On the Back Roads (25 page)

“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.”

B
efore 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 comfortably 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.”

She led me out the side door to show me an obsessive project that was “just weeds and anthills when we started in 1988.” It's now Pioneer Park: a stone fountain, gazebo, three small log buildings, and a little church. The church came first, built tot ally with volunteer labor and trees from the nearby
mountains. Even the local teenagers got involved. They peeled the logs. Many of the logs in the other buildings, originally cabins built in 1918, Dorothy rounded up some place. Pee Wee Barela, who calls himself a general contractor but really is an artist, replicated a pioneer cabin, a tack shed, what he calls a “Spanish-American sod house.” Its sod roof is so low, the house is hardly high enough to stand in.

Pee Wee said that the pioneers and cowboys who built and used these types of buildings didn't have carpenter's tools like levels or squares. So he didn't use them, either. He eyeballed it. Yet the sod house is only an inch and a quarter off square.

He got the name “Pee Wee” when he came here from New Mexico thirty years ago. “For some reason, they couldn't pronounce ‘Isauro'.”

The park, Dorothy said, belongs to the people of the town, but the land is still privately owned. “On Christmas Eve we have a live nativity scene in the park. It is really a beautiful event, but it's religious, you know. If this were public land, somebody would sue.”

That comment surprised me. Not that church-and-state issues don't prompt lawsuits all over the country, but here in Monticello? I mean, this is God-fearing Utah, where the line between church and state is pretty thin.

What would Thomas Jefferson think?

Interestingly, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and lived in another Monticello was an outspoken advocate for the separation of church and state.

But Jefferson also wrote: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

What if Thomas Jefferson, the lawyer, were to try such a case in the county courthouse here? Which side would he be on?

Wow! That would certainly shake things up and untie this unflappable town. They would get to know Geraldo Rivera personally, and Larry King, too.

A
n airport near Interstate 40 reported wind gusts of forty-two knots, according to the National Weather Service. But for those of us who were out here in it, only the precise number was news. It blew out of the west, which was fine, even wonderful, since I was too. Nothing like a powerful wind behind a squared-ended motor home. Life on the interstate doesn't get much better.