Unexpected Company

Though his voice was not raised and his words were simple and concise, it was obvious, even to me, that my father was utterly furious…

In Mormon culture (and perhaps Christian culture in general) the term 'still, small, voice' is used to commonly refer to your internal voice and the Holy Ghost in tandem.  This is the little voice in your head that tells you when something seems a bit off, warns you that what you're thinking of doing or what you're about to do is inherently wrong, and sometimes inspires you to do things that later reveal themselves as fruitful or even destined.  Outside of religious culture it is often simply called a conscience, but this word only describes, in my opinion, a small portion of what the voice concerns itself with; letting you know when you're wrong.  As an adult and at the time of this writing, I have no further religious associations between my internal voice and a devout ghost whispering in my ear but the voice itself is still very real to me in other ways.  It's the voice that tells me which of Las Vegas' plethora of beggars and panhandlers seem like they really do need compassion and which ones likely have a brand new Audi with primo rims and a moon roof parked around the corner on the next street over; the one that makes me wonder if what I just said in casual conversation with my boss was perhaps slightly inappropriate for work (because it never seems to warn me before I say something unbecoming); the one that tells me to call or text a long-lost friend out of the blue just to chat (only to find out they've just experienced a major tragedy in their life and desperately needed that call); and the one that makes me wonder if there's a piece of cilantro stuck in my teeth or an undetected pimple on my nose.

Recently I've been hearing it said that the things parents say to their children when they're small will eventually become the child's own inner voice.  I can attest to the validity of this claim, I think.

Another element of Mormon culture is the concept of Fast & Testimony Meetings.  These are a special type of Sunday service held in lieu of the regular sacrament meeting, though they are quite similar to sacrament meeting and, to the non-frequent churchgoer they may even seem indistinguishable.  They occur on the first Sunday of each month and begin with the personal tradition of, as the name implies, fasting.  I call this a personal tradition because there is no religious law decreeing that one must fast on the first Sunday of every month or go to hell.  No one asks you if you're fasting at church or puts your name down in a book if you don't.  It's a choice, one that the majority of members choose to observe and many of them for their own personal reasons.  Some fast because that's just what they're supposed to do; some, like myself at that age and other young kids, fast because their parents are fasting and because they're told to; some do it for spiritual enlightenment or to show their devotion to the Lord; and some fast for penance.

I should note that fasting is not starvation.  Babies and very small children are universally exempt from fasting as are individuals with strict and specific dietary requirements such as diabetes or hypoglycemia.  As I said before, it's a personal choice, not a religious law.  It is also for a period of only 24-hours or less for most people.  You eat dinner on Saturday night and then you partake of nothing more than water – and the sacrament, of course – until dinner on Sunday night.  Longer periods of fasting are not part of Mormon culture with, perhaps, the exception of a few individuals who make the absolutely personal decision to do so for their own reasons and generally very quietly and without letting anyone else know about it.

Another hallmark of Fast & Testimony Meetings is that instead of the two or three designated speakers that I mentioned in the previous chapter, the spaces between the passing of the sacrament and the hymns and prayers are given over to a sort of 'open mic event'.  The bishop or another member of his cabinet opens the meeting after the sacrament has been passed by inviting anyone who wants to come up and share their testimony to now do so.  After this invitation there is generally a period of silence while everyone who wants to bear their testimony waits for someone else to go first and, eventually, someone does.  The bearing of a testimony is also a very personal thing and can vary significantly from individual to individual but the general format is to stand at the microphone behind the podium (or a mobile microphone can be brought to you at your pew if you can't comfortably make your way up the steps to the pulpit) and quietly talk about your personal relationship with god, any struggles you may recently have encountered in your life and how you feel god has helped your through them, any blessings that you've encountered and how grateful you are to god for bringing them to you, etc.  Essentially, it is your time to tell others about why you love god and Jesus Christ, and why you believe that your chosen religion is the only true religion on earth.  Sometimes people cry and when this happens the understanding is that they are being 'touched by the spirit' or 'moved by the spirit' and the feeling of this connection to the divine is so powerful that it moves one to tears, but crying is neither expected or criticized.  It just … is.

When I say that the pulpit is open to anyone, I do mean anyone.  During Fast & Testimony Meetings over the course of my sixteen-plus years as a member of the Mormon or LDS church, I heard testimonies from the elderly, middle-aged, young adult, teens, children, and even very small children who wanted to participate but needed help, so they had their parents join them and crouch behind them quietly whispering words into their ears which they then repeated into the microphone often far too loudly.  I witnessed non-members of the church that had been taking lessons with the missionaries and were planning to be baptized sharing their testimonies, and later – while living in a tourist community that enthusiastically welcomed curious non-members who were in town on vacation and wanted to go to a Mormon church meeting just to see what it was like – I even witnessed one non-member, who knew virtually nothing of the Mormon religion or church other than the stereotypical misconceptions of cultism and polygamy, bear his testimony of how wrong those misconceptions had been, how unexpectedly endearing he'd found his visit to be, and how much he appreciated the members of that particular Ward for being so welcoming and kind to himself, his wife, and their daughters during their visit.

