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.

Sean

Sean
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008

Before I left the City Center Motel in the morning, I had to take a picture of the clerk - if only for myself. The clerk, Sang, seemed peaceful and kind and tolerant, both towards me as a photographer and towards his long-term dwellers and their various dramas.

While I was waiting for Sang to return to the counter, I found Sean in the lobby of the City Center Motel reading The Book of Mormon Made Easier. I was immediately captivated by his strong and vulnerable face as well as his remoteness and his earnestness. I asked if I could photograph him outside the lobby in better light, and he was quietly compliant - no questions asked.

I photographed him with his book, but perhaps that one looked too contrived.

Cleo

Cleo
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008

Wolfman

Wolfman Smoking
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008

Just before dusk, I found Wolfman pacing in the parking lot of the City Center Motel chain smoking cigarettes. I told him he looked intense smoking cigarettes, and he said he was intense about everything he did. I said I could relate to that, about cigarettes and everything else.

Throughout the night and even the next morning, Wolfman was still pacing and smoking in the parking lot. His girlfriend was arguing with him from her doorway on the balcony of the second floor of the motel, and it was like a play, except it was real. The argument kept Wolfman in orbit around the girlfriend. He couldn't leave the parking lot and yet he couldn't return to their room upstairs. I thought about how often I had been in his shoes, lighting more cigarettes because what else was there to do.

He seemed to welcome the camera as a distraction - a validation of his plight.

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.

Hurricane

Hurricane, UT
April 2008

Smiley

Smiley
Dixie Palms Motel
St. George, UT
April 2008

The morning after my trip to Colorado City and Mountain Meadows and my night in the Dixie Palms Motel, I woke up to find Smiley standing in the parking lot outside my room, and I found his innocence as welcome and reassuring as the new morning itself. After I took some pictures of him, he said, "Isn't it great to have a nice neighbor, if only briefly?," and I felt the exact same way.

He invited me into his room for coffee and told me how he took care of the motel grounds and worked with kids on the weekends. The room was his home, and he showed my some of his belongings and the contents of his icebox. He said that he stocked up on a week's supply of cheeseburgers from McDonald's to save money, and reheated the burgers in his microwave, which I thought was pretty gross, but I kept that to myself.

Everything about Smiley spoke of kindness and gentleness, and I felt lucky to start a new day on this note.

The Temple

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
St. George, UT
April 2008

Television

TV Screens
Dixie Palms Motel
St. George, Utah
April 08

"The FBI," she said, "look in on houses to see if people are committing any crimes. They do it through the TV, you know." She lay back on the bed and the room was spinning. It was like the motel room she had gone to with a rich man. She had felt so alive that night because the plastic was so dead.

April Baker
excerpt from The Motel Room
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

After I left Mountain Meadows, I drove back to St. George and checked into a room at The Dixie Palms Motel. I turned on the TV and found the story about the FBI raid on the polygamist compound in El Dorado, Texas on Larry King Live. The same footage played over and over again with victims telling their lurid stories, newscasters with menacing snarls and women who claimed they liked being one of many wives. I sat on the bed and shot digital photos of the TV screen and thought about how everything felt all at once sleazy: television is sleazy, the FBI is sleazy, polygamists are sleazy, newscasters are sleazy, victims are sleazy, motel rooms are sleazy, Utah is sleazy, Texas is sleazy, America is sleazy, religion is sleazy, cameras are sleazy, even I am sleazy.

Mountain Meadows

Mountain Meadows
Southwestern Utah
April 2008

After I left Colorado City, my next destination was Mountains Meadows north of St. George, Utah. I decided to stop in St. George to calm my nerves and take a tour of Brigham Young's winter home. The house was clean and quiet and soothing, and the tour guide seemed almost saintly in contrast to the bulky and intimidating men I'd encountered in Colorado City. I felt a little guilty that my motivation to photograph Brigham Young's home was less than celebratory since the guide was so gracious when I asked if I could take some pictures. He told us that Brigham Young fathered fifty-seven children with multiple wives, and I took some photos of his massive canopy bed, upon which lay a top hat and a cane. I sensed that the images might be useless given the overexposure from the sun pouring in from the window behind the bed, and I was right.

