THE PASSING OF SEASONS

LOOKING AHEAD

The journey of a day and the passage of a night.

So short a time to do

Our life and our experience.

Can we build and create

In the passing of the moons?

Can we do more than give

And let gifts pass on to us?

We keep saying, let's just do for now.

Too uncertain those days and nights ahead.

Yet as we touch and as we build,

We enjoy and know there is a meaning

For our being here today.

A tree grows in a season,

Its leaves are there to live.

With winter, they are no more.

The roots, though, they still live

Yet another season to serve their dormant buds

'Till they become leaves.

Now another journey of a day,

And a passing of a night.

Another season we'll await with hope,

With hardships ever present,

With the passage of the moons

Perhaps in another season

We'll serve again.

              Jack Williams

         September 6, 1984

PREFACE

I have passed through many seasons in my life. Some have been with happiness and some rather sad, but in all I have made it through and somehow I have survived. This is an account of eight of those “seasons” of my life. Before I started out to write these short stories, I had a nagging feeling that I must record these things of my life, but I did not know the reason why, other than a pressing desire to relive some of those incidents and play them out in my mind again. What was it Abraham Lincoln said? “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” My stories are really “Yesterday’s News” and there is no turning back to change what I have done or get new credit for my successes. I can only learn from those experiences and trust that I have leaned them sufficiently that I don’t have to repeat those seasons again. I am convinced that all that has occurred in my life was by my own making, so there’s no one to blame for any faults with which I have come forward; that I want to make clear in this document. For me, an important facet of my growth is to understand and also live my experience and know that I am continually making it the way it is. Important too, is the fact that I know that I can change it whenever I want and act on those changes to make things different or more pleasant. But most of all I want to make it clear that I am all right with the way things have been because I know that I have been doing my best; and while it may not seem like it sometimes, that’s all there is of me to give. There may be a lesson in this for you, dear reader.

A FEW OF MY SEASONS

Chapter 1—Ecuadoran Highlands

Chapter 2—Traveling Across Idaho

Chapter 3—To Zambia and Back

Chapter 4—A Lifespring Experience

Chapter 5---Marriage and Divorce

Chapter 6—Ibex, a Utah Ghost Town

Chapter 7 – Unforgotten Trips to Farm Creek

Chapter 8 —Experience in Haiti, February/March 2010

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Chapter 1---Ecuadoran Highlands

 

In the morning during springtime in this peaceful valley where I was walking the grass was shimmering with d ew after a cool night and the sun in the east was beginning to give its light to the day. Because the air was so crisp I could see details clearly across to the other side of the valley many miles away. That morning I was walking along a dirt path at over twelve thousand feet in elevation in the mountains west of Riobamba Ecuador to get to a small village to work on an adobe oven project that the villagers had been constructing under my supervision. The air was thin and while I was able to get around all right, it seemed to me a little difficult at this elevation. But none of that took away the beauty of the valley and the hills beyond that I was in and the rounded fertile mountains I could see all around me. Here and there people could be seen grubbing the land by hand getting ready for planting. Harvest season was over and it was time for the peasants—they called themselves “indigenous”—who lived on these high mountain hillsides to plant their potatoes and corn again.

I wasn’t there long. The villagers were making good progress on the stove (Horno) and didn’t need my help for the time being. Soon we were back to our vehicle moving along the dirt tracks that wound up to the village of Busay miles ahead of us. Dogs came along the road to meet us and chase the car as we passed. Some would run down from their resting places hundreds of yards intent on chasing our car and trying to bite the wheels. I had never seen dogs so plentiful and intent upon doing us harm. They darted along the side of the car and then would disappear for a while running head on just barely in front of the tire. Then they would follow us for sometimes five minutes before they gave up and stood on the road still barking until our car disappeared from their sight.

We would pass people with sheep and goats while they herded them along the road going somewhere, I knew not where. Everything looked the same there on the hillsides and who knows what was their intent? All the women I would see were dressed in costume and most all of them had rounded black hats that they wore. Some, I noticed, especially some of the young women wore baseball caps but all were wearing some kind of a hat and I never got to see much of their hair that was tucked away under those head covers. It was cold in the morning and throughout the day there on these hills, so most of the people seemed bundled up as if it were a cold December morning in Utah. I didn’t think it was so cold, and was comfortable just wearing my vest and a long sleeve light shirt.

The men as well were dressed warmly. All wore the same type hats that were different from those worn by most of the women. All were jacketed like it was freezing outside and almost everyone; men, women and children wore brightly colored wool ponchos. Children, I noticed were always bundled up and most were wearing hats like their mothers were wearing. Some, however, had knitted pull-on hats that covered their ears.

The children of school age were all bundled the same and wore these same ponchos with only their faces showing. But every one of them had bright red cheeks swollen and blistered from the penetrating sun and the intense ultraviolet radiation that was prevalent in this high altitude. The children were all tiny and even adults were rarely over five feet tall. Some teenagers seem to be taller and I believe it is because they are eating better. I noticed most of the children smiled a lot and waved when I passed. When I was close by they would crowd around me and loved that I was taking pictures of them though none of them, I am sure, had ever seen a picture of themselves. I took hundreds of pictures of these beautiful children and treasure them to this day. They are my valued pieces of evidence of my visit there.

Meeting the people and seeing how they lived was another experience of amazement in this season of my life. One house I went into in Busay was and adobe brick structure built on a rather steep side hill. The earth had been cut away on the side of the hill to make a flat spot for the house that was at least twenty feet wide and perhaps another thirty feet in length. A very thick thatch roof hung down over the walls of the house almost reaching the ground in some places. To enter the one door in the house a notch was cut into the side of the hill. To enter the house I had to step down about two feet, and then bend over to make it through the four foot high door. It was quite a challenge for me to simply enter the house. When I finally got under the overhanging roof and was fully inside the house, I realized the bottom of the door was not level with the dirt floor of the house and I needed once again to step down about two feet to get to the main floor of the house. It was dark inside since there was no window. The only light entering the house came from the open door and a small fire built on the floor in the far side of the room.  

When I was finally inside after stepping down off the large stone that served as a step into the house, I stood up surprised to see how big the house seemed to me inside. I could stand fully upright in most of the structure. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the darkness inside, so during that time I did not move from the entrance for fear I might step on a child or a chicken. When my eyes finally did adjust, I was able to see that there was a barrier-like wall built from one side of the room to the other with a small opening on the left side leading to the back room. In that front section of the house there were sacks of corn or other grain, some buckets and miscellaneous other things around. There were no chairs or tables in that section of the house. When I was finally brave enough to move to the back of the room I found three women sitting on chairs crowded around a bucket full of meat that looked like it was two legs of a lamb or goat. They were cutting the meat off the bone. One of the women was quite young and I was surprised to see that she was nursing a baby while she was cutting the meat. A small cat was standing by the bucket helping itself to some of the meat that was hanging off the side of the bucket. No one was making any mind of what the cat was doing. I was sure that they could see it was there chewing away.

To the right of where I was standing just inside the back room of the house, I could see a woman crouched over an open flame on the floor cooking something in a pot that looked like potatoes. I guessed they were potatoes since I had seen many people harvesting them on the hillside. On at least two occasions in other villages I had been served pieces of potato that had been boiled. In moments after I was in the back of the house by the fire my eyes were burning from the smoke in the room. When I could still see past the tears I noticed that to my right was a bed that was about three feet off the floor. Earth had apparently been left that high inside the house for the bed when they excavated the hillside for the house. It was for sure a bed since there were sheets, pillows and some blankets. I could hear a baby or small child crying back on the back of this high bed but at first I couldn’t see it. Then I realized that large lump in the upper end of the bed was the child sitting up with a heavy wool blanket covering over him or her. 

I didn’t stay in the house much longer, but when I was again outside in the cool air of the mountain and was able to see, I took some time with the owner of the home to explain to him through my interpreter (the Program Coordinator that was with me) that he should build a smokeless stove for the place. I explained to him the dangers he and his family were living with considering the smoke inhalation, the possible lung disease potential and the danger for children from open fires in the home. He agreed and asked how he could build one of these stoves. I briefly told him about smokeless stoves, made a sketch for him on how to build one and promised him that I would arrange for and deliver a pipe for the stove on my next visit to the place. I was already having a sheet metal fabricator make up some other stove pipes for two community stoves that were to be built in two of the village schools, so I was confident that this would be no problem. After a few minutes of scribbling on my paper, I handed the man the drawing of a stove he could build out of adobe bricks and we left.  A few days later I returned to this home and delivered the stove pipe to the man. I wasn’t able to ever find out if he actually built the stove, but I was convinced that he would since he was quite an industrious man. He was literate and seemed to understand the drawing I gave him. I later learned that he was the President (like a Mayor) of his village.

The village of Busay is was located approximately thirteen thousand two hundred feet above sea level. It happened to be the highest village I worked in during my short visit to Ecuador. From the upper most section of the road near where it ended at the Busay Elementary School I could see for miles in three directions. Behind me the rounded hills loomed even higher and I was sure if I were to climb up to the top there would be another even higher hill behind this one. While we were there that day we assisted a group of villagers build a drip irrigation system behind the school. Later I came back several times and almost completed an underground tank that would collect water from the existing roofs of three class rooms.

I had been interested in the water situation for this village of Busay from my first visit I made there. I could see that from where we were at the top of this one mountain there was no water nearby, so I asked how people got water up to the school for school lunches and for their personal needs. The person I was interviewing told me that there was a spring below the village that everyone from miles around used for their water. The man took me up over an embankment and to the edge of the mountain north of the school and pointed in the general direction where the spring was located. He said it was about eight hundred meters vertically (about two thousand six hundred feet) down the mountain side where people got their water. The spring itself was not visible from where I was standing, but I could see far below me two people and a donkey that appeared about the size of ants in my view making their way up switchbacks on the narrow trail that led to and from the spring. I gasped to know what this meant for the people that lived even well above the school on the mountain to the south and felt pity for them and their continual struggle for water.

Before I left the area on that first visit to Busay School I committed to the president of the village that I would design a tank that they could build and I would help them build a system that would utilize the roofs of the three school buildings to collect water. There was already a large cistern built next to one of the buildings that hadn’t ever been used. I was told that it had been built by the government when the school was constructed some years back that never had water brought to it as the government ran out of money before they could install a pump and line to the cistern. I quickly calculated the water volume that could be realized from the roofs of the buildings during one rain storm and determined by the information the president gave me about the normal rain falls in the area that any storm could easily fill both tanks. With both tanks I determined that the entire village plus the school could benefit by the installation of this system. Furthermore, it would give the people at the school and in the neighboring homes an easy mostly downhill trek to fetch water.

