boredom were only broken by seeing the coast of Labrador and then Hudson’s Bay in the gathering darkness, a wilderness of ice floes and emptiness. Salt Lake City airport came suddenly in the morning, with the sun beginning to rise behind the snow-clad Wasatch Mountains to the east. And there was our substitute for Archangel Gabriel, the more welcome Mikel, waiting to drive us along the freeway through the built-up urban area north of Salt Lake to Ogden, where we were deposited to catch up on a little sleep – in the Ben Lomond Hotel.
‘You’ve got a Ben Lomond Hotel and well as a Ben Lomond?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Yep, and we gotta a Ben Lomond High School as well,’ came the reply.
Mikel left us to snatch a kip and some late breakfast, saying he’d pick us up for a talk to his literature class in the afternoon. This had not been mentioned in the programming schedule and I asked in mild panic,
‘What about?’
‘Oh, anything you like,’ he said, ‘whatever you talk about you’ll know more about than they will, so it will be fine.’ And with that he left us in our suite of rooms.
The Ben Lomond Hotel was, as such places in the US often are, luxurious but with an additional slight air of vulgarity. It proclaimed itself as ‘An Historic Building’ – it had been built in the 1920s – and in the foyer there was ‘An Historic Exhibition’ of bottles, plates and tin openers from the inter-war period. We had one of those gargantuan American breakfasts where everything initially looks wonderful but whose constituents would be difficult to tell apart in a blind tasting. The waitress approached, friendly but looking slightly frayed at the edges, ‘Where you guys from? Scotland, wow! You gotta lotta castles over there, aint ya? When you guys get back, you be sure and send me a postcard of some castles.’ She was probably amazed when we obliged and had possibly also forgotten who we were by the time she received it.
‘What are we going to do this afternoon with Mike’s students?’ Jack asked, mildly perturbed.
‘Just give them a couple of Rabbie Burns songs – that’s literature – and I’ll show them some slides of Ben Lomond, that should do.’ I replied.
Mike duly arrived and drove us to the university campus on the edge of Ogden, pulling the car over in the biggest car park I had ever been in until I walked a bit further and realised this was the overflow from the main car park. I mentioned this to Mikel and he commented matter-of-factly, ‘No one walks anywhere here. And everyone has a car.’
The talk, which I hurriedly entitled ‘Romanticism and the Scottish Highlands’, went well, to judge by the polite response and the number of books I sold. But here I was to observe a phonemenon for the first time that almost always repeated itself subsequently whenever I gave a talk in those parts – no one asked any questions, or if they did, it was a personal question about myself, or something totally unexpected like, ‘My ancestors were called Black. Where does the Black Clan come from in Scotland?’
I asked Mikel about the lack of questioning and he gave a curious twist to the issue.
‘Well, if they ask a question it implies that you’ve missed something out or got something wrong, and people in Utah are brought up to be polite and not be critical of other people publicly. It’s the Mormon thing.’
My first encounter with a form of behaviour that was initially a welcome contrast to the grumpy critical cynicism we are so used to at home in Britain, but which eventually left me feeling that I was drowning in a syrup of cloying ‘niceness’, and longing for some good old-fashioned bad manners.
We certainly didn’t get any bad manners at Mikel’s home that evening, where we went to see his collection of ‘antique’ ice-axes. I was surprised; they were all more recent than the wooden shafted one I had started mountaineering with in the 1960s, and which Mikel immediately offered me $100 for if I brought it over next time. His wife Janis was the essence of kindness and friendliness, a fine person, and we also met two of his lovely daughters. By now Jack and I were both shattered and we headed back to the hotel for what we hoped would be a good night’s sleep; this ‘Merka’ was hard work.* We were hoping to get a day out walking on the Wasatch Mountains the next day, though Mikel told us nobody walked in winter on these mountains, only skied, because the snow was very dry, soft and difficult to walk in – and there was a high avalanche risk. Nonsense we thought, we are Scots, we eat ice-axes for breakfast, no silly soft snow will stop us.
We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Outside our luxury suite was the hotel’s electricity sub-station, which thundered away all night, giving jet-lag induced exhaustion only momentary respite in fitful slumbers; At least for me – Jack could sleep through an artillery bombardment and awoke refreshed. In the morning I decided to complain and found that this isn’t done in Merka, and there is only one (or two) answers to the question of how things were, in hotel, restaurant or anywhere else, and they are ‘Fine’ or ‘Great’.