Though I am no longer a member of the Mormon/LDS church, I will never deny that Fast & Testimony Meetings are a special experience that I would encourage all of my readers to observe at least once if you're able for the sake of cultural education, if nothing else.  Among the participants of open Testimony was, quite frequently, yours truly.  I was old enough to bear my testimony without help from a parent whispering in my ear and, at that age, I had a very strong testimony to bear.  I was deeply religious and when the time came for our first Fast & Testimony meeting in our new Ward, it was no surprise to my parents, I'm sure, when I stood and made my way to the end of the pew past my father to approach the stage.  I don't remember now what I talked about but I know that I was more nervous than I had ever been bearing my testimony before because, as I stood at the pulpit looking down over the congregation with the soft hum of the podium being lowered to accommodate my 11-year-old stature, my eyes immediately fell on Telton, sitting almost dead center of the room beside his mother and siblings, looking up at me with those damningly beautiful blue eyes of his and I realized that I really wanted to impress him.

That morning I'd dressed myself in one of the skirts that I'd picked out after battling with my mother.  It was a knee-length denim wrap skirt with white fringe that had been one size too small (which was part of the reason my mother had fought with me over buying it).  It looked like it fit just fine when I was standing but when I would sit down the front flap would spread a bit too far, so I'd carried a large hymn book with me throughout the day, laying it over my knees to hide the flap entirely so that no one would notice.  I'd paired it with a white shirt made of light, airy linen that gathered at the waist, had a wide oval-shaped neckline that neared the off-shoulder region but remained just barely within the realms of Mormon modesty, and had puffy sleeves.  It was something exotic that reminded me of a shirt I'd seen on a teenage girl in a movie and had instantly loved the look of.  I looked good … or at least, I thought I did.

I stood at the pulpit and bared my spiritual soul through the microphone in the hopes that the bishop's perfect son was listening to my every word and hearing what a strong spiritual compass I had and that it would translate into how much of a good, god fearing wife I would someday make.  Wife and mother is the role that all little girls are encouraged to aspire for in many religions and the Mormons are no different.  Of course, unbeknownst to Telton, I had decided at the tender age of three that I was never having kids because my mother had told me that she loved her kids more than anyone in the world.  To this I had asked 'Even more than Daddy?' and she had replied 'All parents love their kids more than anyone else in the world, even more than their husbands and wives'.  I didn't like that.  I liked that my parents loved me, of course, but I wanted to be a wife some day and when that day came I wanted that husband to love me more than anyone else in the whole world!  If having kids meant that my husband would love our children more than he loved me then the answer was simple – we just wouldn't ever have any kids.  I was already well on my way of snubbing the social norms of my religion by insisting, much to my mother's chagrin, that I never wanted children – but to be a wife … I wanted that more than anything else in the whole world.

I wanted the fairy tale version of life.  The cute boy who asked me to prom whilst I was standing at my locker in the halls of a high school that I would never be permitted to attend; the unexpected phone calls that let me know he was thinking about me and made my parents uneasy; holding hands and then that desperately awkward first kiss that made my heart feel like it was going to explode out of my chest; and the one-knee proposal with a ring in a little velvet box after graduation followed by the perfect wedding where my father walked me down the aisle and gave his blessing as he handed me over to someone who was every bit as intelligent and strong and competent and perfect as he was in my eyes.  I thought about it constantly and for the last two or three weeks I had finally been able to picture a face on that perfect boy with utter clarity – the face of the bishop's perfect son.

When I'd finished my testimony, my mouth felt dry and I saw my mother making her way down the aisle, approaching to give her own testimony after mine.  We passed one another at the bottom of the stairs and, as we passed, she leaned close and quietly said "Suck your stomach in, it jiggles a little when you walk".