Traveling to Busay as I did many times never ceased to amaze me at the beauty of this place. It was especially wonderful one day. As we were coming down from the mountain we encountered several alpaca-type animals grazing near the road. They were not actually alpacas, but looked much like them. I was told that this was a special breed of wild animal called, vicuña that had been given to the Ecuadoran Government by the Peruvian Government as a gift. The animals were especially valuable for their wool, which I was told was many more times valuable than alpaca and much nicer, if that were possible. I had purchased two sweaters made of natural alpaca when I was in town one day and I had never felt any material so soft, and never experienced any material that was so insulated against cold.

But the mountains there rolled like waves and all the ground around everywhere was coal black as if it has just been excavated from a coal mine. Somewhere I read that the ancient now extinct volcano, Chimborazo, that is the most prominent feature in the region had exploded some eons ago and cast its cinders across thousands of square miles to a depth of over thirty feet. What I saw everywhere was this rich soil that was the remains of the ash that had come from this mountain that was located about forty miles to the west of the area where I was working.

Despite the elevation in the mountains where I traveled those five months that I was there in the latter part of 2007 I was told that it never snowed. When on the few occasions I could see the volcano Chimborazo from Riobamba, it was always covered with snow. But even though it didn’t snow, as it approached the winter months of May and June in that latitude, it was very cold sometimes and a coat was even necessary. I can still see this place in my mind and will never forget the sensation of looking from the top of one of these mountains, like in the village of Busay, as being able to see these rolling hillside with their splashes of green, the black freshly plowed fields, and the dry foliage that in most cases was the remaining stocks of corn long awaiting to be cultivated into the ground.

Chapter 2—Traveling Across Idaho

Another peaceful season in my life occurred during a long drive through the mountains of Idaho and Montana. It was during the summer of 1995. I was returning home from Eastern Washington after a long consulting assignment with OCM where I had been doing outplacement work for the layoff of workers that occurred with the Hanford Facility in Richland. I had studied and planned a route on the map that would take me through the city of Walla Walla, on over to Lewiston Idaho, and then over the mountain range to the heart of Western Montana’s western mountain land. I could have gone straight home from Richland on the Interstate highway, but decided I needed a break from the difficult program I had been involved in during my three-month stay in Richland. The experience had been stressful with angry people that believed that they had been given the shaft by their company, and by the fact that there were so few employment opportunities in the area for the people.

I have often used long drives to interesting and new places as a break in my life, and this was one of those times when I really needed those moments with myself.  There’s not much to remember about the drive itself. I had my little Toyota pickup that I had purchased for this trip to cut down my commuting costs, and it was easy and fun to drive.

Soon after I left Lewiston continuing east the road became a narrow winding path through giant pines and steep mountains. Along the way the scene changed from modern towns like Lewiston to large bar/restaurant/store combinations that looked like they were out of the Thirties. People, mostly lumbermen I am sure, were dressed in overalls and heavy plaid shirts and tall-in front baseball caps. Many were large men that I saw in these places with beards and logger boots with thick soles. Those who had regular Levis on wore wide red suspenders that strung around their bulging beer bellies. From the back as these men sat on the tall well-used benches up to the bar, the cracks of their butts showed inches above their belts. And, of course, those with belts were sure to have a wide silver belt buckle displaying their favorite logo of Cat, Harley Davison, or Buck.

I spoke to some of the people I met in these places along the way and found that most of them were unemployed and were generally angry about everything—the government, the state, the weather, but mostly the economy. Some were drunk and babbled on, but most were simple drinkers that congregated at these ancient places to talk, to compare stories and to be collectively angry.

Rivers flowed along most of the roads I traveled across Idaho. I longed to fish them but had no gear with me on that trip. But I dreamed about it anyway. On several occasions where the mountains closed in on the road and cliffs hung dangerously close, I saw mountain sheep grazing on these steep rocky ledges as if they were on flat ground. There was much foliage there for them as these overhanging cliffs were moist and many were covered with moss from regular weeping of the aquifers that played out on these mountain-sides.

Some trucks loaded with logs careened around the sharp turns as if their breaks were out on some downhill stretch. All seemed to be going much past reasonable speed limits and I was cautious not to get too close to them as I passed. I could just imagine a large log rolling off the truck as it rounded a corner with me and my little Toyota under it.  But for the most part the ride was easy and the roads were not crowded. The weather the day I passed that way was good, and though there were high feathery clouds, I didn’t anticipate I would hit any bad weather along the way.

Because I stopped many times along the way to enjoy a coke at one of these broken down roadhouses or just to enjoy the scenery, it took almost all day to get across this narrow section of middle Idaho.  But the ride, I concluded, was okay and a well worth effort.  I knew once I hit Montana I would be traveling the rest of the way on Interstate 15 to Utah so I enjoyed the backcountry ride as much as I could.

 The passing of this season of my life was short and sweet and much adorned the visual stimulus that I love. I have said many times to myself and others that the mountains I live in and feel a part of are my favorites of all things in my life. I have often dreamed of passing the last of my days in some comfortable place with nothing but mountains and solitude surrounding me. I love a quiet stream that has fish in it that I can watch or fish for; I relish the coolness of the mountains and the freshness of the air. But mostly I love the solitude and can easily be there alone with no one else around and never get tired of it. This trip through Idaho that one day was a piece of the type of solitude that I love and miss when I am away from it, and the memories of this day stay with me.

Chapter 3—To Zambia and Back

 We don’t call it the rainy season in the U.S., but that day in Los Angeles when I sat on the plane for eight hours waiting to go to Kitwe, Zambia by way of London I knew that we had a “rainy season” in our country too. The day had been long enough anyway, waiting in the in airport in the morning for Wade Hunter. He was to be my traveling companion, and himself had traveled that day from Canada to meet me. I found Wade about noon at the airport and then both of us remained there until eight o’clock that evening before boarding our plane. Wade as my traveling companion to Zambia would take up the role of cameraman for the project to videotape interviews of all the people that would be our clients while we were there.

When we finally boarded that plane at about eight o’clock, for reasons we didn’t know for hours, we remained on the plane with the air conditioning off. Occasionally the flight attendants would tell us that they were close to having the problem with the plane fixed and we would be on our way. Wade was especially agonizing this entire time since he hadn’t had a cigarette since we got on the plane and was by that time almost crazy from his addiction. When the plane was finally fixed we learned that there was some faulty sensor in the baggage compartment and the part was not available at the airport and had to be flown in. Finally after four hours delay there on the tarmac we were on our way for the additional hours we had to travel to get to London’s Gatwick Airport.

I had never seen such rain anywhere in the U.S like what we experienced in LA that day. It was spring, however, so I should have expected it to be that way, but it really surprised me. I had flown into LA the afternoon before so I could meet Frank Stacy, the Director of the project, before I left and the weather had been fine all that day and evening. And even in the morning when I checked out of the hotel and went to the airport to meet Wade it was clear and sunny—well anyway, as sunny as it ever gets in LA.

I met Frank for the first time that day before we left. He was the one I had spoken to several times before I left Utah, and would be the one directing my new project from his home base in Pasadena.  Frank never traveled any more since he had a health condition called Lew Gehrig’s Disease that was slowly taking his life. He had already lived three year longer than most people do after they contact the disease, but he was still going despite the fact that he had to have constant help getting around, that he couldn’t talk very well and was only able to move around on a wheel chair or a walker.  I met Frank, his wife Betty and his daughter at a restaurant in Downtown LA with great anticipation knowing his condition and realizing that I would be working with this man for an anticipated two years. In some ways I was excited, but in others I was more reticent and cautious about how the meeting would go.

It was nothing like I had expected, however. Frank and his family were very gracious and warm. He laughed a lot and kidded about his condition and seemed to take it as something that was okay with him for the time being. After our meal we discussed the project for a while, he gave me some training manuals he had copies from a sample I had written for the program and sent to him for editing and reproduction. I was to take them along with me so I would have something with which to start the training once I got there.

Once the plane was in the air things seemed to be normal again, but that was not to be the case later on when we arrived at Gatwick. We and nine other people on the plane had to make a quick connection at Gatwick to Heathrow Airport some eighty miles across town. From there we were to be flying British Airline through Harare Zimbabwe and to Lusaka Zambia. As we approached for the landing at Gatwick the flight attendant announced that those of us connecting with this flight to Lusaka, because it had been delayed so long, we would be shuttled to Heathrow on a special bus and that this bus would be waiting for us when we arrived. We were told we had little time to get to the bus and make the connection so we would be escorted there by ground attendants.

We all had to get money changed to pay the bus fare; we did that and were quickly escorted to the bus. Wade smoked his first cigarette on the way to the bus, but never finished it and had to toss it before boarding. The hour-long bus ride to Heathrow was during evening rush hour, so the driver drove like a madman to get us there on time. As soon as we stepped off the bus we were met by another ground escort that said that the plane was waiting for us and we had to run to get there on time as they were about ready to close the doors.

For some reason, and I think it was because we had been under such stress for so many hours, I was experiencing that awful feeling one gets just before diarrhea sets in. I told the escort person that I had to go to the bathroom, and she said I would likely miss the plane, but if I had to go, I should. Wade waited for me as I quickly went, and when I got out much relieved, we had to run to the plane. The others had reached there just before us, and the door had to be reopened for us to enter. We were soon on our way for another long flight, I think it was something like twelve hours, to Harare in Zimbabwe where we made an hour stopover without getting off the plane before continuing on to Lusaka Zambia.  It was about another four hours for this flight, and finally we touched down in Zambia.

Neither of our checked baggage arrived in Lusaka because of our late arrival in Gatwick, and we were told that it would be about four days before our luggage got there. That was okay with me since I had taken several changes of clothing for such an emergency in my carryon. But Wade had not anticipated what problems we might have and didn’t have those extra things with him. Rather he had loaded up all his video equipment into his carryon that took all the space he had and only had his shaver and tooth paste. We were not through with our travels yet, however, so we waited four more hours in Lusaka Airport for our two hour flight north to Kitwe, our final destination.

In Lusaka we attempted to get something to eat, and found out that the restaurant was out of everything, so we settled for some dry sweet biscuits and a coke. That was all we had eaten since we were on the plane to Harare. The short ride to Kitwe was interesting since it was mid-day and for the entire trip we were able to see the ground and the layout of the countryside all the way to Kitwe, some six hundred kilometers (about 372 miles). I was surprised to see that most of the countryside was brownish and yellow bush with very little green anywhere. There seemed to be little or no water either. I saw no lakes or rivers along the way in either direction. The month that we were traveling was May, the beginning of Zambian winter. It was only when we got near Kitwe and the region called the Copperbelt that we began to see some green trees and forest. From the distance, we could see that Kitwe was a very lush area with many large green trees throughout the entire city, and to the west, it looked like it was total forest.