‘Is everything all right for you gentlemen’ asked the hotel receptionist who had that combination of sweetness and blandness I was to find most in her profession were to have here.
‘No, there was a generator outside my window that went all night and it disturbed my sleep.’
She looked puzzled.
‘But everything was fine?’
‘No, I want to change our rooms. There is a noisy generator outside our window that kept us awake.’
‘I am afraid I do not have any other rooms, Sir, to give you. The hotel is full.’
I fell silent.
‘So,’ she smiled, ‘everything is satisfactory?’
I gave up and we headed out into the crisp, invigorating air of a Utah winter’s morning.
Later, I was to learn that, if your meal was rotten or your hotel a flophouse, this implied that you, the consumer, had made the wrong choice in the first place. To avoid admitting such an error, the thing to do was to say everything was great, showing what a good free and democratic choice you had made. Merkans don’t make mistakes, or at least, admit to them publicly.
Between meeting Mikel in Leeds and flying out to Utah I had got rid of my elbow crutches and wanted to test my walking abilities. Utah’s mountains are probably the least known of the Rocky Mountains, the last parts of the chain before it peters out into the great Colorado Plateau. Reaching 4000m (over 13,000ft) in the north of Utah in the Uintas area, they are lower on the Wasatch part of the range running parallel to the Great Salt Lake, between Ogden and Salt Lake City. Ogden itself is about 4250ft above sea level, and the peaks behind rise to between 8000 and 9,500 ft, so the height gain is not all that dissimilar to that on a Scottish Munro, I thought. We had brought our walking gear and I had a guidebook, so I persuaded Jack we would try for Mount Ogden, clearly visible, with its subsidiary Malan’s Peak providing a sort of halfway house to the summit. Heads were shaken but politeness prevented anyone we spoke to suggesting it might not be a good idea, though the taxi driver who took us from the hotel to the trailhead did comment that we would probably not see anyone else that day, adding, ‘And watch out for the cougars.’
‘Cougars?’ asked Jack, a little anxiously.
‘He’s just making all that up, I’m sure they shot them all years ago,’ I replied.
It was hazy, with a thin mist covering everything below us as we set off along the track, reassuringly well trodden, one of the ancient levels of the Great Salt Lake left by its retreat over the millenia. Our first anxiety came when, as our own route headed up Taylor Canyon according to my guidebook, all the footsteps continued along the flat ground of the former lake level. But there were only two or three inches of snow at this stage and I told Jack that making a trail in that would be no bother. At first it wasn’t, though the snow was amazingly fluffy, impossible to composite because of its dryness. Taylor Canyon was a fine piece of sandstone architecture, the red rock of its cliffs making a satisfying combination of colours with the white snow and the green of the pines, and we wended our way up the river bed, the snow deepening all the while and beginning to slow our progress, until we had to break out of the canyon and up its incline, past a magnificent cliff with two jagged teeth atop, towards Malan’s Peak. At well over 7000ft this was about halfway to our objective – the summit of Mount Ogden.
We were waist deep in the snow by now, and its refusal to give purchase meant we were constantly slipping back in our tracks, pulling ourselves forward as much with our hands as with our feet. After much toil we managed to gain the ridge leading to Malan’s summit, and finally we were rewarded with a staggering view. The Great Salt Lake lay below us, looking like something out of the Antarctic, and to the north the face of Ben Lomond, appearing like a giant version of our own summit back home, towered above North Ogden. That mountain, I decided, was clearly out of bounds on this trip, though I was to climb it on a subsequent visit to Utah. Tired as much as impressed we sat beneath a tree to admire the view. Jack spoke first, ‘Don’t look up, but there are huge paw marks leading to the foot of this tree.’
Despite our own tracks, a quick look revealed to me that that was indeed the case, and these marks were made by no wee pussy, but by some big beast. I was thinking – it’s like one of those Western movies, where the cougar jumps out of the tree and mauls the cowboy to death. I was wondering whether I could run faster than Jack and then found the courage to look up. Whatever had been up the tree, had since vacated it, and we breathed again.
