Before moving out to Utah, I’d long admired the landscape of the West. As readers might know from previous posts, I’ve loved writers like Laura Ingalls Wilder, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, & even Zitkala Sa. There’s a certain mythos of the West that reinforces rebelliousness, fierce independence, strength in solitude, self-reliance, & even anarchy. Cowboys & bar fights, duels at high noon & wild horses, roaming vast expanses of land with painted rocky pinnacles in the distance. There are so many images of loss & death, but there’s a beauty in the arid land that forces life to find a way to persist.

As I wandered through the ghost town of Grafton a second time, with my mother & niece in tow, I watched my son run & explore the abandoned buildings. What an amazing thing to see him explore the types of places that filled my imagination as a child, growing up in the age of Melissa Gilbert on “Little House on the Prairie,” with Michael Landon as Pa Ingalls. Even though I’d never visited this town before a couple of months ago, it was as if I knew this kind of place from my imagination, all those times when I’d pretend I was living in the book or TV series. An imagined landscape.

Weird to explain, but I loved those calico Gunne Sack dresses & braids with ribbons so popular in the late 70s, in the heyday of old Western films my dad loved to watch. (Since watching Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid recently, I couldn’t resist thinking of that scene with Paul Newman riding around on his bicycle in this little town to “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”)

The setting really is stunning there with beautiful multi-hued cliffs in the background, & all around in pretty much every direction. One could imagine the persistence of the people who tried to make a living there, despite a river washout that forced them to start all over in the 1870s. The need for irrigation in such a dry climate & near so much rock & ledge. The remote location near Zion National Park would have attracted people, yet it would have required great tenacity to make a living there.

And the cacti & succulents are cool to see, though there’s way more greenery to be seen than what I had imagined. Even the Wasatch Mountains near Salt Lake City can look sandy at first glance, but upon further inspection that “sand” is actually a light-colored,  low-growing, scrubby kind of grass.

Maybe that whole joie de vivre of the West drew me out here, along with the new job opportunity? There’s a defiant independence associated with this part of the country & its history, so perhaps at this midpoint in life that appealed to me. A entirely new place, yet one familiar in my mind through books, film, & music. It’s also a great chance to examine more of the Native American history that ends in the Northeast with the Indian Removal Act & begins here.

It feels like I know so little, even though I’ve been studying American literature & history for a lifetime.

And so I feel very grateful to have this experience, to be able make memories & see such natural wonders with family. Sometimes fear can paralyze us, preventing us from taking that big leap or risk for greater happiness. Sometimes you just have to follow your dreams, wherever they may lead. For me, routine & stagnation depress me. I need to feel like I’m changing, growing, advancing, accomplishing. These are core aspects of my personality. I’ve watched people around me content themselves with regimented routines that almost never vary. The same coffee mug & breakfast at the same time, each day. The same breaks, the same foods, the same patterns & times for coming & going. Like the people controlled by IT in A Wrinkle in Time or the people in the lyrics of “Little Boxes.”

Some part of me feels that adhering to such a routine is like a living death. An overall numbness to life, droning on & performing perfunctory tasks over & over ad infinitum. Until physical death.

Since the West is the place of the setting sun, there’s pervasive awareness of death out here, I think. There’s the climate & rocky landscape resistant to farming, along with the lore of raiding, pioneering, dueling, & illness claiming lives. It’s like how age causes one to enjoy things more as one grows older, with the knowledge that the number of times to do new things is slowly dwindling. Not with a sadness but rather with a profound appreciation, like savoring the most expensive chocolate & lingering in those moments. Being present.

That’s what I think the biggest gift moving out here has been yielding me thus far. Appreciation for what can be discovered when you push though fear & willingly take the risk to try something completely new & foreign.