We were met by a representative from KPMG, the accounting firm that was doing the Logistics for the project. He was an interesting person who told us that he had come to the airport several times since all the flights had been late that day and no one knew for sure when Wade and I were coming. He first drove us to the office of KPMG where we met a few of the people we would be working with there, and later we met Doug Meleke who would be directing our efforts for the most part. Doug was with the firm ZCCM, or Zambian Consolidated Copper Mining Company. Finally after agonizingly long meetings with both parties, the KPMG guy drove us to the guesthouse that had been arranged for us and we met our landlady, Silvia Morton, a mixed African/European national whom I would become very close friends with over parts of the next two years that I spent in her country. But our trip was finally over after a grueling fifty two hours of travel.  I was still a little sick with a bout of the diarrhea and Wade by then was so exhausted he crashed and burned for the next twenty hours—never leaving his room the whole time.

Coming from the airport in Kitwe to the part of town where we finally settled was a shocking contrast to what I believed I would be experiencing when I got to this part of Africa. I had been in North Africa, but this was the first time that I would be in the Sub-Sahara Africa, the middle section of the country. I had expected jungle, animals everywhere, palm trees and natives running around in traditional clothing or without. Rather I saw dry bush land from the airport to the city that was sparsely populated here and there with thatch roof huts, short stubby brush undergrowth with little or no grass or other ground cover, and finally the lush green trees, most of which were covered with beautiful red, blue, white and yellow flowers adorning the city everywhere I looked. In addition, the city and surrounding residential areas were also decorated with all kinds of ornate plants that were in full bloom. And to my great surprise poinsettia trees (not potted plants as I had come to see at Christmas at home) were bursting with red and yellow blooms everywhere in people’s yards.

The city of Kitwe and all the surrounding residential areas, however, were dirty, broken down and all looked like they had been built in the 1930’s (that most had been in fact). The streets were full of potholes and there was not one place in the city of over three hundred thousand residents where one could drive straight without encountering large deep potholes every fifty feet. I learned later that the city streets had not been repaired nor had any potholes been filled for over fifteen years other than by young entrepreneurs that filled them with gravel, then begged along the street for handouts from drivers for their work.

Silvia Morton had been expecting us and had set me up on the second floor in the largest of about eight rooms in the Guesthouse with Wade taking another large room on the same floor. A single bath served the upstairs for three or four bedrooms there. Downstairs there was a large sitting room with a big screen TV, a dining room and large kitchen with a cook and several helpers, and more bedrooms on an adjacent section of the house.  Outside in back there was a large patio, a bar stocked with all kinds of soft and hard drinks, a pool that had been covered over and made into a flower garden and to the left and front a large parking lot and garage. The entire place was surrounded with a ten foot high wall and was like most places surrounded by mango and avocado trees and hundreds of flowering bushes and plants beautifully cared for by a full-time yard boy who also acted as gate guard during the day.

Silvia was a gracious woman of about forty-five who I learned was divorced but still living with her ex-husband in their shared home along with her four children—three boys and a girl. Silvia stayed in the Guesthouse most of the time, however, and even slept there many nights of most weeks. She directed most of the cooking and set up the menus since she was a great cook, and on every Friday, she put on a public barbecue with one of the most elaborate lines of dozens of dishes I had ever seen done by one person. It was like it had been catered. Several of her friends enjoyed the meals there on Friday along with the Guests and others that came from the city knowing about her great meals. After the meals on Fridays and most evenings people would drop by and drink in the bar and sit in the patio, sometimes up to and past midnight being so rowdy that it was hard to sleep.  Many of the houseguests were one or two day travelers from South Africa that were vendors or merchants selling or buying their goods in Kitwe before returning to South Africa. Their stays over were always interesting since the men usually sat huddled in front of the TV watching rugby games and shouting, drinking beer and cheering their favorite players until wee hours of the night. It was my first experience of rugby and I would join them often fascinated by the game that seemed to me so complicated that I was never sure what was going on with any of the players.

On our first day in the office with Doug Meleke we learned a few disheartening things about how badly things had been set up for us there and what was Doug’s expectations for us based on his frequent conversations and communications with Frank Stacy in Los Angeles that had preceded our visit. Frank had assured me and Wade that everything was set up for us to begin the training of “retrenched” (laid off) employees from the mining company’s operations, but we would find out that nothing really had been done on our behalf. The mining company was owned by the Zambian Government and had employed some fifty thousand people before it got to the point where the government couldn’t continue operations because it was losing so much money. A decision, years in the making, had been made that all of the copper mines that the company owned would be offered to private international companies. In the ensuing four or five years since the decision had been made to privatize the operations only one mine had been purchased by a Chinese company and all the rest were still open for purchase. Our job, as part of a World Bank gift to the Zambian Government of several million dollars, was to do an outplacement effort with the mine’s former upper management and the mine hospital management and nurses; over five thousand people in total. I would be organizing and training people on how to find jobs, help them with resumes and Wade would provide support to me by videotaping mock interviews that would result in a tape they could send or give to potential employers out of the country. Doug Meleke was supposed to have already organized several of the training programs for us with the mine managers that were in the process of shutting down the operations. Frank was told that all of the mine managers would have all of their laid off people lined up for us so we could hit the ground running and begin this massive effort that was initially planned to take almost two years to complete. However, none of the managers in the four mining operations scattered over an area about ninety miles long had been told even of our coming to start the program.

For some reason that I never understood Doug Meleke had not gotten going on his part of the program, so we had it all to do, and I was given the responsibility to begin contacting the mine managers for lists of the people that would be selected for us to train. I also had to arrange for facilities to do that. As well, Doug was supposed to have arranged for our transportation to and from the mine sites located along the Copperbelt, a region about twenty miles wide and ninety miles long, where the four mines that we would be working with were located. None of that had been done and was waiting for our arrival.

Doug Meleke was an ex-employee of the mining company, and had been the Director of Human Resources when he was retrenched. He had worked at the mine for twenty or more years before the shutdown. He was still on some contract relationship with the mining company and was supposed to be our liaison with the mining people according to Frank Stacy. Frank and Doug had been friends for years, and before Frank’s illness had debilitated him completely he had made several trips to Zambia doing executive recruiting for the senior mine employees that Doug was hiring. With help from Frank, Doug had also gone to the U.S on recruiting trips over the years and had been to Los Angeles to Frank’s home many times.

With all that facing us, I had to get busy with making copies of the training manuals, contacting the mine managers and constantly working with Doug on transportation issues that were still unresolved. For the first two weeks that I was there, no training occurred and then it was sporadic with many false starts, visits to locations where there were supposed to be mine employees waiting for us and were not because of miscommunications or other screw-up’s.  Wades frustrations were also burdening him from starting anything since he had been told he would be assisted by crews from the mining company and with lighting and other equipment he couldn’t bring with him, so he was further dismayed and delayed like I was when none of this help appeared.

But life went on and we eventually got started with a vigorous program that would go for four months before it was summarily shut down because of an audit by World Bank when they found out that one of the other companies that was doing training of lower level mine employees was cheating on its billing process. This South African company had been double charging the bank for its training and had by then made off with several hundred thousand dollars in fees that KPMG had paid them but not discovered they were cheating on their counting of certified trainees. KPMG was supposed to be handling all the money matters with the contractors like us, and they had missed this double dipping by this one company. The matter was so grave then that the World Bank officials ordered that our program be stopped and Frank was told to send us home. He was further told that it would be some weeks before the matters were cleared up and we could return.

In the meantime before this shocking curtailment of the program, Wade and I finally worked out our travel arrangements with a driver that Doug had arranged for us and were busy going from city to city doing our training. Traveling along the main road to the various towns where the mines were located was an interesting drive every time I made it. The beauty of the planted forested of pines and heavily wooded areas were astounding. Along the way we would also see mine dumps from the open pit mines that dotted the area. All the mines I had ever seen before were in the mountains; this more or less flat country with the open pit mines going down from ground level was a new thing. Mine waste dumps had to be above ground, so everywhere we would travel these large dumps, like mountains rose above the horizon. Some were replanted with trees and undergrowth, but most were cancerous, yellow sulfur-stained eyesores that ruined the once beautiful landscape of this area. In addition, many of them featured old broken down and rusted mine conveyors and facilities that had been used when the mines were operating. Many of the mines, I had learned had been shut down for years and little or no effort had been made by the government to do anything about the environment that was spoiled by these features.

The mines that were operational or had just before been shut down were in just as bad shape and it was no wonder to me that they had not been purchased. There were two of the mines that had been taken over by international companies, and those had minimal operations going on, but even they were on temporary consignment through some complicated arrangement with ZCCM to keep the mines going until such time that their company or another company would purchase and take over operation permanently. So many of the people we had to work with to give the training to were still employed at the mines, technically, but most were not getting any wages and the mining company didn’t have any money to pay them. When I made arrangements with the mine officials, mostly expatriates, to have their employees excused for this training, there was a lot of hostility about doing this and upsetting an already tenuous situation with the employees. They didn’t want it known to the employees that they were slated for layoff. And even though they were working and not getting any money, and hadn’t done so for months, they still believed that they were still valued workers of the old, defunct mining operation and would be reemployed by the new owner—whenever that would occur.

As I got to know my landlady, Silvia Morton, I found her to be a delightful person who seemed to want to be around me and share her experiences and problems with me. She would invite her friends over often and we would sit for hours in the evenings talking or eating her delicious makings and drinking tea. She was experiencing a lot of problems with her ex-husband whom she had divorced years before because he was having an affair with his secretary in the place he worked (as a manager of a pro-shop in the local golf course in Kitwe). But she had not given up and moved out of her house, as according to the laws of the country, if she left, everything in the house would become his and she would be without furniture or anything else that she had accumulated over the years. It also gave her a place for her children to live, and if she left with them she would be certain to become a pauper trying to raise her children with meager holdings she would have if she left. She had a small boy of ten who was her youngest, and he accompanied her almost everywhere she went except when he was in school. Her three other boys were older and two had graduated from high school and were working. Her middle children, a boy and girl were in their later years in high school, so there was a large gap between the girl and her youngest son. Over that four month period that I lived in the Guest House and visited and ate with Silvia and her kids and friends, I gained a lot of respect for her and she seemed to have that same respect and trust in me. It made our difficult stay there a little easier and enjoyable.