This incident got the adrenalin flowing and inspired us to attempt the last couple hundred feet to the summit of Malan’s Peak, still thinking that Mount Ogden was within our powers. The snow was now so deep and soft we waded through it like snowploughs, it was impossible to walk on its surface. We gained the top, but the last 200ft had taken us half-an-hour; we were moving hardly any faster than the ‘normal’ rate of climbers nearing the summit of Mount Everest! It had taken us a total of four hours to summit on Malan’s, and it would be another four to do the next 2000ft to the top of Mount Ogden, which would mean we would be benighted. Chastened, and feeling slightly silly for having not taken local warnings to heart, we retraced our steps downhill, moving fast in the trail we had made.
Mikel chuckled at our discomfiture, which made me think that (I was to discover, wrongly) my walking plans for this trip were now scuppered by the snow. And our host also confirmed what the taxi driver had said. There had been a spate of cougar attacks lately, as humans entered cougar territory more and more (not just walking in it, but also building houses in the animals’ habitat). A couple of female joggers had actually been killed, then part-eaten, running on the former level of the Salt Lake at the foot of the mountains.
‘But they wouldn’t attack two big guys like you’, Mikel informed us.
Now, with the mountains out of bounds we had time to kill before our Big Night at the Wilderness Conference banquet, where we were to be the opening evening’s after-dinner entertainment, so the next day we went to explore downtown Ogden.
Ogden arose as a railway junction on the east-west and north-south lines through the western USA; at one time it was the third biggest rail junction in America, though subsequent decline means that though it still has a reduced goods freight, the railway no longer carries passengers. We met Mikel for coffee (which turned out to be a second breakfast) in the former Union Railway Station, now a restaurant and museum of the history of the railway, with large numbers of those huge American locomotive engines standing in the sidings in an open-air adjunct to the museum. This neo-classical brick built building is to my mind the finest public building in Ogden, despite local pride in the hotel we were staying in. The city also has a very fine collection of New Deal architecture in Art Deco style – Ogden High School and the Town Hall especially. Indeed though the guidebooks don’t seem to share my opinion, after many visits I find Ogden an increasingly fascinating place. Over coffee Mikel explained that the railway and its associated industries had made of Ogden one of the most cosmopolitan, least Mormon, places in Utah, with a large admixture of Mexican, Irish and other immigrants. Indeed during Prohibition it was one of the main focal points for running bootleg hooch in the US because of its communications advantages. ‘Take a walk along historic 25th Street,’ he recommended, ‘back then every joint was a speak-easy or brothel.’
We first wandered around the railhead area of small factories and clapboard housing of a poor standard one just doesn’t see at home. Coupled with the vacant lots, empty but for abandoned cars or advertising hoardings, it was not a salubrious area. So we decided to head for 25th Street. It has improved a lot since then but in 1999 25th Street was a gap-toothed row of greasy eateries and vacant lots, with tatty lodging houses full of people you would cross the street to avoid. Its fine wood and brick buildings – those that remained – were in a sorry state of repair. Soon we were almost back at our hotel, and we swung left down Washington Boulevard searching for something to look at. We soon found it, possibly not the best, but the most amazing building in Ogden. Peery’s Theatre, built in the 1920s in an imagined Egyptian style in that over-the-top way only Americans can carry off. Its garish colours certainly lit up the street, and it looked like a building on mescalin.
We headed uphill, past more vacant housing, where people appeared to be entering and leaving by the windows (squatters we were later told) until gradually downtown Ogden was left behind and we entered the seriously middle-class part of town, where Mike and Janis live. Mike’s house had impressed me as few others had (I have always lived in flats). It was a late Frank Lloyd Wright-style brick-built house from the 1950s with a balcony giving a view over the Salt Lake to Nevada. It lay in a conservation area stretching over several streets where the rich of Odgen resided. We tried to walk around in this area, but it was almost as difficult as Malan’s peak had been the day before. First, there were no pavements; nobody walked out of their houses, all drove. We were obviously conspicuous as we strolled around and curtains twitched. Secondly people here don’t have fences or hedges round their lawns which debouch to the pavement. There were a lot of big dogs running loose, and we had brief encounters with a couple of them until they were called back by their masters. Thirdly, several of the streets were gated and we could gain no access to the houses beyond.