My daylight hours were fast fading so I got back on the highway north towards Mountains Meadows. Mountains Meadows is the site of what historian Geoffrey Ward described as "the most hideous example of the human cost exacted by religious fanaticism in American history until 9/11."

I first learned about Mountain Meadows through Jon Krakauer's book, Under The Banner of Heaven. On September 11, 1857, a militia of Mormons disguised as Indians, along with real Paiute Indians, attacked a wagon train of Arkansas families known as the Fancher party who were traveling to California. The Mormon militia persuaded the families to surrender under the false promise of a truce and a safe passage. And then in a brutal slaughter known as The Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Mormon militia took the lives of approximately 140 men, women and children.

After the massacre, The Mormon Church first tried to lay the blame for the killings on the local Paiute Indians. But when evidence revealed Mormon involvement, the church then tried to shift sole responsibility onto John D. Lee, a Mormon zealot and the adopted son of Brigham Young. Lee was executed for his crimes by a firing squad in 1877, and controversy exists to this day about the involvement of other church members in The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

According to an article by Sally Denton in The New York Times in 2003, the current church president, Gordon B. Hinckley, agreed to restore a landmark in 1999 where at least some of the bodies were buried, a concession which drew controversy when a contractor's backhoe unearthed the bones of 29 victims. Denton wrote, "After a debate between Utah state officials and church leaders - what has been called Utah's "unique church-state tango" - about state laws requiring unearthed bones to be forensically examined for cause of death, the church had the remains quickly reburied without any extensive examination that might have drawn new attention to the brutality of the murders."

She further wrote, "At a time when religions around the world are acknowledging and atoning for past sins, the massacre has left the Mormon Church in a quandary. Roman Catholics have apologized for their silence during the Holocaust, United Methodists for their massacre of American Indians during the Civil War, Southern Baptists for their support of slavery, and Lutherans for Martin Luther's anti-Jewish remarks. But unlike the leaders of other religions, who are believed to be guided by the hand of God, Mormon prophets are considered extensions of him ... To acknowledge complicity on the part of church leaders runs the risk of calling into question Brigham Young's divinity and the Mormon belief that they are God's chosen people."

Well, as I drove closer to Mountains Meadows, I wondered just how eerie it was going to be, and man, was it eerie right off the bat. Dusk was just beginning to approach an overcast afternoon, and the feeling of death and evil was nearly as pervasive and palpable as what I recall from a visit to the site of the World Trade Center two months after the attack on 9/11. I took deep breaths as I drove down the dirt road to the memorial site where an American flag was erected to acknowledge the loss of American lives.

I got out of the jeep with my camera and tri-pod, praying that I wouldn't be die alone here, subsumed by ghosts or startled by an attacker looming in the meadow. Shortly after I set up my first few shots, a truck came barreling down the dirt road and two men climbed out with a pit bull. I ran back to the jeep and stood at the door and asked them, "Are you guys spooky?" They assured me that they weren't spooky, but we agreed that this place sure was spooky. They left quickly, and I resumed taking pictures until a large bull walked out of the meadow gazing in my direction, and that was it for me at the memorial site. I drove up to the top of a hill to take in the full view of the meadow and hurriedly took three shots and got back on the road.

Colorado City

Cherry Tree
Colorado City, AZ
April 2008


House
Colorado City, AZ
April 2008

When I was a student in junior high school, I remember reading a short story by Shirley Jackson called The Lottery, and the impact that this story had on me. The story is about a farming village which holds a lottery each year and selects one member of its community for a ritualistic sacrifice. A family name is first drawn from a black box, followed by the name of one member of that family, who is then stoned to death in the town square by his or her family and friends.

The story is so chilling, I recall a quiet and profound sense of shock and sadness that settled into me as I finished its final words, an experience that stands out in my mind as one of the events that marked a transition from my own childhood into a darker and more complicated adolescence.

I don't know that anything I subsequently read gave me a feeling like this until, in the summer of 2005, I read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer. This work of non-fiction describes the murder of a woman and her child committed by her husband's brothers, Ron and Don Lafferty, in American Fork, Utah in 1984. The Lafferty Brothers, who were members of a fundamentalist sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, claimed that they received a divine commandment from God to commit this horrific crime and later expressed no remorse for causing these violent deaths.