The trip home and the debriefing I shared with Frank Stacy on my stopover in LA on the way home after the first shutdown of the program was filled with expectations that this matter with the World Bank would soon be resolved and I would be returning to Zambia within a month’s time. Frank with his contacts at World Bank in the U.S. was very positive about our chances that the program would take off again soon and told me that Doug Meleke was also confirming that from his end. So I went home, rested a while and waited for my calls from Frank that seemed to come every day with more promise and expectations that I would be soon returning to Zambia.  During that time home, I had several chances to take work with OCM, the consulting firm that would have given me long-term options for making good money, but I continually turned them down and would only take sporadic work with them to hold me over. I could have made thousands upon thousands of dollars working for them had it not been for the promises that Frank was making to me every day, so I continued to be loyal to Frank since his promises that in just a week things would change and I would be back on the plane. Up to that time, Frank had only paid me partial of what I was owed, and I was also several thousand dollars out of my own pocket to Silvia and the Guest House that Frank had promised to pay me but hadn’t yet. All around I was continually losing money, but for some strange reason I felt obligated to keep my loyalty to Frank and wait the project delays out.

It was almost a year before the World Bank situation was settled and then it was tenuous and had in scope reduced considerably by then. I went back in April of 2000 with a four-month promise that I had certain things to resolve and accomplish during that time. It was to be a fast and furious effort that had by then been set up partially by Doug Meleke that gave me a schedule I could not accomplish without more help. I went back to Frank with a request for help and a recommendation that he bring on an old friend of mine to help me, and he began making some of the arrangements.

It was a strange and complicated process I had gone through establishing contact with Frank in the first place. I had never known him or about him before January of 1999 when I got a call from this old friend of mine, Eric Stoddard, whom I had worked with in Bechtel years before. Eric was doing consulting work at the time and had received a call from another mutual friend of ours, Larry Lien who knew and had worked with Frank some years earlier. Larry had been one of my employees at Bechtel for a few years and was what I knew to be one of the best and most confident people I had ever worked with. Eric had also been on my team for a short time, and while we were friends and had kept in touch with each other after I left Bechtel (and he remained for a while), it had been over nine years since I had experienced much of anything with him. One time when I was working with OCM in Salt Lake, they needed another consultant to work with them on a project and asked if I knew anyone. I suggested Eric to them and they interviewed and hired him for a while. I did not see or experience anything of what he did there but only knew his tenure with OCM was a short one for some reason that I didn’t learn about until much later when I had been home for Africa for a time. Eric, apparently had not met OCM’s expectations at all and was only given one short assignment. Everyone on the project rejected him, I was told and Dave Hilbig, OCM’s CEO made it clear to him that there was no more work available from them.

How it all got started for me was that Eric received a call one day in early 1999 from Larry Lien asking him if he would like to do this work in Zambia that I would eventually take on. Larry had told Frank about Eric and his experience and asked for a resume from him to give to Frank. Frank had accepted the background of Eric as adequate for his needs, and had told Larry to contact him and have him arrange to go to Zambia.  Initially Frank wanted Larry to do the job, but Larry was full into a contract with a program in China at the time and had to turn Frank down. So as it came out, Eric was a second choice for Frank. The timing was not good for Eric when the initial schedule was made for the job, so that was when Eric called me and suggested that I contact Frank. He told me a little about the project and said Frank wanted someone right away and could I go. I told Eric my situation and said I would contact Frank post haste. That day I called Frank, told him about my outplacement experience for the previous twelve years and Frank almost hired me on the spot. I sent him my resume, and he immediately called me and offered me the assignment. Eric was for the time out of the picture. I called Eric and thanked him and that’s where I left it. Frank had told me at the time of reviewing my resume, that he was so pleased that Eric had suggested me since he was a little reluctant to take Eric on because he had only that short time with OCM doing outplacement work and he felt a little reluctant to offer him the job but was forced to since he was on such a short fuse to get someone to Zambia to start the project.

As it turned out the January date for my departure continued to slip each week as I turned down consulting opportunities from OCM over and over that would have been long-term and lucrative, and finally four months after the initial push Frank called me and said I should arrange for my tickets to Zambia. In that time Eric had finished his project and was pushing Frank to take him instead of me as he had been the second on the line of candidates and had only suggested me as a courtesy to Frank. Frank was no longer interested in Eric and somehow told him that, and I was still on the docket to go. I believe Eric never forgot that I had won out the contract with Frank and never forgave me for not giving the opportunity back to him. But Frank was convinced and had told me how much better I was qualified to take the job than Eric, so that was how it was left and I went to Zambia for the first wave of work sometime in April of 1999.

 On my second trip to Zambia when I suggested that Frank reconsider Eric for my assistant to get this large bulk of work going that was needed, Frank balked initially at the idea, but I was feeling guilty about the situation with Eric and felt some loyalty to him since he had suggested me in the first place to take the job instead of him. Frank finally gave in and the contact was made. Eric was available, made some kind of arrangement with Frank and within a couple of weeks he was at my side looking over the plan.

Eric played a strange game when he came over that was to eke out over the next couple of months of his stay that was basically dirty and much out of integrity. He seemed to do okay when he was training and following the program, but there were undercurrents going on between him and Doug Meleke that none of us knew about while he was plotting his revenge on Frank and me. The project schedule was being made with both of us working so from my perspective things were going along pretty well. Eric was being okay with me, so that part of it was good too. But right in the middle of the project, for some reason that I can’t remember clearly—it may have been something to do with my visa expiring or that I had to leave the country for tax purposes and return again, I went home for about two weeks leaving Eric in charge of the program. When I returned the program that I had set up for Eric to continue while I was gone had gone to pots and through some finagling with Doug Meleke, he had changed the program and lied that Frank had told him to do this. When I got there and saw the results and reported it to Frank asking him why he made those changes he immediately suspected the motive from Eric since I had by then and ordered Eric summarily to pack up and leave the job immediately.

Eric on departing owed about two thousand dollars to Silvia Morton for room and board at the new Guest House where we were staying on this second visit, so in lieu of putting the charges on a VISA that she had suggested,  he gave her a check that he claimed was good and left. The check, it turned out bounced for lack of funds in Eric’s bank and that created a great flurry of calls to Frank who threatened to hold back any pay he owed Eric until it was straightened out. Eric’s deal when he went over, unlike mine, was to pay for his own board and room while he was there. When Eric found out that Frank was paying mine and Wade’s board and room, he believed he was due the same as us and purposely gave Silvia this check that bounced. It was months before this matter was cleared up and Silvia got her money.

Wade Hunter and I continued to battle the logistics and schedules for the next couple of months until the World Bank money disappeared and we were forced to shut down the project a second time. Wade left about that same time. He had arranged a freelance contract with National Geographic Magazine to do a filming of a river float down the entire length of the Zambezi River where it flowed through Zambia. I didn’t hear any more from Wade until I returned home late in the year and called him in Vancouver. He said he had a great shoot during the time he was there, but contacted malaria along the river and spent a month in the hospital in Lusaka before he could return home.

Even though the World Bank money was finished, Frank wanted me to stay and work with Doug Meleke and set up a satellite version of his old executive recruiting company and assist Doug in setting up a new business he was attempting to create. I had never done executive recruiting, but said I would give it a show and do my best. We made a “gentleman’s agreement” about how I would get paid for this extra work so I thought at the time, this would be a good opportunity for me. Frank gave me some suggestions that I could follow in contacting the three major international companies that had by then taken over several of the shutdown mines in the area, and would need international and local executives to fill their new positions. So the prospect looked good and I took Frank’s offer. The money sounded good and he even promised me a stipend while I got started. That promise and prospect kept me there for another five months that would make my second stay in Zambia nine months total before I left for home late in 2000.

The executive recruiting process was something that was new to me and not of my liking. I was not good at being the pushy salesman that the job needed, so in the first two months, while I was able to acquire and place two local people that were hired by the companies that was about the extent of the energy I wanted to put into the project. It had become apparent to me too, by that time that Frank was having some serious financial problems and any money that I was owed was about to go down the tubes. I had earned with the two recruitments over ten thousand dollars that was part of the fee, which was good and Frank had received the money, but I never received my cut and still owed Silvia for my stay at the new Guest House. Frank had also hit me up for a twelve hundred dollar loan that he said he would pay back in a week, but that never came through.

According to Frank, he was owed a great deal of money on a piece of property he owned jointly with a man in Chicago that had been part of his old business years ago and the property was up for sale and they had a buyer. But during the negotiations for the sale, the old man who was Frank’s partner died and his son, an attorney in Chicago, took over the affairs of his father’s estate. There was no formal agreement made between Frank and his old partner, so the son felt no obligation to pay Frank anything for his part of the property sale, and Frank was left out in the cold. He used up all the money he had for medication for his continuing ailments and so there I was holding the bag with no money available and ten thousand miles from home. When I got wind of the situation, I paid Silvia off, packed up and left the country as soon as possible. I never heard any more from Frank nor his family. I just assumed later that he died, and nothing he owed anyone was ever paid off. For me it was an expensive lesson that left me pretty low on money and once again going after what I might get locally with OCM or the Ropes Course Company that was by then about ready to fold.

I look back on my experience of Zambia with some pride that I did what was asked of me and did it well. The fact that I didn’t make the money I had dreamed of was another thing that I wonder about from time to time. Did my loyalty to this dying man cloud the issue? Did I want the experience of Zambia so bad that I let it influence good thinking on the way? Or was it just an experience from which I could learn some lessons? In that particular passing season of my life I like to believe it was the lesson that was the best and the good memories and great friends I made over there. I knew also that this was to be Frank’s last effort that would keep him alive for a while longer and that made the difference and brought the springtime into my life. Though it has been several years since my departure from Zambia, I still remain in contact with Silvia Morton and have even seen her once in Vancouver B.C. when she was there with her daughter who was marrying a Canadian fellow she met while going to school there.

Chapter 4—A Lifespring Experience

One season of my life passed quite quickly but it has had the effect of lasting ‘till the present time, and beyond I am sure. It began sometime in 1985 with a meeting I had one day with Jack Lewis who was a colleague of mine at the firm where I was working for a short time as a full-time employee, Eclecon. I had worked with Jack for only a short time, but I found in him to be a fascinating man like no one I had never experienced in my life. He had an ambiance about him and a sensitivity that was so overwhelming that he almost glowed with this quality. I loved working with the man and respected his opinions almost more than anyone else in the office. He had ideas and motivations that I admired and he was always looking to make things better. When Jack came to me one day with a proposal that he said would “change my life,” it was the first time that I had any doubts about the man and kiddingly told him that my life was okay and that I wasn’t seeking any particular changes in my life right then. But Jack persisted and told me that his offer was nothing to be cautious about; I would just have to go to the Marriott Hotel in Salt Lake on a certain night and sit in on a presentation, and that this would be all that was expected of me. He promised that there would be no pressure, and no charges for the presentation.  I would only have to listen and make up my mind if what was presented was something I wanted to do. I asked him the nature of the presentation and he danced around that one with a vague explanation until I was not sure what I would be getting into.