And our frustrating urban promenade revealed another difference from home. An estate like this would have been built in the UK by a developer in a more or less homogeneous style, then the houses sold off individually. Here we saw that every house was different; American bespoke individualism. You get what you pay for, out of the architectural catalogue. Here was an Art Deco gem, there a Victorian Gothic pile, further down an Art Nouveau palace, there a classical mini Palladian mansion. We were meditating on this when the police car drew up, and out leaned one of the officers, who in a monotone politely asked,
‘Can I help you gentlemen. Are you lost?’ Someone had presumably reported us as ‘suspicious characters’.
‘No, we are fine,’ assured Jack.
‘What are you gentlemen doing? Do you live around here?’
‘No, we are staying at the Ben Lomond Hotel. We are just out walking.’
‘Walking!’ – the sangfroid was so shattered by this piece of astonishing information, that the response was repeated interrogatively, ‘Walking?’
A muted conversation between the two policemen occurred in the car, then one offered, ‘There is no public transport in this area. If you gentlemen would like to go back downtown we can oblige with a lift.’
I accepted for both of us, fearing that those twitching their curtains might not call back the dogs if we hung around here much longer.
Doing Ogden had not taken us as long as we had expected, so I decided to visit Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake in the afternoon. Jack, on the other hand, thought he would spend the time practising on his guitar and running through a few of the songs for our conference performance. As I got ready he suggested, ‘I thought we might try a couple of those pubs of 25th Street tonight, to see if I can get a floorspot, just for the fun of it?’ I have occasionally noted an element of the ingénue in Jack, and this was one such time. I would rather have re-run the gauntlet of the dogs in uptown Ogden, but one has duties to one’s pals, so I agreed. I’ll deal with what happened that evening before covering my own visit to Antelope Island.
Looking a bit like Dylan the Rabbit in the Magic Roundabout, I am not sure Jack realised how conspicuous he was walking from the hotel along 25th Street to the railway area that evening, with his guitar slung over his back. Eyes were raised too, but nothing said, when we entered a Mexican café near the flour mill, occupied by Hispanics and (very) poor whites. Jack had heard that Mexican food was good in the USA. After working our way through as much as we could of the mega plate of reconstituted industrial slurry that was offered us, we headed back, fortified, to seek Jack’s fame and fortune. (He was always talking about the band, I forget which one, that had been performing in an Irish pub to two or three people, one of whom – by chance a Mr Big in the music business on holiday – signed them up and made their fortunes.)
He was so eager he was a bit ahead of me and had already entered the first joint when I was just reaching the bottom step. I had not reached the top step (there were only four or five) when he came out with a look of horror on his face and said simply, ‘Let’s get the fuck outtahere,’ almost pushing me back down the steps.
He said nothing as we walked back down the street, then I noticed an oasis, the street’s first apparent piece of gentrification, a micro-brewery called Rooster’s, and dragged the traumatised troubadour in. He still said nothing as I ordered beers, and found that in Utah (at that time) you had to order food with alcohol, and added some token snacks to the request.
‘Where you guys been?’ asked the barman when he brought the drinks. I told him of my pal’s attempt to get a floorspot, and pointed to the location down the street.
‘You went in THERE?’ came the utterly astonished, yet admiring reply. Jack has still not told me what he saw inside. It certainly wasn’t Mr Big.
I had driven that afternoon to Antelope Island, a State Park lying in the Great Salt Lake and linked to the mainland by a causeway (everywhere has to be accessible by car). The Great Salt Lake in winter is one of the wonders of the world. Encircled by snowy mountains, and with the mist rising off the water, it is like an imagined landscape of Arctic purity. The lake is not sterile, with salinity ranging down from a high of 25% to only 4% in areas, and though there are no fish, minute shrimp breed in it as do seasonal hordes of flies, which provide rich pickings for migratory and resident birds. Antelope have been re-introduced to the island sanctuary as have bison; indeed settling a herd of the latter here in the 1890s probably saved the American bison, once numbered in millions, from total extinction. I paid my dues at the Ranger Station to the most obese park ranger I had ever seen. She looked like they would have to dismantle the kiosk at night to extricate her from it. I asked her what the condition of the trails were on the island.
‘I dunno,’ she replied, ‘Never been out on those back-country trails myself.’
