This is the Place

[Patrick Hendry via Unsplash]

It was summer of 1847, and Brigham Young had enough to worry about. As president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Young had over the past four months led an advance party of nearly 150 men, women, and children, along with their livestock and wooden carts loaded with food and supplies more than 900 miles from their winter quarters near Omaha. The weary and famished group now found themselves in the middle of the Wasatch Mountains. It was July, and time was running out to find arable land to begin growing vegetables, or they would face winter starvation. They were traveling through Mexican territory, on land patrolled not by soldados but by warring parties of Shoshone and Ute Indians. And here he was, his peoples’ last hope, cart-ridden, stricken with spotted fever, and the prospects didn’t look good.

Young’s driver Wilford Woodruff spurred the horses until they at last came over a crest with a sweeping westward view. “We gazed in wonder and admiration upon the vast valley before us,” Woodruff later wrote in his journal, “with the waters of the Great Salt Lake glistening in the sun, mountains towering to the skies, and streams of pure water running through the beautiful valley. It was the grandest scene we had ever beheld till this moment.”

Delirious and in pain, Young raised his head and beheld the sight. “This is the right place,” he is said to have exclaimed. “Drive on.”

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I don’t often find myself reciting Mormon legends. I wouldn’t be doing it at all if a few weeks ago I hadn’t seen a billboard on I-15, outside Cedar City: “This is the Place for Tools – Utah’s Hardware Superstore”. That made me chuckle. Even the sober, straight-laced Mormons know how to make fun of themselves.

But something else in those words, something to be admired. “Every traveler is on a quest of sorts,” writes Pico Iyer, “but the pilgrim stands out because his every step is a leap of faith.”

Three years earlier, at the age of 43, Young had assumed the post of president following the murder of his friend and founder, Joseph Smith, by a mob in Nauvoo, Illinois, where the Saints had fled after expulsion from half a dozen other places. Missouri Governor William Boggs went so far as to issue an Executive Order declaring the Mormons be “treated as enemies” to be exterminated or driven from the state. Afraid and desperate, and under threat of further violence for their unorthodox practices, including polygamy, the Saints’ exile from Nauvoo now left them with only one option.

From the more than 10,000 faithful that then assembled in Iowa, Young organized the advance party that followed wagon trails across the plains and over the Rockies, in search of sanctuary in “a place on this earth that nobody else wants.” The Salt Lake valley, isolated and devoid of any human settlement, was, to the Saints, that and more. It was the Promised Land, the place where their journey would finally come to an end.

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My only experience in the West was ten years ago, when I took a job in northwestern Colorado with the Division of Parks & Wildlife. I had spent the previous summers mastering the craggy windswept peaks and humid forest backcountry of the Adirondacks, and was eager for a new challenge. I didn’t know exactly what to expect from Colorado, but my impression was more of the same—the mountain terrain I already knew, but bigger.

Imagine my surprise when, after a three-day cross-country drive, I crested the continental divide and turned north, past cattle ranches and sleepily nodding pumpjacks, into the parched and tarnished hills of Rio Blanco County. At the sign for Little Hills State Wildlife Area, I turned off the county road onto dirt, churning a thick cloud of dust that billowed over pale clumps of rabbitbrush until after a few miles, I came to three drab white buildings and a cluster of trailers parked around a patch of lawn.

My title was Sage Grouse Field Technician, which I understood to mean conducting surveys for greater sage grouse, an ungainly turkey-sized bird that at the time were candidates for listing under the Endangered Species Act. Grouse numbers have fallen precipitously since the 1960s due to habitat loss and degradation, largely from oil and gas development. The data the crew and I would be gathering would help determine whether the birds were worthy of protection. The first day of training, our supervisor, a biologist in his late forties, gathered the six of us in the kitchen of the Little Hills bunkhouse, and informed us that we wouldn’t be looking for grouse—we’d be doing “pellet surveys”. In other words, counting poop.

We worked exhaustive ten hour days, living out of trailers at a high camp on the mesa. From there we fanned out across rutted 4x4 roads and hiked to remote survey points guided by finicky handheld GPS devices. I hopped barbed wire fences, got my shins spiked by cacti, stared down huffing, ground-scraping bulls, and crawled on my hands and knees through thickets of scrub oak and juniper, all the while scanning the ground for chalky white pellets.

The nearest town was forty five minutes away and easy to miss, so weekends were spent mostly at Little Hills. I ran on the dirt road, but only early in the morning and after sundown, when it wouldn't feel like a trip through the broiler. The few leisure activities included playing foosball or watching movies in the sweltering lounge, or "shed hunting"—searching the nearby gulches for antlers dropped by mule deer bucks the previous winter. At night, we sat around the fire pit.

A rivalry developed between Grouse Crew and Deer Crew. One night, while drinking Banquets around the fire, the Deer Crew leader, wearing mirrored sunglasses backward over a sweat-faded DPW cap, along with his pretty girlfriend (also Deer Crew), sauntered over to show off his new sheds—a five-rack, matching set. We were underwhelmed. He shifted on his feet and spat into the fire. Then, turning, he held the trunk of an antler in each hand, cupped one over each shoulder blade, elbows out, and strutted away, girlfriend fawning at his hip.

The summer began to take its toll. I did my best to get used to the static cling of dust to sandaled feet, to cracked lips and fingers, to chronic sunburn. But the dryness, the lack of trees, made me uncomfortable. Everything seemed brittle and exposed. Little Hills' acre or so of turf was kept impeccably watered, as a fire shelter for the nearby community of ranchers, but the thought of huddling here while the surrounding hills burned wasn't exactly reassuring. The lushness of this tiny parcel, bounded by the stark landscape beyond, only heightened the contrast, emphasized the barrenness of my situation.