For a while I thought about it and told him would consider going as I respected what he said, but I was still suspicious that what he was about was some kind of a personal financial management presentation or it was a sales promotion from some company or a religious thing. I knew that Jack was a religious person and that his wife was a minister of some church so that was high on my priority of suspicions. Well, I went and when I walked into the room there were at least two hundred other people there at this same presentation and there were signs on the wall in front that this was a program called “Lifespring.” I knew right then that I would be hearing about a religious organization and that this was a meeting for acquiring converts.

Jack saw me when I came in and immediately came over to greet me and offered to sit with me through the presentation. It was a tense few moments before the presenter started since I probed Jack to tell me what this was about so I could run before it started if I liked, but he was gentle with me and continued to offer his support and encouragement so I stayed.

The presentation was sort, but what followed were some exercises where the people in the room were invited to “mingle” around the room and just have a conversation with the others there. We were asked simply to give our names and ask a few questions about the other person and in some way get a little acquainted. We were asked not to spend too much time with any given individual, but to move on to another whom we saw who was also looking for someone to visit with.  I did what was expected of me, but I did not like it and felt like it was one of the many cocktail parties I had attended over the years and hated, except that this one was without alcohol.

When it was over Jack approached me again like he had been assigned to do, I would learn later, and asked me if I was interested in participating in the weekend program that was coming up in a couple of weeks. The program would cost three hundred dollars that I didn’t feel like I had, so I told him no and shortly after left. He hadn’t pressured me as promised, but I could see and hear from his disappointment that he really wanted me to go.

I came to work the next day and Jack approached me again with a proposition that if I went, it would be well worth the money and the promised that I would never miss the money once it was spent on this program. Once again I told him no, but could see he was reluctant to give up and finally I told him I would come up with the money and would go to the program. I wrote him a check from my meager bank account and the deal was set for two weeks from that day.

I showed up at this strange gathering that was again in the Marriott with one hundred and sixty eight others who had handed over their money and were in attendance. When I came through the doors and was checked off the roster, I was told to go in, take a seat and remain there until the music stopped. I entered the room where a large number of seats had been placed auditorium style in two large columns. There were at least twenty five or more seats to a row in each column. In the back there were tables set in a row and several staff members for the program where busily working with the sound system, shuffling papers and generally being quiet. There was a man sitting on a high stool on an elevated platform in front of the room and behind him were two large flip charts and very large marking pens. Behind that on the wall and other places in the room were banners with the logo and name, Lifespring. Nothing else to indicate what this was all about. I was still in the fog.

I took a seat near the front, but not on the front row. I had this notion that I should sit near the front and that I wouldn’t be embarrassed and called on by sitting back in the back. Several people did take the back rows, but were ushered back up to the front soon after they came in and sat down. I was glad I took the initiative. The program began on a Friday evening and was to last until Sunday afternoon or evening. No time was set for its ending on Sunday.

People filed in until it was time to start and then the doors went closed. I learned later that anyone who came late was denied entrance and arrangements were made for them to get their money back. It was down to exact minutes, in fact. If a person came one minute late it was too late. The music inside the room continued while everyone sat there silent or quietly talking to their neighbors, but there was nothing coming from the speaker nor was anyone in the back now giving any orders to people. The seats were so close together, that for me, anyway it was very uncomfortable. As I looked around before the music stopped I could see that everyone seemed to be experiencing the same discomfort.

The music stopped eventually and the speaker got to his feet and started the program. He outlined what the program was about in gross terms and how long it would take and mentioned some things about being committed to the program one hundred percent and that was all that was asked of us. He said that first before the program got underway there were a number of “ground rules” that had to be taken care of. These ground rules, he said were printed on a piece of paper that would be handed out shortly, and after reading them if there were any questions about them we could raise our hand and he would deal with the questions until everyone in the room had agreed that for the length of the workshop they could apply themselves to these ground rules. Anyone who for any reason as unable to agree with them would be asked to leave and their money would be refunded in full, he announced.

The process that was to follow continued for over three hours until everyone in the room acknowledged that they would abide by the rules for the duration of the workshop. They were essentially easy rules to follow, but it was surprising how many people left and how many questions people had that were frivolous and meaningless. Those who had these questions were immediately addressed and the facilitator stayed with them until they were answered one way or another. Statements on the sheet like: There will be no drugs taken during the workshop’s three days, was one of the more frequently asked questions. And really what they were talking about were illegal drugs like marijuana or cocaine not aspirins for a headache. But these were things that people wanted to be sure of so they persisted in continuing to ask the questions: What about this . . . ? or, What about that  . . . ?

That first night was a trial that went until almost to midnight before they finished and let us go. The next day would be much the same with challenges and breakout sessions where we cleared the room of chairs and sat on the floor in small circles and more mingle sessions where people got acquainted with each other and discussed certain assigned subjects. It was clear to me that this was becoming a program about learning about one’s self and not a didactic program about leaning concepts. It was hard felt stuff that was sinking in to some degree. Initially I found the program and the exercises fascinating and useful, more from an intellectual point of view than from a personal learning exercise, however. At the time this workshop was going on I was involved in a large contract in Houston with the Exxon Shipping Company that involved workshops and everything I was seeing and hearing had application there. When that first night’s program was complete I knew that I would be taking much of what I had seen and learned to Houston the next week that I was there.

All through Saturday and Sunday the program got more intense and I liked it very much—again from an intellectual perspective. But I knew something was going on that was more than this, so I paid attention to everything that was said, made mental notes of the things that went up on the flip chart and focused on everything and everyone as best I could—especially the facilitator and his methodology. One outstanding exercise that has stayed with me for years was an exercise called, “My Retreat.” The facilitator had us sit on the floor with a paper and pencil and write a short piece about a place he described that would be our retreat. He said it would be a location where we could go any time that would be a place of comfort, of love, and of peace. He asked that we define this place like we would a home we would build that would have everything in it we ever wanted and would be a place where all our sacred and cherished memories could be saved. I did this exercise with zeal and took the document home with me. In later years I copied the document and put it on my computer and later still entered it into my personal memories, in a large document of my personal history that I have named, My Retreat. Of all the things I got out of that first Lifespring workshop, this has become the most memorable.

When I created this special retreat document, I went first to a place that I had seen many times, both in my mind and in my experience. It was a place in the West Desert of Utah, miles away from any other inhabited region. I realize now that I picked this particular place because of the heritage of both my mother's side of the family and my father's. The West Desert near Callao, Utah was the location of my Great Grandfather Kearney's second homestead in the West in the mid 1800's. The West Desert near Simpson Springs was also the location where my Great Grandfather Williams herded sheep when he was a boy in the late 1800's. During my earlier years, many of my mother’s relatives still lived in places like Callao, Fish Springs, Gandy and as far south as Baker Nevada and Ely. I used to travel there as a child when my folks went to visit these relatives.  In later years I have ventured there many times to hunt, to explore and to share the beauty of the desert with friends and my family. I am including a copy of this document, My Retreat, here as it is seen in my personal history after the same name:

“My Retreat” exists in a valley between two mountain ranges slightly sloping [up] to the north. It is not a deep valley, but is rather shallow extending many miles to the north. The only water it sees is in the spring when the rains come or in the winter as light snows cover the plains. I “built” the retreat in the spring when the flowers of the desert were in bloom. This is also the most beautiful time of the year in the desert.

The building I would call “My Retreat” is constructed low to the ground and in perfect concert with its surroundings. From a distance it blends perfectly with the desert and is hardly visible from any direction. 

I wanted “My Retreat” to be open, but secluded, so it would look not much different than many of the rock outcrops in the surrounding area. Natural materials went into its construction and stone is used both for the main structure and architectural details. Most of the rock in this area is volcanic of a light to dark brown and black color. The surrounding soils and gravel are mostly browns and blacks with some white colors intermixed. The retreat duplicates those colors in every detail.  The wood used in the retreat is grey with tan matching the surrounding sagebrush wood and cedars that dot the landscape.

When I built the retreat, I was reminded of the contrasts of the landscape and how that mirrored my own life. Those contrasts are manifest in the surroundings with the vegetation, flowers, rock outcrops and gravelly washes. The contrasts in my life are shown in the hard surface I often manifest underpinned by sensitivity, kindness and warmth.

The structure takes shape in my mind with rock walls dominating the east and west sides of the building. Large windows cover the entire north face of the structure. No trees or other buildings will ever disrupt my view to the north. To the south, the building fades into the hillside low to the ground. This configuration takes into account the prevailing winter winds from the south and the hot summer winds and sun that also predominate from the south. Large roof overhangs shade the windows on all sides from the sun, but do not block the views of the desert in any direction.  A pathway leading to the house curves and matches the natural contours of the land.  A driveway and place for automobiles is tucked away on a hillside adjoining the retreat and is also designed to be in concert with the desert surroundings.

The entrance to My Retreat has a light on the overhang that greets the visitor with a cleansing effect. Its soft brightness is an invitation and a welcome to those that wait at the door. The door also manifests my ever welcome state. One needs only to be in its presence to feel the welcoming influence to come into My Retreat (my life).

Inside are several large rooms. Most of them are set up for visiting and having conversations with family and friends. The main room in the middle of the building has a large open fireplace where in winter logs of cedar will blaze and warm the interior of the structure. 

Rugs from all parts of the world adorn the floors and some walls. Abstract paintings decorate the available walls with warm and pleasing colors. The one wall has an enormous library of reference books, books for pleasure, autobiographies, and biographies, films and videos. Comfortable chairs, couches and pillows fill the area so many people can be accommodated at once. A large as life video screen is tucked away on one wall to be used in viewing videos from my library of life.

Another room adjoining the main visitor room is dedicated to creativity. This studio has large windows and skylights and has the best view of the outside desert panorama. In this room I can paint, sculpt, listen to music, write or just relax. This place is especially designed so I can escape into those locked up places of my mind and capture thoughts, memories and pictures of life.