There is, as is the case almost everywhere in US National Parks, a scenic drive round Antelope Island, but I thought I would break out, once I’d had my buffalo burger and coke in the café at the car park, and do some those ‘back-country trails’, fancying as a target the main summit on the island, Frary Peak. It was a gorgeous sunny day as I walked through the savannah-like countryside past little knolls, or knobs as they call them. The trail I took wandered four miles though the prairie, past herds of grazing buffalo, to the foot of the peak, where a sign announced the summit as ‘off trail’ and attempts to climb it punishable by a ‘citation’. I wandered back by a circular route, deciding to avoid being spotted attempting Frary Peak by my fat park ranger through her binoculars back at the toll station, and heavily fined as I exited. I did not know that I was in a greater danger than facing a fine, until my local friends reacted in horror that night to my tale. I had approached close to the buffalo, taking photographs of the cuddly-looking – rather stupid I had heard – beasts. But not only are they very aggressive, they can also run at up to 30 miles per hour for short periods, and from such an attack there is little chance of escape. Like the cougars, the buffalo have left dead tourists around their habitat. I think my polite hosts were slowly beginning to think that Jack and I were archetypal Mad Scotsmen, having braved cougars, buffalo – and the wildlife of downtown Ogden.
But we still had our event at the conference banquet (which turned out to be a Mexican self-service buffet) that evening which went very well – as I was to learn most things in America tend to. I showed the slides with the stories of the exploration of Scotland’s mountains, and Jack sang the songs. There were no questions. The actual conference was a mixed bag, much of it dominated by that anti-industrial Worship of Wilderness, from people whose lifestyle comes from industrial society and whose access to wilderness is predicated on that lifestyle, which I find irritating, even reactionary. And there was a lot of the Metaphysics of the Mundane, platitudes dressed up as profundities. One rather faded hippy woman showed a slide show which started (and continued) as follows.
I am a Woman (picture of herself)
Wife (picture of husband)
Mother (picture of kids)
Wilderness Lover (picture of cows and fields)
– and so forth.
But there were good points: an interesting talk on the drowning of Glen Canyon on the Colorado River for the creation of the eponymous dam – which story will feature later in this book, and a quite brilliant one which made the whole event for me worthwhile: a talk on the history of walking from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the present day, which was both learned and stimulating. It held me rivetted, especially, I have to admit, as the deliverer, one Ms S was drop-dead gorgeous. I was looking forward to the ‘wrap party’ as they call it, in order to have further (verbal) intercourse, I hoped, with Ms S on the dialectics of pedestrianism, and hopefully hear her say, ‘I just loved your talk/book/accent … ’.
The advice I would give anyone unfamiliar with America is – go with the flow and pretend you are in a movie, but remember it’s a movie. The yellow cab came to the door of the hotel (I was mildly surprised it wasn’t driven by Travis from Taxi Driver) and Jack and I got in, with his guitar in its case, and we drove to the outskirts of Ogden to a motel where some of the conference participants were staying. Crammed into a double room with lots of booze in a state where until recently drink laws were a bit like they are currently in Iran, it felt deliciously wicked. Jack started by taking forward his performance and adding lots of Beatles, Dylan and Orbison numbers to it. Various others improvised and joined in and we really had a party going. Unfortunately, Ms S appeared more interested in Jack’s music than my observations on her talk. A big geetar and a Cheshire-cat smile can get you anywhere with women, it sadly seems. For my sins I was cornered by a very earnest and overweight grand dame from Australia who appeared to want me to repeat my talk as a private performance; I could see, thankfully, that she was only interested in my mind, not my body. I can’t remember getting back to the hotel but we must have, as I woke up there.
Next day we drove Jack to the airport for his flight home, and on the way back to Ogden Mikel told me, (they do that), ‘I’ve arranged for you to go walking down south for a couple of days with Burt and Lindy. You’ll like them.’ Mikel hadn’t told me where we were going either, but they do that as well. But, I thought, go with the flow.
Burt and Lindy turned up about noon the next day in their gas-guzzling Land Cruiser. Burt was a nice guy who taught American Lit, Lindy was a nice girl who worked in computers. There was a third member of the party, The Dawg, a big lolloping retriever which had a free rein to roam the car and kept leaping into the front seat and onto the driver’s lap at frequent intervals during the drive … unnerving to say the least. Within a few minutes of knowing me Lindy told me in that way Americans often do, about intimacies which we in Britain would guard for years – for example that she and Burt didn’t have kids. The dawg was clearly a substitute. We headed south and I thought I might as well ask, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Moab,’ came the reply from Burt.
I had no idea where that was, though the original Moab I knew was from the and I recalled a line from one of Walter Scott’s novels regarding ‘lustful Moabite women.’ It sounded promising.