I was utterly devastated, shocked, crest fallen and confused.  My … my stomach?  My stomach jiggles?  That's bad?  Neither of us had actually stopped in passing for more than a quick second so there was no time for me to ask any of these questions and, as all eyes were on us watching her approach the podium (no one else in the room was standing, after all) it would have caused a scene of awkwardness had I even tried.  I returned to my seat in the pew but instead of listening to her testimony with rapt attention as I usually did on the rare occasions when she shared it, I sat there looking down at my own stomach.  It stuck out.  It stuck out rather far, actually – especially when I sat.  I couldn't see the buttons on my skirt because my stomach was in the way.  Was that not normal?  I looked over at my dad but he was still somewhat pudgy from the desk job as a design engineer that he'd held for so long so yes, his stomach stuck out.  I looked at my sister.  Her stomach stuck out a little bit but not nearly as much as mine did.  I looked across the aisle at Loni, the stunningly gorgeous sixteen-year-old girl in our ward who would eventually become 2^nd runner up in the 1995 Miss Teen USA pageant.  Her stomach didn't stick out at all.  Not even a little bit.  From her boobs to her lap she was a flat, perfectly sculpted slab of marble beneath a Kate-Middleton-Chic dress.  I looked down at my own stomach again … I didn't have boobs, just a stomach. 

The dawning happened then – I was fat and fat was ugly, therefore, I was ugly.  It was that fast and that simple and as absurd or immature or obsessive compulsive as it might sound – from that moment on, that became my inner voice and it didn't stop there.  Eventually the voice discovered that my eyes were too far apart, my forehead was too large, my teeth were too crooked, my face too round, and my arms far too hairy.  I began hating everything about myself with only two exceptions; I could sing very well, and I had nice hair.  Those became my only two sources of self-worth.

When we returned to the camper and changed out of our Sunday best I ran off somewhere with my sister to play and my dad made his way up the hill toward our property to putter around a bit because actually working on Sunday is frowned upon by most Christian religions including the LDS.  I wasn't present when our first visitor arrived but as my dad told it later, the time was just before sundown and if you've never seen a desert sunset I must strongly suggest that you add it to your bucket list.  They're always beautiful if the weather is good but the best ones happen just after a storm when there are a few clouds dotting a crystal blue sky.  As the sun sinks toward the horizon the entire landscape explodes with a wash of pinks and blues and oranges and purples that no camera on earth can adequately capture.  The red sandstone mountains become monolithic towers of flaming gold while the clouds form a type of lovely patchwork gradient from yellow to orange to hot pink to purple and indigo and violet and blue, touching every spectrum of color in between.  The dry brown foxtails shimmer like they've been crop dusted with golden glitter and there's a crispness to the air that's more refreshing to inhale than the first sip of a cold drink on a hot day.

This was just the kind of sunset that we were having when my dad was alerted by the soft crunching of tires rolling slowly up the gravel hill toward the property.  He stopped what he was doing and watched as the driver of the small gray pickup pulled up to the property, turned the engine off, got out, and looked around in utter awe at the twin peaks of Kolob canyon to the northeast.  My father was an exceptionally social person who could strike up a conversation, and often did, with complete strangers having their lunch at the next table, so it would have been nothing at all for him to approach this man in a friendly yet guarded way.  As it happened, the man's name was Joe and he'd not arrived on our property that day for any particular purpose.  He'd been driving and noticed that there was a nice sunset happening so he'd wanted to find a high-up place to have a look at it and our steep hill had been the most convenient option.  Joe had chosen well.  We did have one hell of a great view!

Joe was as social and likeable as my dad so, naturally, the two got on instantly well and quickly discovered that they had many things in common not the least of which was their distrust of government and their belief in a need to be prepared with things like food storage, weapons, and most of all survival skills.  Joe was not religious that I recall but that didn't stop the two men from getting along and this became only the first of many visits.  We all liked Joe once we'd met him.  He was a handsome man with mid-short salt and pepper hair, an active build, a big smile, and a loud and very unique but pleasant laugh which he used very often.  He was also highly intelligent, fiercely loyal, and the kind of person that would have dropped everything to help a friend at the slightest indication that it was needed.  When he learned that my dad was planning on building our entire house himself while we all lived in a camper, Joe brought his teenage boys with him to help as often as they could manage despite the fact that they all actually lived over an hour away in Boulder City.

My favorite thing of all about Joe, however, was his connections.  Joe was a horse expert.  He and his sons frequently purchased wild horses from the stock auctions held by the BLM in Cedar City and then trained them into respectable, gentle trail or even skilled rodeo horses which they then sold to loving homes.  One of the promises that my parents had made to my sister and I prior to the move, in fact – the most important promise of all as we saw it, was that we could have horses in this new home and Joe was precisely the man who could make that happen.  Joe and my dad agreed that purchasing a discount horse for a few hundred dollars fresh from the stock auction and then training it ourselves would be a good character building exercise for my sister and I, a way to teach us about real responsibility, about horses, about hard work, and help us to build a special bond with the horse that often only comes from mutual education.  Joe picked out a lovely little black gelding with a big white star on his forehead and a long, messy black mane and tail and brought him to the property as soon as we had a good fenced in spot to keep him.  He was small but stout and just about as wild as they come but he was ours and we adored him.  I've mentioned before that my sister and I took the naming of animals very seriously so we didn’t give the horse a name right away – in fact it took us several months to pick one out as I recall because we quickly rejected any lackluster typical names like Black Beauty or Ranger (we'd finally gotten around to naming one of the Wilkins' cats Quigley and I don't recall what name we picked out for the other one).

