People, Places, and Things on US 89

Where's YOUR Utah?

The first time I saw the black & white photographs in John Telford's show, "People Places and Things on US 89," I had the immediate urge to hop in my car and do my own tour of our amazing state. Eventually, I did just that, eating my way from the Trail’s End Café in Kanab to the Hometown Drive-In in Garden City. You can read about my trip through Utah on U.S. 89 in my essay "The Tastes of Highway 89."

But other Utahns have also been inspired by this show. This space--or, more precisely, this cyberspace-- offers a place for every viewer of the Highway 89 show to post their own private visions of Utah, as seen from U.S. Highway 89.

Telford's 503-mile photo tour of Highway 89 (called by many Utahns "the old road") passes through rural and historical parts of the state that the casual traveler will never see from the Interstate highways. Other guides to the state usually focus on Utah's red rock wilderness and national parks, or on our cultural eccentricities like polygamy and our famous fondness for green jello. But those of us who live here know that those guides are really intended for visitors, for outsiders. We know that behind the public face of the Beehive State there is a real place with a diverse people, a rich history, and fascinating stories.

Telford's photos give us a view of that authentic, unexploited part of Utah. You won't find Duane Cox, the beekeeper in Logan, or Merlin Figgins, the casket maker in Orderville, playing any part in the Utah Travel Council's marketing plan, but they fit perfectly into Telford's presentation of the real Utah, the one we all know is there, but don't often look for.

So join us, please. View Telford's photos, and take a tour along Highway 89, even if only in your imagination. Tell us what you saw. Share your own vision of Utah.

HIGHWAY 89: A GEOLOGY OF MEMORY

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.

Telford’s Road: A Ribbon of Healing

By Stephen Trimble

US 89 begins just as it should—at a seam, a boundary, a suture line. The highway enters Utah from Arizona by crossing the Colorado River at Glen Canyon Dam. Highways cleave the world, and as you pass the dam these two halves fall away behind you in the rear view mirror. For hundreds of miles upstream on the Colorado an intricate maze of drainages leads away from the mainstem of the river into the slots and alcoves and labyrinths of the Canyonlands, the redrock heart of the Colorado Plateau. Downstream from the dam, the rumble of the river quickly disappears into the Earth, headed for the depths of the Grand Canyon.
The highway passes between these two great divisions of the continent and then turns west, moving up the successive lines of cliffs stepping northward away from the Grand Canyon in what geologists call the Grand Staircase. Each formation lifts you higher, each named for its characteristic rock color. The Chocolate Cliffs. The Vermilion Cliffs. The White, Gray, and Pink Cliffs.

This stretch of road between the Arizona line and Kanab, Utah, passes through real wilderness. The ribbon of asphalt rolls across the high desert, crosses the Paria River and the upswept hogback of the Cockscomb. These are the Big Empties—the only stretch of US 89 in Utah within designated national preserves, in this case, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
John Telford shows us Milepost One east of Big Water, with the distant sandstone cliffs kissed by the fires of Colorado Plateau sunlight. He doesn’t show us much of that spectacular country out beyond the highway. He has photographed those scenes elsewhere, published his grand landscape photographs in other books.

Telford’s US 89 really begins at Kanab. Here, the road begins to find its way along the path of Mormon settlement, running dot-to-dot from one pioneering small town to the next. US 89 trends north, crossing divides from river valley to river valley, from the Virgin to the Sevier, between Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks, threading the linear ranks and lava-capped ramparts of the High Plateaus.

US 89 traces an agricultural landscape all the way to the Sanpete Valley: Little Denmark. Still rural and remote, but now with more center-pivot sprinklers than freshly arrived immigrants. Water guides the pattern of settlement and the path of the road, from the golf course air-brushed by irrigation onto the slickrock borders of Kanab to the geometric fields and pastoral turkey farms of Ephraim and Mount Pleasant.

From the cab of your pickup, you look past the fields at the surrounding mountains and redrock cliffs, and you feel you are traveling through wildlands. From the air, you see otherwise—Highway 89 runs cocooned in an agricultural landscape hugging the path of the road for mile after mile. The ribbon of the highway forms a corridor of Mormon culture and farmland.
In this passage across Utah, Telford moves from conversation to conversation, looking for the faces and stories that give the highway its personality. His journey takes us on an amble between front porches. Down the road lies another pioneer farmhouse, another local business, another refugee from the city opening a gallery or a one-of-a-kind restaurant. Utah’s smallest post office. Utah’s oldest hotel.

