by Matt Weiland
The usual proscriptions against caffeine do not apply to Coca-Cola, since BYU’s board of trustees has a financial interest in the beverage company.
There is a higher-than-average incidence of homosexuality among Mormon men. (This tidbit was always accompanied by a hyperlink to a calendar of shirtless missionaries and, like many theories in the “who’s gay?” phylum, was almost invariably followed up with the super-scientific assessment that “Mormon boys are the hottest.”)
The best place to see polygamous families is at Costco, where the competitive pricing and mayonnaise in jars the size of fire hydrants makes it the obvious choice for a household with eighteen children. (Perhaps I went to the wrong one. I see nobody resembling sister-wives. But far more miraculous are the free eats. Unlike the eagle-eyed young foodies who dole out the samples in New York where they memorize your face, thus making going back for seconds nigh on impossible, the Costco I went to in Salt Lake City employs a veritable army of the geriatric, the halt, and the mentally not all-entirely-there, who man stations in their red uniforms and hand out free pizza, chile relleno, penne with chicken in “a quattro formaggio sauce,” and never once give you the fish-eye, even if you return in under a minute for another pleated paper cup of those canned Indian River grapefruit segments.)
Some of this is demonstrably true (Warren Jeffs was a polygamist and he is in jail; if social services is taking case histories from boys being thrown out of their homes, then Q.E.D.), some of it is essentially unverifiable (without proper LDS identification, you cannot even see the Garments for sale in a Salt Lake City department store). But it is the tenacity of—and the pleasure taken in disseminating—the whispered chatter that is remarkable. Prior to my trip, I did not fail to receive a joking “Don’t let them get you!” warning from everyone I spoke to, as if I were marching into the waiting jaws of a cult.
To understand why the Mormon faith might be routinely tarred with the Weird brush—and also why it should not be—one need but visit the North Visitors’ Center. The lower level is an unassailable and impressive testament to present-day Mormon initiatives, both local and global, for fighting hunger and other good works. There are the requisite photographs of beautiful Third World children enjoying some all-too-rare nutrition or inoculation, although it is an unassuming pallet of canned food labeled “Deseret Industries,” stretch-wrapped and ready for air-lift that packs the poignant punch.
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 Book 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, 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 Visitors’ Center. There a tall—18 feet?—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, all lurid planets and surging nebulae. In the words of anyone who has ever been sixteen, attended a laser rock show at their local planetarium, gazed longingly at an air-brushed van, or used Dark Side of the Moon to pick out stems and seeds, it is fucking awesome.
Of the original, pioneer-era buildings of Temple Square—the Tabernacle, Assembly Hall, and Temple itself—the worst architectural accusation one might level at them is that they 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 Opera House in Aspen, Colorado. At the northern extreme of Temple 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 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. The building broadcasts an agenda of world domination, like some Strangelove-vintage United Nations of Really, Really Bad Guys. Neither does the church any public relations favors.
A shame, and not really true. For decades, Mormon boys (and some girls) have spent two years overseas on mission as a matter of course. The late unpleasantness of delayed black membership notwithstanding, there is 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 in one’s midst. On my way to the library—an impressive Moshe Safdie-designed multistory atrium with glass elevators for which the taxpayers dropped some serious coin—I am approached by an African-American man. He 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 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, given the church’s only recent admission of blacks into its ranks. “That’s why,” he says, as an explanation for the kindness. He has Mormon friends all over the country. The Mormons are vigilant about treating people of color very well, he tells me.
If they are so friendly and benevolent, has he himself become LDS? “No way,” he says. “That would be like joining the Klan.”
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 Mathison 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 crook of his affectionate father’s arms, 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 tan county jail 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 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 j
udge agrees.
“Put some money on my books,” the man tells his mother as he is escorted out.
There is a cultivated dignity to the courtroom. The walls are decorated with framed artwork by children. The judge is respectful to all the defendants who come before him, almost particularly so 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 LDS.
“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.”
