By Katharine Coles, Utah’s Poet Laureate
1. Long Past
We are driving toward Lagoon, my parents, my two brothers, and I. I am not yet this tall but still big enough to ride the teacups into a flight of dizzy ecstasy, and so awash in anticipation, asking my parents again, for the hundredth time, How much farther, how long, are we almost there? Maybe we are just coming around the gravel pits, past the old mineral hot springs building, shuttered since before I was born and dilapidated—about halfway there. The whole drive from our home near Sugarhouse takes less than thirty minutes, but I spend those minutes in unbearable, endless, infinite anticipation and the certainty that I will not, simply cannot survive the time (expanding, surely?) that must pass before that final curve when the old roller coaster will come at long last into view—
—and then it is over already, already late, the midsummer sun setting, and I am limp with exhaustion, sticky and grimy and probably whining as my father lays me into the back seat, where I promptly fall asleep. My brothers too. I see myself, now, from the outside, as if in a photograph of memory—so now, over memory, I layer what I imagine, my parents driving home at last in blessed silence, the refineries on the north edge of town silhouetted by the sunset, vermillion over the lake—
—or we are going south; it’s Friday, late afternoon, and my parents have snugged us into our pajamas and tossed us on top of the sleeping bags lining the back of the International Travel-All. They heft in the cooler and the tent, go back for the stakes. On the way out of town, we stop at the MacDonalds on State (over a million served) and pick up dinner, then my parents take turns eating and driving as the sun sets. By the time 89 leaves 6 above Spanish Fork, we children have sunk into sleep. My parents will make camp in the dark and carry us, still sleeping, into the big family Springbar, bought at Kirkham’s on State Street. When I wake, the early sun will be casting an emerald glow through the nylon walls, and by the time my parents pull themselves out of their sleeping bags we kids will be out, scampering up and down fantastic formations, clamoring for Mom and Dad to watch us as we scale sandstone laid down in layers over centuries, carved by wind and water, gone deep red in the dawn—
—and I am a teenager, leaping out of the car in the Lagoon parking lot, maybe for the last time, stopping long enough to take whatever money my parents will give me—never enough, but I've been saving my allowance—before leaving them behind to find my friends. I am this tall now; I can fly on any ride I wish, but I am concerned now more with the other teenagers; boys and girls from my own high school and, more intriguingly, different high schools, parts of the valley that seem remote and exotic, far from my own neighborhood and stomping ground, communities strung out like beads along State Street all the way from the Capital to Point of the Mountain, so that if at night I stand above the cemetery on 11th Avenue what I see stretching south of 21st South is a line of lights and then a cluster there, at Midvale, and there, Murray, Sandy, Draper, places we sometimes pass on our way elsewhere—
—then, suddenly, I am old enough to drive myself, or at least my friends are old enough to drive, and it is with them I set out toward Arches or Canyonlands, Capital Reef or Goblin Valley or Bryce or Antelope Island or Bear Lake—it seems no matter where we go always at least part of the route runs along 89, though sometimes that old road joins with another as with 6 south of Provo, or even sinks briefly beneath it, as beneath 15 around Point of the Mountain—
—still young enough that I am thinking of 89, like every road I think of it at all, in linear terms: a route from point A to point –Garden City to Salt Lake, Panguitch to Kanab—a road that takes me if not always in the most efficient possible way at least in some approximation of it, though even at our young age we leave the freeway, still immortal, still taking all the time in the world to look at the old towns, the highway running right through town, running under their Main Street lined with motels and legendary drive ins: Oh, Main Street, the shade of old porches so deep and long even under the heat, pressing, that two dogs, one splayed and one snoring, sleep the pure, given-over sleep of the happily unconscious. There will be times in my life when I will go to no end of trouble to choose the wandering line over the straight—but never have I considered 89 as a destination in itself, something to look at and ponder, its own space not to get over or through but in which to be—
—but no: think of some few Saturday nights, when for a lark a few girls, say three, pile into a car and drive it down State Street, our heads swiveling to check out the kids crammed in the car to the right of us, to the left. Say me, and K, my best friend, and W as often as not. Usually, we don't go much farther south than 21st, where the bright city lights begin to thin, but sometimes we take it all the way down, past where any carload of boys would follow unless in a tantalized trance, now not checking but just driving. The windows are down, and sometimes we even speak, laugh, give out names but never our own. We tell the boys we are sisters, though we look nothing alike, we three, and they pretend to believe us. The summer night hot and heady, its breeze running like fingers through our hair. We don't stop, don't get out of the car, not ever, however many glances we exchange, however many words. We are together, and before curfew we will veer off the thoroughfare and make our way through the familiar neighborhoods to our own safe houses—
—and at last we are grown up, or think we are, heading north again, K and I, driving her ancient red Volkswagon beetle to college in Logan. 1978. I will help her unload her things and then we will set out again, now all the way to Bear Lake, not it turns out for the last time, but almost, with sleeping bags and not much more equipment. What else could we possibly need? A flashlight, a couple of sandwiches. The lake—you all know it—is a visual astonishment, a mirage of blue shimmering under a blue desert sky, the sky we've grown up under together, the sky we know. We are so innocent, we imagine no danger. We, the two of us, know nothing yet of tragedy, little of loss, though this will change sooner than we think, and we will be changed, written over, overlaid. This afternoon, down here at ground level, we can’t see the thunderheads gathering on the other side of the mountains. The leaves are just beginning their change, and we are just beginning, and all that blue, above and below, looks like nothing so much as possibility, through which we
