Kolob, Utah

To give you an idea, one came saying, without irony, that she'd come to find her voice. I can think of only one other year-rounder who would, I imagine, find this funny. For some, this rationale [or declared mission or quest] is entirely unembarrassing. A few may even think she's on a truly sacred pilgrimage. For the rest, the majority, the old Mormon ranchers, the hangers-on after the drying-up of the old Mormon ranches, the aging remnants of the pioneer culture that still lives by gardening and slaughter and canning and sharing in a pinch, she is a silly child of modern times, a risible but possibly dangerous invader from the city, from America, from the credulous, sissified, misinformed, arrogant but contemptible liberal elite.

Another arrived by way of Cedulosa [where she'd hawked handmade jewelry and post-card-sized watercolors (abstract meditations, she called them) of the redrock desert and worked on and off at the Right Eating to put gas in the car], looking for work at the restaurant. She said she'd do anything and was affable enough to be believable, but they let her go within the week for smoking grass, which here can get you put in jail for a very long time, so everyone is strict about it in public. Now she is taking care of The Mysterious Joseph Mary's horses while he is gone doing what we can only suppose and gossip about since we have never met him except K who works stuffing P. O. boxes and claims to have handed him heavy piles of reloading catalogs and IRS notices every few months when he comes through. This one is still in town maybe sleeping in her car and maybe with one of the guides from The Unwashed, the survival school.

This place sometimes we say it has an invisible fence, more like a series of filters that get finer and finer as you get near town, around it that keeps the tourists away, or at least from stopping for long, and that admits only the desperate, the impressively-lazy, and a few that don't have the real-life skills to match their idealism, which means the town is basically two-in-one: the ranchers who are all skill and no idea, unless you count conspiracy theories as ideas, and the recent arrivals who are mostly good at only useless things, like making stone arrow points or hand-carved guitars, but have many very big ideas indeed. All of us are in the same spread-out place mostly agreeing to disagree and going to sometimes-elaborate lengths to avoid each other. Picture, if you will, two of our citizens: one, "Radar" Lyman, is the Troutfield County Sheriff's Deputy in Kolob, and the Mormon Bishop. He is state and church here. He is the youngest son of one of the old Mormon families, and he owns maybe half the valley. He is tall and boyish and clean-cut and nobody has ever seen him smile. Two is Firefly Pems, who came from Flag looking for organic farmwork that doesn't involve weeding, because the plants were calling out to her in pain and who are we to judge which ones stay and which ones go, but she couldn't find anyone looking for that kind of help so now she is living on a hillside waiting for the mothership. When you talk to them and keep it shallow and friendly, these two seem fairly normal, well within the fat belly of the American bell-curve, but they are never sitting down to talk politics, I believe it's safe to assume. Even if Radar maintained his most stoical gentlemanly reserve, Firefly has told all of us that the energy field of his gun gives her labor pains if he even comes near, and he's never withouit his gun [except when it was stolen] so there will be no conversation.