‘You’ll see some Aztec ruins down there,’ Lindy told me.
Aztecs? I thought. Weren’t we a bit far north for them? But politeness restrained me from expressing my reservations about her archaeological knowledge.
South we headed from southern Salt Lake City through the Mormon heartland, American Fork, Orem, Provo, Spanish Fork, a massive prosperous grid-plan of quietly pleasant suburban housing, if a little monotonous and unvaried on the eye. On the hillsides, as in Morocco with the mosques, stood massive Mormon Churches, expressing cultural hegemony. In between trying to keep the dawg from blocking Burt’s view of the road ahead, Lindy asked me about Scotland.
‘Do you have television there?
‘We invented television. John Logie Baird in the nineteen-twenties.’
‘If we came to visit Scotland, would we be able to get maps?’
‘We invented modern maps with the Military Survey of Scotland in the seventeen-fifties. We have the best maps in the world.’
This kind of questioning wears you down after a while, and you find yourself answering simply Yes’ or ‘No’, but I was new to America and not yet used to the profound ignorance about the outside world that exists there even in ostensibly educated people, so then I would reply at length, if – occasionally – perhaps a little testily.
Suddenly at Spanish Fork the scenery changed as we swung south-east into Spanish Fork Canyon, quickly being hemmed in by mountains on either side, deeply forested down to the road. Our route then followed Soldier Creek to Soldier Summit through a largely unpopulated area of great scenic beauty. From there we descended down Price Canyon into Carbon County. First we came to a massive coal-fired power station that seemed to obey no pollution regulations, belching out black and grey smoke, then to one of the coal mines which supplied it, which appeared like something out of Zola’s Germinal. We passed through mining towns for the next 15 or 20 miles, with their Workingmens’ Stores, and their houses that looked like they had been raised in a day and could disappear just as quickly. Carbon County I was later to find, was one of the few areas in Utah that voted Democrat; Mormons are Republican virtually to a man (and woman). But let’s get to Moab, I’ll come back to Carbon County another time.
The scenery had become more barren, with sagebrush and juniper replacing forest, and further south of the coal mining area this barrenness intensified until we were driving though semi-desert in the gathering gloaming. Lindy (and the dawg) had gone to sleep and Burt had put on some Bob Dylan tapes. Cactuses began to appear in the sandy soil, and as the sun was going down over the mountains to the west, I thought, listening to Dylan, this is my American Dream, this is just perfect. In a sense I was lucky that it was dark by the time we got to Green River. Partly because it is a God-awful place which claims, for lack of any other distinction, to be the Watermelon Capital of the World, and partly because it meant the last 50 miles or so to Moab we drove unseen, meaning that when the next day dawned, it would be new to me. Unsuspected and unexpected. Vague impressions of rock towers at the side of the road loomed through the growing darkness as we arrived in Moab and we checked into the motel Burt and Lindy had booked.
That enviable American energy which we Europeans so lack comes at a price; hyper-activity and a certain attention-deficit disorder. I was not given more than 10 minutes from check-in to then appear at the door of the motel to go for something to eat. No idea of anything like a walk around town, but straight to an eatery that Burt and Lindy knew and liked, followed by the usual American rushed order-taking, followed by rushed eating and then … what do we do now? It was about 8pm and Burt and Lindy decided they would go to their rooms and watch TV. I strolled about Moab thinking, this looks a fun place … micro-breweries, cafés … a bookshop! But my stroll in the dark brought no encounter with the Lustful Moabite Woman, so I too headed for bed.
My log for that trip starts with the simple statement for 20.2.99:
‘The best day.’
And so it was, by far. We drove to the entrance of Arches National Park, of which I had never heard, and thus concerning which I had no expectations. Getting the short distance there was through fine countryside of deep red sandstone cliffs, but once in the park and driving to the trailhead 15 miles away, I was in the most astounding landscape I had yet seen. Huge sandstone cliffs, miles long at times, eroded by wind and rain into pinnacles, mesas and castellated architecture, followed by acres of petrified dunes, and thickets of rock-fins, stratified in a pastelled variegation. Burt and Lindy didn’t stop the car before we got to the trailhead, but already I had decided that, if I could, I would come back here and explore this landscape at a more studied pace, in future.
