Field of Sad Trees

Field of Sad Trees
Spanish Fork, UT
April 2008

Thank you to Andy Adams for featuring one of my images on Flak Photo today. I made this photograph during a trip to Utah in the spring of 2008 to explore the setting of the Gary Gilmore murders in 1976. The search for a sad tree was inspired by a passage in The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer.

One Sunday while she was digging away in her garden, Gary carved their names on the apple tree. He did it with a pocket knife, real nice, real neat: GARY LOVES NICOLE. Nobody had ever done that before.

Next day she had a lot of things to do, and kept wanting to get back. When she finally reached home, she cleaned out his car first, then climbed up the tree to a place above where he had done it, and carved out: NICOLE LOVES GARY. Then she went into the house just in time to meet him.

He came out into the backyard with a beer and she told him to look at the apple tree. He didn't see anything and she finally had to point it out to him. Then he was happy as a kid, and said she had done hers better than his. Told her it was a beautiful heart she had carved around the names.

excerpt from The House in Spanish Fork
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

Gary and Nicole

Field of Sad Trees
Spanish Fork, UT
April 2008

One Sunday while she was digging away in her garden, Gary carved their names on the apple tree. He did it with a pocket knife, real nice, real neat: GARY LOVES NICOLE. Nobody had ever done that before.

Next day she had a lot of things to do, and kept wanting to get back. When she finally reached home, she cleaned out his car first, then climbed up the tree to a place above where he had done it, and carved out: NICOLE LOVES GARY. Then she went into the house just in time to meet him.

He came out into the backyard with a beer and she told him to look at the apple tree. He didn't see anything and she finally had to point it out to him. Then he was happy as a kid, and said she had done hers better than his. Told her it was a beautiful heart she had carved around the names.

excerpt from The House in Spanish Fork
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

What were the odds of driving around Spanish Fork and finding the apple tree where Gary and Nicole had declared their love for one another thirty two years ago? Pretty slim, I thought. Like finding love itself. And making it work.

Spanish Fork, where Gary briefly stayed with Nicole, was drearier and poorer and tawdrier than Provo. Dark clouds hung over the town and seemed perfectly right for my impossible mission and my own disillusionment.

Does the fact that these dark clouds got me excited make me some kind of truly gloomy person or just practical-minded when it comes to telling a story?

I made a sincere effort to look for the most romantic and/or saddest tree I could find with no idea what it would look like when I found it. I found these trees in a field that separated the town from a National Guard unit on its outskirts, and they looked sad enough for me to stop the car and set up my camera.

I simply didn't have the patience to stay in Spanish Fork for ever and ever looking for a tree I'd never find. Some things are just made to stay in your mind like a fantasy or an ideal. I imagined Gary and Nicole walking through the field to carve their names on one of these trees instead. Maybe it was a sunnier day if it is ever sunny in Spanish Fork which was hard to picture at that moment, though I had often imagined the two of them under a hot sun, sweating.

City Center Motel

Green Curtains
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008


Window
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008

On the flight to Phoenix, I began reading The Executioner's Song for the second time. The first time was in Chicago in the winter of 1997. My girlfriend and I were sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a poorly heated apartment and shared one copy and passed in back and forth and argued over who got to read it on a given night.

This second time around, I got as far Gary getting out of prison in Utah, Gary and Nicole falling in love, Gary getting drunk and high on Fiornal, Gary and Nicole fighting over sex, Nicole breaking it off with Gary, Gary shooting a clerk in a Sinclair Station, Gary trying to have sex with Nicole's stoned sister in a Holiday Inn, Gary shooting a clerk in the lobby of the City Center Motel, Gary getting captured and put in jail, Gary writing love letters - letters full of sexual longing and jealousy and pain - to Nicole, who falls back in love with Gary and tries to take her own life.

Gary's refusal to fight his death sentence, which the book later describes, created a media sensation in 1976 and drew Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer and eventually his own brother, Mikail, to tell Gary's story and the story of his family and a story about Utah. A juvenile delinquent with a Mormon mother and a violent father who was perhaps the son of Harry Houdini, Gary spent most of his life behind bars. Handsome in a rough way and intensely masculine with streaks of charisma and creativity, Gary, whose hero was Johnny Cash, had the makings of a dark and tragic American icon. His crimes made history and his character fascinated even Matthew Barney and the art world.

My goal was to find the scenes of his crimes and to discover what exists there now and what psychic energy remains in these places. I had already tracked down the City Center Motel at 150 W. 300 S. in Provo via the internet. I was almost surprised, when I made my first call to the motel, to learn that it still existed, and I asked the clerk on the phone, "Is this where the Gary Gilmore murder took place in 1976?". The clerk sounded uncomfortable and said it was under new management and he didn't know what I was talking about. Later, I made a reservation before I left for my drive to Provo, and it was a good thing I did, since the motel was full when I arrived, and most of its inhabitants seemed to live there for long stretches of time.

I spent the night in a room that smelled like stale cigarettes and felt like any motel room anywhere, really. Dingy, sad, lonely. The most interesting thing to me about the motel was its cast of characters, some of whom I photographed, and whose images will appear soon.

The Sinclair service station in the nearby town of Orem no longer exists as far as I could tell. Norman Mailer describes its location as the intersection of 800 North and 175 East. The closest thing I could find to that address was 800 North and 75 East, where small houses sit at the base of a big sky and snow-capped mountains, and my night pictures of this setting didn't quite make it.