Telford personalizes the hot spots of Western history along the road. At Circleville, famous as the childhood home of Robert Leroy Parker, the young man who became the famous outlaw, Butch Cassidy, Telford doesn’t just photograph the Parker family cabin. He finds Wallace Ott, an old friend of Butch’s, to tell him stories. At Big Rock Candy Mountain, legendary destination for hobos and dreamers of the mythic West, he photographs signboards at roadside cabins, not the fabled mountain or its Lemonade Springs. At the Manti Miracle Pageant, he photographs both the paid anti-Mormon protestor and the local kids protesting the outsider—always looking to demystify and humanize the stories of the road.

Like Highway 89, Telford takes us on a leisurely journey through central Utah. His panoramic compositions run lazily out to the perimeters of our vision, whether a roadside scene or the confined space in the workshop of an artisan. This is not the four-lane straightaway of Interstate 15 west of the mountains, laid out in implacable linearity by super-confident highway engineers across the big, booming valleys of the Great Basin. Here, Telford willingly slows down for each curve, looking for authenticity, happy to maroon us in conversations at Mom’s Café or The Hot Spot in Salina—verbal exchanges impossible in a fast food franchise or Interstate quick-stop.

At the head of the Sanpete Valley, US 89 enters the mountains. In just a few miles the highway leaves the Colorado Plateau, transects the southernmost range of the Rocky Mountains, and rolls out into the Great Basin at Mapleton. This is the most abrupt transition of all—appropriately marked by the drama of the landslide and drowned town at Thistle.

After hundreds of miles in the clear light of the Colorado Plateau and warm embrace of pioneer nostalgia, suburbia takes us by surprise. From Spanish Fork to Brigham City, US 89 becomes an urban highway. More than 80 percent of Utah’s people live here along the Wasatch Front, in a dense concentration of cities and towns compressed between the mountains and the old Pleistocene lakes. Utah is one of the most urbanized states in the country.
US 89 runs smack through the middle of this urban complex, but keeps going, north and south, tying together the malls and suburbs and enclaves of sophistication with the tiny villages hundreds of miles away.

Telford finds stories even here, for Interstate 15 carries most of the traffic. Highway 89 follows the old Main Streets and State Streets of the downtown business loops. Telford finds Robbie Clayton stringing Christmas lights and kids riding carnival rides. Here the businesses are bigger, but still rooted in family. The Freeds of Lagoon, proprietors of the Disneyland of the Intermountain West. Gibbs Smith publishing a lifetime’s worth of books from a family farm in Layton. The contemporary representatives of generations of Pettingill fruit farmers in Willard and Cox beekeepers in Logan.

Small town characters carry us along to Salt Lake City, where the nationally prominent liberal Mayor Rocky Anderson works from his City Hall office right on US 89. Telford photographs Rocky passionately leading anti-George W. Bush rallies; he photographs the pro-Bush counter-protests, and then he moves on down the road out of the city, where the daily rhythms of small town life overwhelm such global concerns.

One current in western history is missing from Telford’s record, for traces of Indian Country are few and far between on Highway 89. Pioneer Anglo culture successfully displaced Navajo and Paiute, Ute and Shoshone from these springs and rivers that had been their homes. Native names remain: Kanab, Panguitch, Timpanogos. A cluster of Paiute tract homes huddles near the highway exit at Joseph. Far to the north, as Highway 89 runs into the mountains toward Logan and Cache Valley, it passes the abandoned intertribal Indian school at Brigham City, former home to hundreds of young Indian people from all over the west, an artifact from the Twentieth Century federal insistence on assimilation. And that’s about it.

That passage from Brigham City to Logan begins the leavetaking for US 89. The highway leaves the Wasatch Front. Cache Valley is the last Great Basin valley. When US 89 climbs the hill past Utah State University and enters the Bear River Range and Logan Canyon, wildlands once more take over from the colonized Utah of Mormon Country—for the first time, really, since Kanab. The road drops down to the family vacationland of azure Bear Lake and then heads north out of Utah, across the Idaho line.

On this road, each moment is a journey, an amalgam of motion and place and state of mind. You may be so distracted by your daydreams that you don’t see a thing, driving by instinct and peripheral vision. You may be transfixed by weather and scenery—the road receding into a barely noticed ribbon leading you through a three-dimensional landscape. You may focus on the road itself, on the drive, on the experience of speed and curve and acceleration.

You drive along from one point to another, from a beginning to a destination. John Telford reminds us that in between and along the way live the resident characters that give the road its vitality. He reminds us to stop and ask questions and begin conversations. Considerable common ground exists between these longtime locals in rural Utah and urban visitors from all over the world. The road is a bridge between cultures. The road is an archive of stories reeled out by generations of people living close to the land. If we can look at photographs from the road together and tell stories that grow from this land together—we will feel more comfortable in planning for a visionary future together. And so the highway helps to ease the tensions between these disparate elements of our society.

John Telford celebrates these connections. Highway 89 binds together communities. In these photographs, the road becomes a ribbon of healing.