Salt of the Earth

    Just out of Great Falls, I saw what I'd feared in the dark the night before: a coyote right at the edge of the road, jogging, watching traffic, waiting for a break to cross just as patiently as any urban dog, and a lot more traffic-savvy. Not much further, I saw a herd of about a hundred head of antelope just beside the highway enjoying the fodder in a farmer's field, with cows in the next field. Deb thought they were "farmed antelope", but they could have cleared that fence before you could say "Deer me!", of course.     

    There's been some renaming going on 'round here: we passed a place called First Peoples' Buffalo Jump. Mind you, you wouldn't want to be the second person doing a buffalo jump, would you? By then he'd have gotten wind, literally, of what you were up to, and you'd be on the horns of a dilemma...or a bison. Still, those First Peoples were pretty athletic, weren't they? 

    We did see a buffalo on the edge of a precipice later on, looked like he was deciding to take the plunge, but Deborah spotted tethers restraining his enthusiasm. 

    The scenery was gorgeous all day long, from the first sight of the Big Belt Mountains with a classic butte to their right, through the foothills of the lower Rockies, and across the Continental Divide twice, back and forth. Deb liked the canyon setting for the Jesuit St. Peter's Mission. I like the stories of Black Mary, later known as Stagecoach Mary - you can google them. 

    Kinda funny: the Jesuits built their mission to the Blackfoots on their reservation, and the minute it was done, the gov't moved the boundary of the reservation ten miles north. So they had to build a new one, and turn the old one into a school for people who remained in the area. It would make a great movie set for a western. Louis Riel lived and taught school down here too, before he went back north to lead a rebellion and get himself hung. 

    In Salt Lake City we're staying for two nights at the nicest $50 motel I've seen in probably twenty years or more. We have a kitchenette suite at the SkyHarbour motel, complete with every pot and dish and other convenience you could imagine, plus a "clubhouse" with jacuzzi and sauna, heated pool, etc. 

    It was 7° today, I drove around with the window open. There is no snow anywhere, even up in the hills where there would normally be skiers at this time of year.

    We're right near Temple Square, so we whipped down right away to watch the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's Thursday evening rehearsal. They did anthems and hymns for Sunday, and practiced Somewhere Out There and Somewhere Over the Rainbow as a medley. 360 voices, I estimated, and they sounded like silk and honey, although the basses could have used a little more testosterone. I kept fantasizing what a 360 voice Umbundu choir, trained and auditioned, would sound like.

    The organ is famous, so we dropped in for a recital today at noon, with high hopes... which were dashed. There was a horrible echo, and except for one nice performance of All Through the Night (which they didn't even name in the program), all the pieces came out of the organ sounding thunderous, ominous, jarring, shrill, shrieking...there are several different organists who take turns playing the daily recital; maybe we just didn't win the lottery today. We kept seeing the macabre Phantom of the Opera instead of a heavenly vision. 

    We spent time in the Family History Library, where Deborah did some research on her ancestors; and then in the Museum of Church History. I find Mormons pretty weird. They're Christians, but with this strange overlay of belief, "some kinda baloney 'bout boney Moroni"...the angel Moroni, that is, who gave golden tablets to John Smith in the woods almost two centuries ago. (By the way, how come there are no fat angels? They all look like young Greek athletes.) 

    Other than that, Mormons appear to be kind, industrious, family-oriented worker bees in a gigantic world community - and one of their iconic symbols is the beehive. Could as easily be the Borg, I suppose. They have an abundance of spectacular temples, tabernacles, etc - they remind me of the Roman Catholic Church, actually. 

    More puzzlements: like the Catholic Church, they have saints; but they can all become saints after they die, apparently. They have missionaries, doing something like an 18 month compulsory draft program in the army; earnest young people with nametags wander around looking for tourists to chat up. We spoke with two friendly young ladies, one from England and one from Mexico, right in Temple Square; I joked about sending missionaries to the holy land. 

    We saw a giant bathtub that was used to baptise the souls of the dead who'd hadn't had a chance to become Mormon; that caused a big kerfuffle in recent decades when Jewish groups were incensed that holocaust victims had been posthumously baptized! It does seem to demonstrate an arrogance so profound that it might be embedded in their DNA.  

    They do have an awesome genealogy resource, three billion names in it, and they're determined to be as thorough and factual as possible, so they're a great resource for the rest of us, and they do it all for free, just because the family itself is central to their odd belief system, which entails "pre-existence", "marriage for eternity", and "reunion of all families in the afterlife". That must be one of the strongest draws for new adherents, when the missionaries magically appear on your doorstep: who doesn't want to believe they could be re-united with loved ones who've passed on? 

    Families are forever, they believe; also, they used to be polygamous, but left that behind to get status as a State, apparently (the church had already split over that issue even earlier).  I don't know if their polygamy was similar to the African form where widows are taken into the home of a brother of the deceased, or whether one simply collects as many young women as one can handle, which seems to be the case in places like Bountiful, British Columbia. They didn't mention what happens if two wives didn't get along...do they bicker for eternity? 

    But the town of Salt Lake is pretty nice, too - clean, wide, not busy, not a lot of traffic, and not expensive for food and accommodation. About 200,000 people live here, I think, including a Muslim crowd, and a large Spanish population. Next blog: From the Sacred to the Profane