2. Something Like the Present, in Photographs
can’t stop meandering, going back and back over the same ground, the way I might return now to a photo that reminds me of something else. Composing its nostalgia, in black and white, it makes me think I could order memory, give it shape and outline: say, bring back a long-ago Christmas, silly and alight; or a motel with beds that would shake you, fifteen minutes for a quarter; a particular face; another march—1968, to mourn a different war, a particular murder—in which I, eight years old, on crutches, in my hand-me-down Sunday dress, catch the eye of a newspaper photographer and march into history. Do you remember the stands along Fruit Way, all summer selling cherries then peaches then apples? So many orchards now plowed under and given to houses like the rest of the valley west to east, north to south, the city lights stretching in one solid, brilliant mass all the way to Lehi and beyond—now, now—
—the way the image of this painting layers over wood, its grain rippling into water the boy bends to drink; his mouth meeting his mouth in reflection—
—memory over memory, layering the way these photos do though I still dream in color, laying other images, other lives, over my own, until I almost believe I was here, watching ice form on the fence; here, walking into Mom’s (famous!) for a dinner on the road, making me ask, don’t I know that place? And maybe I did, though there is no evidence of it, no photograph placing me here, in this spot. So the new gets laid down over the old, writes over it, changes it, and the most perfect memory, the most intact and accurate, is the one immediately lost, the kiss forgotten in an instant and not revisited, never laid over with other, deepening kisses to seal a wedding or a life, the bride wearing her grandmother’s dress, all joys and sorrow attendant. The most perfect memory is the one that means so little we forget it
3. As We Forget the Actual Present, in Flight
so, now, August 2007, flying low over downtown in a tiny four-seat Cessna, with photos in my mind’s eye and a map in my lap, I don't know any more what precisely happened that Saturday night on State Street (Fifth South? Sixth?) when W broke precedent and climbed out of K’s mother’s Chevette and into a red sports car driven not by a boy but by a man, in his twenties anyway and therefore dangerous. We would have been sixteen or seventeen. W appeared as usual in the hall at school on Monday, looking smug; the damage wasn't visible, not to her, not to us and our friendship, though we, K and I, best friends, were jointly—what?—not so much shocked by what W did as excluded by it, made lonely. As our friendship must have excluded W, though we took her along with us still, night after night. So K and I were left safe back in childhood, while W leapfrogged over us
as, now, our pilot Randy lifts us above our grounded world, Steve and Guy and me. I am tucked under the Cessna's wing like a baby bird, all downy and new as we rise from sleepiness into sunrise, the lake also rising in its own puddled light. As the sun comes up we round Point of the Mountain, where the city narrows, defined by geography: steep slope on one side, freeway on the other. Below, fields turn over their crops, and from up here I can see the outlines of the newest developments, neat lots and cul-de-sacs already sketched out in the dirt, the last flat open land giving way to the city’s breaking wave in constant motion, each new boundary drawn first in a developer’s mind, then bulldozed, before asphalt and concrete are laid and hardened into this suburban dream, ravening, uncontrollable. The edge of town, where the future makes its intentions known. And so one world lays itself over another, as obliterating as memory, and every minute passing means Steve, sitting in the Cessna’s front seat, and Guy, sitting next to me, lose a little more of that perfect photographer's light
until we are over Spanish Fork canyon, the road I have seen so many times through a windshield at ground level. We are craning, looking for Thistle, where the mountain slipped and wiped out an entire town, its houses layered over by water and washed away
(Where did they all go, the people in those houses?)
and then, in high country, the view changes, opens beyond our narrow corridor, the green of agriculture laid over desert brush which presses all sides, ready to move back in its wildness at any moment. Steve and Guy and I press to the windows, identifying Aurora, Elsinore, Marysvale, Junction, locating junkyards and churches and,
outside every small town, its cemetery
overlooking the highway, from which, if we were on it, the river, the Sevier, would now be out of sight, over there, though from up here Steve points out where the old highway, long abandoned, followed the natural path, the river's bends and curves. The new road stays high, its route blasted and dug out of the hillside, straighter and safer
than our own high road on the wind, where landscape too is layered, pasture receding into hill, then foothill, then mountain, sky, cloud, red bluff thrusting up here and there and then
the vast desert heaving into view (coxcomb, white cliffs, pink cliffs, vermillion) to stun our eyes, already squinting from all this overgazing—who knew the horizon could be so far and still visible?—so we can see every storm for miles. Today, we avoid the weather, but later, alone, I will drive right into electric wind, the splatters on my windshield more dirt than water—
—and there, at last
the gap, mile one, under the rim, the end of the road, though the road in fact keeps going and so could we—as we have flown already past city line, county—over the line where the mile markers start counting backwards all over again, all the way out of the country, across one border or another. I imagine being just that lost
before the Cessna banks and drops back into Kanab, onto the small airport’s tarmac, and so brings me back
(with Steve and Guy and Randy, each of us carrying our pasts, our accumulated secrets and heartaches, yet as much in flight as any child on a carnival ride)
back to earth, ground level, human scale. Randy taxis to a stop. Lets us out. Legs a little shaky. Houston’s will still be serving breakfast. The wind blows hot, and even after everything, having been carried all this way, I am still voracious, insatiable for the giddy flight home.
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