In Around the World in Eighty Days, when Phileas Fogg and Passepartout venture out into the City of the Saints, they find that they cannot “escape from the taste for symmetry which distinguishes the Anglo-Saxons.” The grid might have been noteworthy for a Frenchman like Verne, but it’s a wonder that he makes no mention of the width of the streets of Salt Lake City, which are a steppe-like 132 feet across. 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. (A similar pronouncement was attributed to Cecil Rhodes when he was overseeing the layout of the city of Buluwayo in Rhodesia. Perhaps this bit of hypertrophic urban planning was 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. Perhaps such space between souls, such an uninterrupted vista of sky, imbues a populace with a sense of possibility; in its most literal sense, “room to grow.”
Landscape shapes character, after all. This is never more clear than when I encounter the closest thing resembling a crowd 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). People, many of them in Halloween costumes, stroll eight abreast like one of 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 that informs this entitlement, but the idea behind it. 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 a while.
What makes Utah unique is not just that those who settled it felt they could live here, but that they should live here. 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 out of town, all is harsh and huge. We drive past the flaming smoke stacks of oil refineries, past small towns in the foothills. For the nonalpine dweller, “foothills” seems an oddly reductive term for such incline and sky-blocking mass. The tiny houses nestle toy-like 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 historical site, about a hundred miles northwest of the city. It was there, on May 10, 1869, that the tracks of the Central Pacific met those of the Union Pacific and were joined to form the first transcontinental rail system. The landscape is as large and unprepossessing as the museum/restroom/gift shop is small and inconspicuous. 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 transnational telegraph had been completed eight years earlier (in Salt Lake City, in fact) in October of 1861. The effect was felt immediately. This is not metaphoric. The Pony Express ceased operations literally two days later. You can still tap-tap-tap “Mother ill. Come soonest. Stop” all you like, but if you’re relying on the stage coach to get you to the deathbed in question, I’m afraid I have some bad news. With the railroads, the trickle of settlers coming by wagon trains 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 one another 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. R 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 sailors’ eyes as being the last time mankind came face to face with something commensurate with 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 preindustrialized 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.
Clearly—and history thanks them for it—people did. And they have not stopped trying, either. We get back in the car and drive about thirty miles south to Rozel Point on the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake proper, to the Spiral Jetty: Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork, arguably the most significant piece of environmental art in the country, along with Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico. The directions, downloaded from the Dia Art Foundation website, are exhaustively chatty. Instead of telling us to turn right, we read, “… drive 1.3 miles south. Here you should see a corral on the west side of the road. Here too, the road again forks. One fork continues south along the
west side of the Promontory Mountains. This road leads to a locked gate. The other fork goes southwest toward the bottom of the valley and Rozel Point. Turn right onto the southwest fork …” They also warn us that the quality of the roads diminishes precipitously after the Golden Spike, and they’re not kidding. It is rutted and dusty and cratered with potholes, and Wyatt has to serpentine the jeep, slowing down to such an extent that we eventually give up, get out, and walk the last bit.
The hills are littered with black basalt boulders. Below us to our left the jetty projects out into the lake. Cue the screeching brakes of dashed expectations. It’s still an impressively huge project, but the thirty-eight years since its construction have not been kind. Its shape is barely discernible, certainly not the pristine fiddlehead fern the photographs would have one believe. Whatever whorl Smithson constructed is now largely lost; we think we make out a counterclockwise swoop but it stops well before another arc doubles back. And the whole is further diffused with errant rocks and old wood pilings. Picking our way down the hillside, we resolve to make the most of it and walk along whatever portion of the earthwork we can still find.
The jetty’s decay is a bit of a surprise. Given the meticulous stewardship of the Dia Art Foundation—to say nothing of their website that documents essentially every pebble that might fly up to the undercarriage of our vehicle—one might think there would have been some warning or indication of the depredation of this, one of their jewels. The ingredients are all present and accounted for: the setting, the Salt Lake, black basalt. But it’s like the Internet date who didn’t lie, exactly; he is an underwear model, but for a prosthetics catalog.
We mask our disappointment with Pollyanna chatter about how fine the day, the relief to be out of the car, and similar platitudes. At one point stepping along the makeshift path, my feet sink down into the sucking mud. I pull my boots out with a terrestrial fart and soldier on with forced Smell that air! cheer. In the end, Wyatt’s odometer will measure our journey at 250 miles round trip, and for what? A walk over crushed water bottles on sodden, uneven ground.