Despite not having a name for him, we became infatuated with him right away and wanted to begin training him immediately though I dare say we'd thoroughly underestimated the true scope of that task!  When the Bureau of Land Management rounds up wild horses in the southwestern United States they do the job as quickly and efficiently as possible.  This often involved using a series of small, light, and nimble helicopters flying low to locate and subsequently spook (or frighten) a herd of horses and get them running the right direction until they eventually and unintentionally run right into a sort of horizontal horse funnel.  The mouth of this funnel is comprised of vinyl webbing that is rolled out in large sheets and temporarily strapped to a series of fence posts.  It's so wide at the mouth that the horses don't even realize it's there on both sides of them but as it nears the final enclosure it narrows (hence the term funnel) until the horses are forced to run in a column, side-by-side and nose to tail with no more than 2 or 3 abreast. 

By the time they realize they're being trapped it's far too late and there's nowhere else for them to go but forward, through the gate and into the main enclosure where they can then be easily lassoed and wrangled into trailers for transport.  Many of the most wild mustangs sold at the BLM stock auctions will still have that first lasso hanging around their neck because they pulled it too tight and behaved too wildly for the BLM cowboys to easily remove it so they just cut the rope and assume that the horse's new owner will remove it or that the horse will be sold to a glue and dog food factory where the lasso can be removed post mortem.  Yes, this is the same organization that pretends to care about the humane treatment and preservation of turtles and I know all of this because I've witnessed it first-hand.  It's not a conspiracy theory or a dirty rumor or, in these parts, even a secret.  It's a public display that anyone can go and watch for entertainment purposes from a safe distance away.  You're welcome.

This horse did not still have a rope around his neck, but he did have a wild look in his eyes that worried even Joe.  He expressed to my father that he had doubts about it being the right horse for my sister and I and about it being a tamable horse.  He said that there really are some horses that are just too wild and will never be anything else and he suspected that this horse might be one of those.  He regretted picking it for us, but we loved it and we believed that with enough time, patience, and faith we could move mountains.  We wanted to work with him obsessively at first, but my dad and Joe insisted that we give him time to acclimate to his new surroundings – he was all worked up from the auction and the trailer ride to our property and they said that if we gave him a few days to cool off and adjust we would find him easier to work with and it would be better for his sake.  Of course, we adored him, so we always wanted to do what would be in his best interest, so we let him be.

Not long after we got the horse we had a steady string of new visitors to the property.  My sister's dad brought a pop-up trailer that he loaned us so that my sister and I could sleep in a bed that was actually long enough for us and so that my parents could have a bit of privacy.  My oldest brother visited with his best friend to check on us and help with some of the construction work as well, and then the most unexpected surprise came one afternoon when my mother, sister, and I were sitting in the camper under the shade trees down on the Wilkins' property.  It was a hot day but there was a nice breeze coming through the trees that made it bearable and when I first looked up and saw a smiling face with big dark sunglasses and fluffy brown curls peeking sideways through the screen door from the hill just beyond it took me a moment to realize this was someone I knew.

I didn't know Kelly very well, but I'd played with her daughters on a few occasions and her visit meant that they had most likely come with her.  She and her husband were friends with my parents in northern Utah before we'd moved, and they'd come to spend a weekend along with their kids.  They had a teenage son as well and some experience in construction.  All at once there was a sort of good old-fashioned barn raising on our property!  The sound of hammers banging and saws whirring echoed off the hills as nearly every able bodied man we knew well worked together to make some much needed progress!  We were already behind schedule and in just one day some barely-visible foundations and a few two-by-fours became a fully framed and paneled geodesic structure with openings for the hallway and the windows and a sturdy floor for the second story where my sister and I would have our bedrooms … and then the soft crunch of gravel tires on the dirt hill interrupted everything.

The hammering halted and one-by-one every pair of eyes turned as the brown and white police car with the big bar of lights across the roof pulled up onto the property and a lone uniformed officer emerged.  I could barely see the events from where I was playing with the horse at the far end of the property, but I saw the officer hand my father a piece of red paper, they spoke but I was much too far away to hear what was being said, and after a moment the officer returned to his car, turned around, and drove away.

All work then ceased.  My father called everyone down from where they'd been crawling over our budding abode and little by little, people started to leave.  We'd been red-flagged.