A third major room in My Retreat is dedicated to music. I, my family or any of my friends can enjoy listening to music or they can dance. The sound system captures every possible experience of music from a large and varied library. All the other rooms have possibilities for others or me to retreat to, enabling any of us to capture a moment together, or to be alone.

I completed the Basic Session of Lifespring after those three full grueling long days of fun and frolic and also much pressure and constant harassment that was part of the program. It was hard and when I finished I had it in my mind that I was going to use much of what I had learned in my programs at Houston. It was perfect and I knew there would be many applications of the processes I had learned.

Soon after the Basic program was over, much pressure was put on all of the graduates to enroll in the Advanced Session of Lifespring. It was much more money than I believed I didn’t have, but I was willing to look at it and told the people that were attempting to enroll me that I would consider joining up with the next group. I didn’t however take the next program that I was being pressured to take since I was scheduled to be in Houston the weekend of the program, but I committed that I would find a way and get into the next session that was available in about two months. In the meantime I talked my daughter Chris into enrolling in the next Basic Session that was planned and she got the money together and signed up.

The Advanced session was coming up and I got in touch with the staff and enrolled myself. Chris joined me since she had been so excited about the first session that she wanted to continue and she had the money to do it. Just after finishing her first session, Chris encouraged Jan my oldest daughter to go to the Basic Session. Now that Chris had enrolled in the Advanced Session she and I would be together for that session that took place in the early fall of 1986.

In the weeks before the next session was to start, I went to Houston for my program with Exxon at least two times. The week-long Exxon program that I was doing on an average of once per month was a perfect place for me to try out some of the things I had learned in the Basic Session. Each week that we met the Exxon people I would first go down on a Saturday morning and meet with the new staff that joined me in the Windham Hotel in North Houston. The staff was made up of one of the Exxon Shipping Company Managers, John Tompkins, Ben Bennett, my old friend from Bechtel who had joined the shipping company before I left Bechtel in 1980, and four of the Ship’s Officers that were brought in each week that we had the program scheduled.

Initially when the program was created that year, Exxon chose twelve of their top officers to be co-facilitators with Ben and me. To begin the program we all went to a ropes course that had been built in a scout camp by Exxon that we would use throughout the program. The course was built by the renowned founder of ropes course programs in the U.S., Project Adventure. So we all had this preliminary team building session before our program started with the shipping company employees, then each week-long session that was held, four of the twelve officers would come to Houston to work with Ben and myself for that week.

                                           

When I started Lifespring we already well into the Exxon program and had already finished at least five of the sessions out of about twenty that we would do over the next year and one half. Just after I completed my first session with Lifespring and was in Houston with the group on Saturday, I suggested some of the things I had learned about processing group dynamics from the session to be added to our program there. John Tomkins, the Ship’s Officers and Ben were all excited about the change and willingly supported and approved the changes. So as the program went along for that first week after my initial session with Lifespring, I was excited to see the change that took place with our Exxon program. We were doing a lot of group sessions in the company workshop and examining the results, and what I had learned from the Lifespring facilitators and staff was a perfect fit to make our program more effective.

The number for the Advanced Session that Chris and I joined was only thirty-eight, down from the one hundred and sixty eight that had been in my Basic session and about the same number that had attended Chris’s Basis session. I was surprised to see such a small group since the pressure to join had been great with the graduates of the first session, and I knew because of the small number we would be getting a lot more staff harassment and pressure from the leaders. I was right in my assumption since the session took off that first day and we were required to acknowledge our commitment to the “ground rules.” Each day of the three day weekend was a harsh and focused effort to get us all to realize our own potential and how we could manage our lives in a better way. There were games and processes that far outdid the first session, and some of them were so revealing that it was difficult for all of us to endure. Some people broke down and cried, gave into their long hidden secrets, revealed things about their lives that they had never talked about or acted on, but the process continued relentlessly. Since this was a smaller session we got to know the other participants better than the larger program and this made it more interesting. Also because it was smaller the processes we engaged in were more focused and dramatic. One exercise that left a great impression on me was one in which we were asked to remember each other’s names without our name badges on and in a draining and difficult process we were supposed to choose five people out of the group that we would take with us if we were loading into a lifeboat and only had room for four passengers besides ourselves. Out of the group of thirty-eight people we had to choose those we would take and those we wouldn’t and had to tell them so. Any of those people whose names we couldn’t remember were automatically out and we had to tell them in specific words that we couldn’t take them. The rejection statement went like this: “I didn’t care enough about you to remember your name so I can’t take you on my lifeboat with me.” That one statement has stuck with me ever since that session, and when I come upon an occasion to meet someone and can’t remember their name after it is given to me, I go to that place of not caring enough to learn their name and that’s why I didn’t know it later. Memorization has always been a difficult thing for me, so this exercise had a major impact on the way I process information in every situation.

On Saturday after a grueling early morning that continued through lunch time to the middle of the day the pressure yielded to a more relaxed and fun process. We were all released from the room and told to go home, get into a costume that gave the message of someone who was the most unlikely and repulsive person we would ever want to be, and then go to some public restaurant in this costume and ask someone to “break bread” with us or allow us to join them at an eating table. We were required to do this alone, and then return in the evening for a debriefing while still in costume so we could share our experiences and show the rest of the participants in the program what outlandish characters we had chosen to be for the day.

I chose to be a pimp for my evening out. I went to the Deseret Industries and picked out some clothing that I thought would be perfect. It included a white silk shirt with large collars, a large gold-colored necklace with a large medallion hanging from it, some tight polyester trousers that were flared on the bottom and some white dress shoes. I had a full mustache at the time, so I trimmed that so it was thin and slinky looking. I put on my shirt and left it unbuttoned down to my stomach so the medallion would show off good and I put on white socks with my greasy-looking polished white shoes. Chris went as a prostitute, with a short skirt, heavy makeup and net nylons. We took pictures of each other before we left and she set out for the Crossroads Mall in Salt Lake, and I went to the Salt Lake Airport.

There was little security in the airport in those days so I was able to go into the concourse where the restaurants were located and decided after seeing how conspicuous I was by the way the passengers looked at me, that I would go into the large cafeteria and order a tray of food. As I passed out of the food serving area, I could see that there were only a few people I the seating area and I spotted a young lady sitting alone who seemed to have just started to eat her dinner.  I walked up to her knowing full well that I could have sat anywhere in the place, and asked her kindly if I could sit with her to eat my dinner. While she sat there almost in shock, I explained that I didn’t like to eat alone and hoped that she felt the same. She said she did, finally, and invited me to join her.

Later during our very nice conversation, I explained to her what I was doing and why I was in such an outlandish costume and we both had a good laugh about it. She was traveling alone and had a several hour layover so having someone to talk to, even though I know she was embarrassed to have me be with her was a good thing. We parted company after about an hour together talking about hers and my life.

When we had parted company and I was returning to the exit, I spotted three men sitting along the side of the concourse talking. They were dressed in the traditional Jewish costumes that orthodox Jews wear, which include the wide-brimmed hat, a long beard and the curls that hang down like sideburns. I knew from their costume and the fact that they were reading from some books that looked like bibles that I had to talk to them. I stopped in front and introduced myself to the men who looked at me as if they were seeing the devil. But they calmed down and we had a good conversation as I asked them why they were in costume and they asked me what profession I was in. It was a fun conversation I had with these men for about fifteen minutes before I set out to return to the eight o’clock Lifespring debriefing session back in the conference center.

That program ended on a high note for me and Chris, and once again I had gleaned more things that I planned to take to Houston on my next go-round. When this session was about to complete, there was some discussion with the group about doing a ropes course after the session was over as a supplemental program that would include all of the graduates. By that time I felt like I was an expert on such matters, so I spoke up and told the group that I was doing ropes courses in Houston every month and knew enough about them that I could search the area and see if there was some reputable firm that had a course near Salt Lake that we could use.

I got on the phone shortly after the program was completed and found two companies listed in the phone book. I called both numbers talking to a man who had a course near the Timpanogus Cave by Alpine Utah, and a Joanne Granger who was managing a course in Mount Pleasant Utah. Both companies knew about the Lifespring programs and wanted to have us as their client. For some reason I liked what the man said to me and I made the decision that I would hire him for the program and made the arrangement on my next call to him. I didn’t know at the time that this man was a flake who didn’t make a good impression on any of the participants that attended. I couldn’t go at the time the program was set up for the group since I as in Houston working with Exxon.  I would later through another chain of almost coincidental events join up with Joanne Granger and her company, Ultimate Adventures, Inc. and eventually after several years of working with her, buy her out and take over the course management with members of my family and a mutual friend of Joanne’s, Joan Burdette.

With the ending of the Advanced Session of Lifespring, I had not seen all of it yet. In a few weeks after I finished that session there was another scheduled that I enrolled in that would last for ninety days after its beginning. It would not be ninety days of training or classroom activities, but rather a small group of people that would work together for that period on some kind of a community or social project and would meet each weekend for that twelve-week program. The cost jumped to a larger six hundred dollars, but I was committed by then to the program and wanted to have my part in it. I hoped that like the previous sessions I would be gleaning more processes that I could use in my Houston program, and was for the most part intellectually committed rather than coming from a place of learning the things for myself. In other words, up until that time I was seeing the program as an intellectual stimulus rather than a self-growth program and denied all that may have been useful to me while I gathered data for this outside program at Exxon.

When I finished the longer third session I had a huge wakeup call as to what was really available to me from the entire Lifespring experience. But it would take some hard knocks for me to wake up to the possibilities that I had pushed away on the other sessions. This program was conducted initially by a Lifespring facilitator who invited us to form into small groups of six. There were a total of twenty-four people who started the session. We were told that the leader of these small groups would be our contact for the rest of the program and that there would be no more input from the Lifespring staff other than from our group leader. Each group would have its own special project and would only get together at the end of the program and would not see the other groups on the weekend sessions.

Soon we were working in the small groups in separate breakout rooms on the first evening of the program, initially outlining what project our group wanted to take on that would be community related. We worked throughout Friday evening without completing our initial task and met on Saturday when we finally decided what we would do over the next ninety days. We would gather together canned goods that we would donate to some charitable organization in Salt Lake. That seemed simple enough and a plan was made on how as a small group we would manage that task. Late in the afternoon of that second day, the lady who was our leader calmly asked that we all commit to calling her on the phone every day for the next eighty-nine days and report to her our progress or simply have a short discussion with her about anything. She said she would hold open a window each day from 10:00 p.m. until 10:45 p.m. when we could call her and that each of us would have a time that we should call and that the calls would only be a maximum of five minutes long. She assigned me 10:07 p.m. when I should call. Each of the others had their times over that forty-five minute period.