At the trailhead we walked along a good path and came to our first main sandstone arch, after which there were dozens of all shapes and sizes, some still forming, some on the point of collapse. I was overwhelmed by what I was seeing, and having no guidebook was not really absorbing what I saw intellectually – only aesthetically. It was like a wee boy’s dream of Cowboy Country. It was a glorious day, blue sky, sunshine and about 60°F, and we completed an eight-mile circuit through the arches and back by what was designated a ‘primitive trail’ – but which was well marked and easy to follow. Driving back out from the trailhead the scenery was still like new, looking south instead of north and seeing the snow-capped La Sal mountains in the distance. It had been magical, but it had all been so rushed, we could have spent all day in Arches Park, but here we were driving back to Moab early in the afternoon. What would Burt and Lindy do all the rest of the day, I wondered?
We were having a late lunch when I found out they had already decided. They had checked us out of the hotel and we were heading back to Ogden – over 300 miles, that night,
‘But we’ve got something to do in Salina first,’ noted Burt. He spoke slightly awkwardly, I thought. I was loathe to leave Moab but it was their car, so I went with the flow again, though knowing that I would be back – and not for the prime purpose of finding the Lustful Moabite Woman.
We drove back a different way from our route on the outward journey once we got to Green River. Firstly through an arid desert area, and then rising through some astounding country with dramatic rock formations, the San Rafael Swell. Burt drove through this too fast again for my liking and did the same through an area of higher ground, mountainous and forested, the Fishlake Wilderness, before the signs told us we were coming to Salina. By this time I was wondering why I had never heard of the landscape of Southern Utah, why no one I knew had been here; even on this briefest of encounters, it was clearly something extraordinary.
So too was Salina. America – and especially the American West – abounds in Hicksvilles, way far at the Back of any Beyond. Salina struck me as such, but over the years I was to find many even more such towns in Utah and in the other states around it. It was the kind of place where the only decent buildings – the school, the library, the post office – had been put up by the state and everything else looked battered together by carpenters and bricklayers deficient in skills. Shops were boarded up and empty, or had pathetic handwritten signs advertising their purpose. Burt and Lindy drove down a couple of the backstreets, debating the location of a house they were looking for, and finally found it by recognising the kennels in the dusty garden at its side. As Lindy went to ring the doorbell (without result as there was no one in), Burt explained to me, rather sheepishly, ‘This is where we bought the dawg.’ Were they going to give it back, I wondered hopefully?
After much fruitless doorbell ringing and tapping on windows, Lindy took Fido out of the car, and we all walked round to a spot at the side of the house where we could see into the kennels. There were lots of adult dogs, of all descriptions, caged or running about. Lindy said to the patently uninterested canine, ‘Your momma lives here. Maybe that’s her there – or that one could be her.’
As there were a lot of dogs, I realised that this could go on for quite some time, but luckily Burt intervened and suggested they could come back another time and introduce mother to son. Reluctantly, Lindy was persuaded to leave and we headed for something to eat before the long drive home.
It didn’t look promising. ‘Mom’s Café’ was stated in faded paint on the walls and by weak neon signs inside the windows of the brick edifice at the corner of Main Street. Entering, it looked like something from the fifties (though it dated back to the twenties) – chrome, neon, vinyl and leather seats. It was full of locals, women in faded print dresses and guys in braces, stomachs bulging over their trousers. This was real, man! On the wall was a framed cover of National Geographic from the 1950s, saying that the café was the best in America. It cannot have changed since then, its utter authenticity saving it from being the all-American gastronomic cliché (of which there are many Out West). Even a proper Mom sat at the till, like a queen on her throne, observing all. It was fast, cheap, and as hamburgers, hot dogs, milk shakes and the rest go, great. (‘Great’ was a word I found I was now using more than I would have liked to.) As we left Salina I did not suspect that I would be back there almost as many times as I was to be back in Moab itself – though for more fleeting visits.
In the American West, you point a car, drive at 75mph, and burn up the ground; we were back in Ogden at midnight, and I caught the plane home a couple of days later. I had not seen an angel in Utah, nor I had been converted to the LDS Church, though I had had a vision and a revelation in Arches, that would draw me back repeatedly to Beautiful Deseret, each time becoming more aware of the attractions of the landscape and the history. But by the next time I went back over Burt and Lindy had gone their separate ways.
I suspect she ended up with the dawg.
* Our pet name for America.