What is further disturbing about Under the Banner of Heaven is the dense history of violence it illustrates surrounding the Mormon religion, and particularly the violence and misogyny associated with Mormon Fundamentalists who to this day practice polygamy in communities in America. Before I read this book, I had no idea grown men were marrying and abusing teenage brides and beating wayward women in "re-education camps" outside of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah.

What I read in this book stayed with me for years, and it became apparent this winter that I could finally make a trip to this part of the country. I didn't form much of a plan other than to simply make the drive across the desert north of the Grand Canyon to see Colorado City and Hildale for myself and to photograph whatever I might find there.

The day before I left for Colorado City, I talked to my mom on the phone, and she told me about the FBI raid on the polygamist compound in West Texas, which I hadn't yet seen in the news. She was concerned since she knew I was planning to drive from Arizona to Utah that week and she figured tensions would be heightened in the area. I didn't mention to her that I was actually planning to drive to Colorado City the next day since that is not the kind of thing you tell your mother, even when you are thirty-four years old.

The drive from Kayenta to Colorado City took several hours passing first through the stark and beautiful Kaibab Plateau and then up into a snowy forest region in the mountains. My sense of fear began to settle in as I reached Fredonia, a small farming town whose name had appeared in the book in relation to the polygamists, and then it grew as I made the last stretch of the drive through a desolate landscape north into Colorado City.

I didn't know what to expect. Would it look like a normal town with a settlement on the outskirts that I would have to search for? I felt waves of fear pass through me like the sensation of being on a roller-coaster that is climbing towards a peak, when the impending moment of the plunge is full of uncertainty and suspense.

The one thing I had read about the area outside of Krakauer's book was an article I found on the internet about a restaurant in Hildale called The Merry Wives Cafe, where women in long dresses serve food to curious travelers. I planned to stop at the cafe to eat lunch and to get my bearings.

As I drove into Colorado City, I realized that the settlement was the town itself and consisted of houses and yards set off of the highway at the base of a mountain. I stayed on the highway and passed the border into Utah and pulled into the parking lot of The Merry Wives Cafe, whose glass windows were black from the outside. I walked into the cafe and ordered a turkey sandwich and a rasberry lemonade from a woman in a long dress, but when she brought the food to my table, my mouth was too dry to take more than a few bites.

The article about the cafe described portraits of polygamist families on its walls and a mural depicting several woman harmoniously working together in a field. As I sat at my table, I gazed at the mural and thought about asking if I could take a photograph, and then decided that it wasn't important enough to call attention to myself as a photographer since my real goal was to drive into the residential section of Colorado City.

I left the restaurant and drove back east on the highway and turned onto a road that led into the settlement. When I stopped the jeep on the street in front of the cherry tree, several small children in traditional dresses who were playing under the tree immediately ran and hid when they spotted me, even before I picked up my camera. I quickly got out of the car and took a few shots of the tree and drove further in the neighborhood. I saw a woman in a long dress standing in her backyard leaning against a fence, and my desire to take a photograph was overwhelming and yet impossible to realize.

Part of what made Colorado City seem so surreal, besides the large houses with dark windows, was the amalgam of the new and the old. The streets were lined with brand new trucks and SUV's with black windows, while the children and women, some of whom were driving these vehicles, appeared to belong to another century.

I wished I were invisible, but knew that I wasn't, and was, in fact, more than conspicuous, and however real or imagined, my sense of danger in this settlement alone with a camera was growing. My heart was racing, and I imagined one of these many trucks chasing me down in my jeep, and how unlikely an escape would be in the event of a confrontation. I took a few more photos of these eerie houses and drove back toward the highway. I passed a boy with a brimmed hat seated grandly on a horse that was slowing trotting down the road, and I quickly leaned out of the the car window to shoot his photo. But as soon as the boy saw my camera, he fled.

The was my last sign to leave Colorado City, and I continued northwest on the highway. And while the drama of this excursion was clearly a reflection of my imagination, I still felt lucky to leave a place where so many women are held captive.