At first I thought this would be easy. Some of the others also thought the same. But then our leader said that if we could not commit to that schedule that there was no reason for us to be in the program and we would be asked to resign from it and that our money would be refunded.

Initially I could not commit to the schedule thinking that I had too many considerations with my time to commit to it. However, I wanted to be in the program and didn’t want to quit, so I had some serious things to work out. For one, I was wondering how I might make a call to her if I was on a plane traveling back from Houston. I wondered how it would work while I was in Houston and the time was one hour ahead of Utah. I wondered what I would do if I was out of reach of a phone since we didn’t have cell phones then like we do now. So for that full evening on Saturday and into Sunday, I continued to vacillate on how I would manage making those calls. The group stayed with me and continued to work on alternatives with me, so on the evening on our second full day of working on this problem along with a couple of others who were similarly struggling I gave in and committed that I would do it no matter what. Two of the six people backed out on Sunday and said they couldn’t do it, so they left the program so we went ahead as a group of four plus our leader.

We went on to complete the program successfully, however, and on three occasions when my alarm went off telling me that I had five minutes to get to a phone and make my call, I as in a panic. One time I was on a place on my way home from Houston circling the airport in Dallas minutes before my call was to take place and I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but the plane landed, and though I was not supposed to depart, I did anyway and made my call. I lost my seat on the plane but took another when I boarded. Another time I was traveling down Interstate 215 in Salt Lake Valley when my alarm went off. I knew I was five minutes from an exit, so I put my old Land Cruiser into high speed, way over the speed limit and made the exit in time to find a phone at a service station. The third crisis came one evening when I was in a folk dance training class with my partner Barbara Turton when right in the middle of an important dance step I had to leave and find a phone. She stood there on the dance floor alone until I returned and her mood for the rest of the evening was not good, no matter how I explained how important it was to keep my word.

There were great lessons other than that, which I finally learned from the Lifespring effort that would be further reinforced when I attended more sessions like that years later, including “The Training,” “Waking Up” and the “Master’s Program” that replaced Lifespring when it was shut down in Utah. Each was different and powerful in its own way, but even these programs had a short life in Utah and all eventually went away. There was never anything wrong with any of the programs that came and went after only a few sessions. Rather I believe it was pressure from the Mormon Establishment in the Salt Lake area that succeeded in causing people to quit enrolling in the programs. Many of the Mormon people who went got another look at their lives and how they were letting their religion, or their husbands or their wives or their life style manipulate or run their lives, and they simply demanded change. But the Church influence was too strong, and soon Bishops and the other Church leaders were telling their people that these programs were of “questionable moral value” and that they should stay away from them. Enrollment soon dropped and the programs could no long function since they were all meant to be profit-making ventures along with the other possibilities they held out for people.

The programs were tough and even when I staffed on two of them myself, I continued to learn and grow from them. I learned commitment, and keeping my word. I learned that if I consider myself responsible for everything, and knew that I create my own realities my life would suddenly become easier; and it has done so. I now live in the moment in my life and each season of my life is clean and free. I pass through each season knowing I have no regrets for the last one since I know that was how I wanted it to be; otherwise I would have changed it. I know by the way that I live that I influence others around me like I did in the Exxon programs where powerful things take place. I have informally “enrolled” some of my colleagues in my “Master’s” program of being responsible and taking initiative for their lives and their existence, and I continually receive thanks from these people who have seen their lives changed by simply recognizing their own personal power and living their stand. Lifespring was where it started and while I resisted that possibility and what it held for me at first, when I woke up that was when it all began to jell and my life started to change.

Chapter 5—Marriage and Divorce

I had two seasons of my life that together lasted for over 28 years. They both started the same way and ended much the same. One lasted seven years and the other was over 21 years long. Both were called by the same name: Marriage, and both ended in Divorce. A full account can be found in my personal history entitled, My Retreat, A Personal History. This short account will summarize the great beginnings of both marriages, and their sad endings.

First Marriage to Sherry Berrett, July 30, 1953 to August 30 1960

Sherry and I met officially on the streets of Midvale Utah. She was in those days what we called a “pickup.” She was a cute girl just finishing high school when we met. A friend of mine Don Papas knew the girl that was with Sherry when we saw them on the street and he suggested we pick them up. “Picking up” girls was a common thing to do in those days and while it sounds bad, it was only a term used when a person asked someone he or she knew that was hanging out on the street for any reason if they wanted to get in the car with the person or persons who were in the car and go somewhere. Sherry and I hit it off right from the first. I learned that she had just broken up with a boy she had been going steady with for years, and my finding her and our beginning dates was just the thing she wanted in her life. We were not long dating when I proposed to her and we were soon after married. Though Sherry had always wanted to go to the Temple having been a good LDS girl all her life, she relented on my account and we were married by a bishop of her ward.

About ten or eleven months after our marriage, our first son was born. We named him Kevin. At the time of his birth I was in the Army and had returned home from California for my first leave after Basic Training to Salt Lake while I was on my way to Fort Belvoir Virginia for my second stint of Advanced Basic Training.

Not long after I was stationed in Kornwestheim Germany, Sherry was able to join me there. We lived with a German family and had quite a good life with them. But Sherry got pregnant while I was there (I always thought she had an affair with a friend of mine who got her pregnant while I was gone out of town on a special mission for a week). Her pregnancy was plagued with complications so after I was in the Army twenty-two months of my twenty-four month draft period I was allowed to be released from the Army and take Sherry home where our son Jimmy was later born without complications.

I resumed my work at the Utah Copper on my return and life went on for us for another several years through the birth of our third son, Mark who came along two years after Jimmy was born. All three boys were then two years apart.

We didn’t have much money during our marriage since I was making meager wages at the Utah Copper mine, so when I was able to I worked part time during the evening and weekends with Sherry’s father, Wayne Berrett, in his heating and air conditioning business. I learned a great deal from Wayne who accepted me like the son he never had. None of his four girls ever showed any interest in his business. Had Sherry and I continued our marriage, I am sure that Wayne would have eventually turned over his business to me. I loved the work I did with him and the skills I learned there came in handy the rest of my working life.

Sherry and I were so busy most of the time with me going to work every day and nights and weekends with Wayne, we never really got to be with each other much unless it was working on the yard of our home that we purchased. Early in our marriage, we bought a home in a new subdivision called Peruvian Park in Sandy Utah that was on a sandy plain that had nothing but sand for a front and back yard. We had to haul in dirt to even plant a lawn. But we worked at it and had the place looking pretty good after a while.

As far as family activities was concerned, though Sherry was persistent in my getting active in the Church, I never did and that caused us a lot of heartache that permeated through our relationship. She would go to church with the kids and I would stay home and work on the yard.

We didn’t do a whole lot as a family. I don’t remember one vacation we took together during the entire seven years of our marriage. We visited relatives locally and went occasionally to family parties from both sides of the family, but that was about all there was of our family activities.

On my return to the Utah Copper after my Army discharge, I joined the Engineering Department. It was a dead end job I could see if I didn’t have an education in Engineering, so I enrolled in college to see how I might get an Engineering Degree that would be paid for by the GI bill. I already had a GI loan that we used to purchase our home in Sandy Utah. While I was busy going to school and working full time I believe Sherry began to be unsatisfied with our life and her abandonment by me from my frequent departures to work during the day and go to school four nights a week at the University. Anyway something happened that set her off and she began to be restless and wanted to work outside of the home, which she had not done during any part of our marriage. This opened up some new avenues with her and she also at the same time began a secret affair with a man that was living with our next door neighbor. And then without any warning one day she announced to me that she wanted a divorce. It was a big surprise to me since I believed I had not done anything from my perspective and was working hard to make something of our future. Whatever it was, however, the real reason that would appear after the weeks since her proceeding to divorce me started, I learned that she was pregnant by the man whom she had been in an affair with for some months. I resolved the matter my filing for divorce from her, and setting the conditions to be without alimony, but including child support. That divorce ended after what I thought at the time was seven years of a pretty good marriage. But now I see it as different and taking many of the possible conditions in place there were multiple reasons for our breakup.

My divorce decree with Sherry dictated that she would have to move out of the house with the children and I would rent the house to cover the payments. She did not argue with that option and moved into a place in Salt Lake that she rented. The man she would later marry soon moved in with her. The three children of my first marriage were initially the victims of our separation, but that was later resolved to the benefit of all of them by my giving them up for adoption by their new step father, Paul Deesing. They all took on his name and I gave up any contact or involvement with them. Sherry and Paul went on to have many more children. Sherry eventually set up a business of her own selling antiques while Paul had a successful business selling furniture. For the most part I lost track of the boys and never saw any of them until one day in 1980 I received a call from Kevin, my oldest boy’s wife who invited me to their place to meet his family. He told me a little about his brothers and their affairs, but I didn’t pursue any more contact with them after that.

My departure from the boys of my first marriage continued for several years without further contact with any of them. But then about 2006 one of the boys, Mark, the youngest, contacted me and we set up a meeting. He currently lives in Colorado and I see him occasionally and we meet as friends on Facebook, but I have no other contact with his brothers. His mother, Sherry died in 2013. I did not know about her death until long after, and never attended her funeral.

Second Marriage to Kay Robinson -- January 1, 1962 to August 5, 1984.

After separation from Sherry and the short time she lived in the house in Sandy before moving in with Paul, I took up residency in an apartment that was one half of an old house in Holiday. It was a large place and I was living alone for the first time in my life. It was a simple existence since I was not making much money at the time working at the Utah Copper and paying what was an enormous amount for me for child support. So for a while I simply existed.

However, while I lived in Holliday I resurrected my old talent of painting and writing and began to take up those lonely evening hours between the weekends when I could see and be with the boys. I had a big front room in the house, and knowing that my sister Pat had a friend that was a dance teacher, I set it up so that Pat and this friend of hers would come to my house on Thursday’s and teach dancing to me. The girl agreed and for the first few times we held the sessions she came with her boyfriend and I danced with Pat who also wanted to learn some new dance steps.

One day during the time I was living in Holliday, I was at my mother’s house in Murray visiting and having a free lunch with Mom and my cousin Lorene Martin who was at the time Mother’s neighbor and good friend. While I was talking with them Lorene started in on me about finding another woman to marry. Rene, as she was called, said she knew this girl who was a recent widow that had been married to the son of a Dr. Lippman who was a dentist in Murray, and that I should meet her. This girl was also a friend of my sister Pat I was told and so the arrangement could easily be made to line me up with her. At first I was not interested in doing this, but they insisted, so when Pat came home that day from work, Rene suggested that a meeting be set up.