Once, for a change of scenery, we talked about taking a weekend trip to Moab, only four hours away. A few weeks went by. The idea came up again later in the summer, but only halfheartedly, after it was clear that everyone just wanted to go home.

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Four years and one graduate degree later, I found myself in a glass cubicle in downtown Buffalo, working for an environmental consulting firm. Our clients were mostly oil and gas companies, for whom we provided permitting services for pipeline construction or repair. When early on I voiced reservations about working on these projects to a senior scientist, he responded, “It’s gonna happen anyway. We might as well do a good job, to make sure it happens right.”

One autumn, I got called to rural Blair County, Pennsylvania, where a pipeline crew had used a boring technique called horizontal directional drill to install a pipe under a row of houses. In the late morning, I turned onto a leafy gravel lane, where stood four or five modest homes, all on the same side. Opposite was what a wetland delineator calls a "scrub-shrub" wetland – a brushy, crimson-gold marsh of willows, dogwood, and sedges. From maps I knew that the pipe crossed at the end of the lane, about a half mile down, but all the pickups were parked here, with men in hardhats milling around. An excavator with a spinning yellow light was digging a trench along the residential side of the road.

I introduced myself to one of the roughnecks, who proceeded to explain the situation. During drilling, they had hit a fault in the bedrock, through which drilling fluid had oozed up from the ground, spilling over part of the right-of-way. He walked me across the road, to a stack of cobbles and cement among the reeds. This was a freshwater spring, he said, fed by groundwater prior to the incident. Now it was dry.

The pipeline company, I learned, had struck a deal with the residents, who relied on wells for drinking, cooking, and bathing, and who were concerned about contamination. In exchange for their silence, the company would, at their own expense, connect the homes to the municipal water supply, several miles away.

In grad school, I had hung a poster next to my desk from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. The poster shows a Native American woman on horseback, with painted face and feathers in her hair, battling a hissing black snake. The tagline: “Mni Wiconi – Water is Life". I thought of myself as a defender of wild places, and here I was following oil companies around with a clipboard, complicit in their destruction.

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In mid-October, 2021, I had two weeks of unused vacation, and itchy feet. By the time I pulled into the NPS station in Moab to collect a backcountry permit for Canyonlands, where I’d be spending the next three days, I was cramped and didn't want to wait. The ranger pointed across the road.

I parked in a clearing at the base of a sheer red cliff, next to sandstone blocks the size of buses that lay where they had tumbled, like an interstate pileup. I swapped my sweatshirt for a tank top, tied on trail runners, and swung a pack over my shoulder. Immediately I was huffing upward through switchbacks, heat building in my legs. After a few hundred feet I crested the cliff and turned to see the city nestled in a sea of redrock stretching to the horizon. Looming behind, the snow-capped peaks of the La Sals soaring in the cerulean sky. Between them, the Colorado River, a taupe ribbon surging through folds of sandstone.

Upon discovering the Salt Lake valley, Brigham Young is said to have remarked, “The spirit of light rested upon me, and hovered over the valley, and I felt that there the Saints would find protection and safety.” I closed my eyes, breathed deeply. What a revelation to be back in the desert, where light is not a limited resource.

The trail flattened and opened onto a narrow plateau, becoming sand, where it meandered through striped and polished outcrops – swooping contours of pink, velvet, and ochre. I treaded past spritely tufts of bunchgrasses, prickly pears bearing plump magenta fruits, and bristly pastel paintbrushes while the perfume of sage and juniper drifted on the warm breeze.

I remembered the Adirondack village of Saranac Lake, where during the late 19th century doctors ordered their patients suffering from Tuberculosis to retreat for convalescence. The pure mountain air and lakeside vistas were, at the time, the only known cure, a refuge from the stigma of the outside world, where the ill could recover in peace. I thought of my own experience in the Adirondacks, of rain and mud and black flies, of trudging through soupy mist and emerging, unexpectedly, into a clear sky, a rocky island rising above a sea of clouds.

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Two years ago, I uprooted my life--packed everything I owned into a Uhaul and once again drove across the country, for a new job in the heart of canyon country. When I tell people I'm from western New York, I still get the same reaction. "That's a big change," they say, with piqued eyebrows. "That's brave," I've heard more than once.

Maybe. Pico Iyer writes that every journey is a question. If that’s the case then the question that’s followed me all this way is this: How do I know whether I’m running away from something, or toward something else?

“We travel to return to selves we have forgotten," Iyer writes, "or to people we didn’t know we were.” Rather than a straight line, a pilgrimage is "more often a kind of circle. As in the ritual circumambulations that worshipers make in Tibet, or in India, or around the Islamic Kaaba... Where an adventurer may seek out a distant planet, the pilgrim only seeks the sun.”

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Brigham Young would be proud to know that the pioneer spirit is alive and well in Escalante. Rural and insular, locked between two mountain passes with nothing but desert to the south, the town and its people are industrious and self-sufficient. Until the highway was built in the 1950s, Escalante was cut off from the outside world all winter. Even now, it's not uncommon for families to have several years worth of provisions stored in their basement. At their fingertips, the rewards of patience and hard work, the fruits of conviction and blind hope: apricots, peaches, pears, plums, and apples, vegetable gardens, chicken coops, cattle and horses, homemade jam and canned goods. All of it shared as freely as waves to strangers.

In their example, again, a lesson in commitment – to a job, to a place, to a future vaguely sensed, latent with potential. Such commitment, writes Anne Lamott, "can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, 'This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.' And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will know what you are doing. After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know..."

This is the place.