I met Kay Robinson (married name, Kay Robinson Lippman) at my mother’s house a few days later on a Sunday. She had brought her little one-year old daughter Jan with her. It was a pleasant meeting and we were soon off to a place in Sandy where I offered to buy Kay lunch and get to know her better. To my surprise she was very attractive and I especially liked Jan who had red hair just like her mom. During this conversation I had at lunch with Kay she remembered that she had met me some seven years earlier when she was fourteen or fifteen when I offered my sister and her to have a ride in my new 1953 Chevrolet convertible.

That meeting led to a few dates mostly to my house where Kay came to the Thursday dance classes and we were soon talking about marriage. Kay wanted to get married right away but needed some time before she did that so that the parents of her dead husband wouldn’t be hurt with her getting married so soon after the death of their son. Kay didn’t like the Lippmans very much, but she respected that they needed some time and we agreed that we would get married one year after the death of her husband that would be in April of 1962.

The date slipped a couple of times since Kay and I got more intimate in our relationship and felt the need to get married sooner than the year waiting period, but finally we did set the date that was about nine months from the death for a wedding on New Year’s Day in 1962. By then we had known each other about eight months.

It was a great wedding we had at our home in Sandy. I had gotten the renters out of the house and redid the place so we could live there, and there was all the potential that we were going to have a great marriage.

It wasn’t quite that way however after we were married and settled into the house. Both of us had brought some baggage with us from our previous marriages and so there were a lot of adjustments that had to be made. So in effect our marriage stared out with some serious problems that neither of us realized would impact our marriage so seriously; so we went on without help from anyone and blundered into our marriage ignorant of the impact both of our previous marriages was having with our current one.

Those first months and early years of our marriage was taken up with the normal struggles of a marriage—lack of money, pregnancy, miscarriage, work, debts and a child who had come along with the marriage (Jan), church issues and a myriad of things that we created along the way. Those first few years were fun, unhappy, happy, and joyful at times, but mostly hard. But we moved along and resolved them as best we could as we went along.

Both of us were stubborn in our own ways and resisted many of the things we should have gotten help to solve, but like most people of our age and economic status, we were not about to discuss these matters and simply went along with the flow. Soon after the first miscarriage that Kay had about five months into our marriage, she was pregnant again and not long after, our first child, Douglas was born on the same day as his grandfather’s birthday. In respect of the grandfather, we gave Douglas a second name of Albert, after Albert Robinson. Unlike his grandfather, he was never called Al.

Doug was a challenge from the first, but soon he as a toddler was going along fine. At the same time as he was coming along and was about one and one-half years old, Kay was pregnant again. During this pregnancy we took on a responsibility for a young girl named Vicky Holst who became our foster child for over a year. Vicky was about sixteen at the time we took her in and was a Ward of the State. We picked her up from the Youth Detention where she had been held for some insurrection like running away from her last foster home.

Vicky brought a new dimension in to our home and became a difficulty with Kay and a problem for all of us. She had some very good qualities, but like Kay was a red head and had a temper and an angry presence about here that was difficult much of the time to deal with. She played a dirty manipulating game with both Kay and I and for the most part took my side against Kay with me in the middle. Overall, however, the  experience of having Vicky in our home was positive and as definitely good for Vicky that we would learn many years later when she was grown up and married.

Sometime during our life in Peruvian Park in the city of Sandy, I became for the first time in years active in the Church, and soon Kay and I were talking Temple Marriage. We worked out all that we had to to become “worthy” and were soon setting up the Temple Marriage. First we had to have her first Temple Marriage annulled by the church, but after much consternation from her previous in-laws, the Lippmans, we got the annulment and were soon after married in the Temple

In 1968, after we were married for six years I went to work for Bechtel Corporation, a company that was doing work at the place I had two years before left—Kennecott Copper Corporation (former Utah Copper). Our lives took on another major change at that point. I would work at the Bingham Canyon operations for a few months and then Bechtel had a new assignment for me in Mountain Pass California, just across the border into California from Las Vegas. By then our second child Chris was a little toddler a few months old. We had to move for the new job to Henderson Nevada, so we had to send Vicky back to the State. Before we left we sold old our home in Sandy and made our first of many more moves with Bechtel.

Our life in the Las Vegas area was soon filled with frustrations and difficulties. People came to visit us often because we lived by Las Vegas and its gambling casinos, I was working quite constantly seven days a week and long hours, so I was not home very much, Kay’s work with the Church that she loved so much was difficult at best and for those reasons and many more the stress got to Kay and she was began having stomach problems that lasted most of the time we lived in Henderson.

After six months that we were in Henderson, in early 1969, the job finished in Mountain Pass and we were shipped off to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and found a house across the border from Iron Mountain Michigan in the town of Niagara Wisconsin. Life there became the point in our marriage that in my opinion was the best years we spent together. We became friends for the first time, had fun with the children, lived a life that was completely different than anything either of us had ever experienced and loved the moments we spent together in intimacy. We also gained some new friends while there and introduced them to the Church and loved working with the LDS Missionaries that were stationed in the region. I had a good and important job from which I learned many new things and much more about the Iron Mining Industry. Along with that, Bechtel was good to me offering me many new and exciting responsibilities. After about two years in Niagara Wisconsin, the job was finished and we were once again on the move.

There was a new nuclear power plant that was being built by Bechtel in Upstate New York and I was given the opportunity to go there for my next assignment. It would mean leaving the Mining Division and joining the Power Division of the company, but the offer seemed good so I took it and we moved on again.

We found a home in the town of Ontario New York that was only about five miles from the job, but it was also only eight miles from the famous location where the LDS Church was founded, Palmyra, and we would be in the Palmyra Ward during out stay there. During my short stay in Holliday Utah I became active in the Church again after about twelve years of inactivity. So being able to live near this special place was a great blessing to all of us. We got to make some new friends in the Church and the activity there was fun and quite a change from the small “twig” of the church we had created while we were in Wisconsin.

Things were quite expensive in New York, so we settled for half of a duplex to live in while we were in this location. It was a nice place, but living the side of another family with paper thin walls separating us was quite a change from our most recent single family home we lived in in Niagara Wisconsin. We had a good time there, however, and while we didn’t have a yard or even a garage, we managed to find other places to explore in the area and loved being in the Palmyra Ward. Both Kay and I took on jobs in the Church and were excited about our activity there. Our life together took on new meaning too and the relationship we had started to have in Wisconsin seemed to continue for the time we were there in Palmyra area.

It was a long way from home there, however, and for the first time in our marriage and being so far east this time, we kept looking west and hoping that someday an opportunity would come to us that would take us nearer to our home in Utah. After about a year and one half in New York that opportunity did come. We had taken a vacation to Utah and Al Robinson, Kay’s father, who worked at one of the Kennecott Copper Plants in Garfield Utah as a Credit Union Manager heard about a job that was opening up there and told me he could arrange an interview if I wanted it with the General Manager. It turned out that I went there for the interview, but when I left I didn’t believe it went too well and wasn’t sure I even wanted to work there. The job was to be a Plant Maintenance Superintendent and I would have to take a cut in pay to work there; because of those two factors, I didn’t much want to be considered, nor did I hold out much hope for getting an offer.

We left for home in New York after a two week stay in Utah while Kay enjoyed being with her sisters and I worried whether I wanted to quit Bechtel and take a job at a dirty stinking smelter in Utah if I was offered the job. 

Nothing happened with the job at Kennecott while we were in Utah, but when we got back to New York after a five day drive across country again, there was a letter in the mail from the Garfield Smelter General Manager with whom I had interviewed offering me a job.  It seemed appealing to look west again so I took the offer and Kay and I left New York and headed west again only three weeks after we had made the trip back to New York.

The job in Utah was not all it was meant to be and we found we didn’t like living in Utah any more. Kay’s family was different to us and the Church suddenly felt false and transparent to us for some reason. I was working a straight midnight shift that was anything but pleasant and our home life suddenly took on a new look that neither of us liked. After six months of this difficult and confusing season of our lives, I called one day to my friend and former boss at Bechtel and asked if he would consider me coming back to the company. He jumped at the chance, offered me a promotion if I would come back to the same project that I had left and said that they needed me in two weeks if I could make it. I talked it over with Kay and called the man back the next day and accepted the offer. Going back I would be a supervising Field Engineer for the Mechanical Department of the project and would be supervising about twelve Engineers.

When we returned to New York we had a hard time finding a place, so we settled for a duplex again that was the exact duplicate of the one we had been in on our previous stay there, down the street about a mile away. A lot of interesting things happened while we were there that second time. My sister Pat had come to Ontario when we lived there previously and had met a man whom she married between the time we were there first and the time we came back. She was living in a trailer on the back side of the Hill Cumorah where the Golden Plates were found by Joseph Smith. Her husband, Paul Baldauf was the Grounds Manager for the historical sites of the Church.

Once again we took jobs in the church and had fun with them. Kay became Relief Society President and I was called as Elder’s Quorum President. Our children were happy there and for Kay and me it was another good time of our life. My work was non stressful at Bechtel and I was loving being a supervisor and would soon be promoted to Job Engineer over all the Engineers on the project with a good salary increase and a grade jump to Senior Engineer. We would be there for another year or more before we were off again to our next assignment. 

For the next assignment with Bechtel, we moved to Connecticut where we took up residency in the upstairs half of a rented house in the small town of Uncasville. It was only three miles from my work place in a coal-fired power plant that Bechtel was building there. I had an important job as Job Engineer, we got involved with the community, we had our kids in a good school where they were taking off and having a wonderful time, and I was made a High Priest in the Church and called to the Bishopric. It was a pretty good time for us there, but several things happened that turned the tide for us. First, Kay got cancer in her leg with a life-threatening melanoma and for some reason that I never understood fully she got the notion that I didn’t care that her life was at stake. Either before the melanoma or after, I am not sure when, Kay went to the hospital and had a cyst removed from her ovary that was not life threatening, but she lost one ovary in the process that was a setback for her that was years in the background of our marriage.

There was another factor that entered into the marriage during that period of about one and one half years that we were in Connecticut. There were two women in the Church who took a serious interest in Kay and depended on her for council and friendship that to me started to look more like a homosexual relationship than a regular friendship between women. I was not particularly worried about Kay at the time, but the one woman, especially, got to me with her constant paying attention to Kay. It came though into our marriage and I had many discussions with Kay about it while we were there, but all was passed off that Kay was providing support to these two women who were having great difficulties with their marriages and that was all there was to it.

Another incident put our marriage reeling again just before we left Connecticut in 1969. My mother, who was ailing and not far from the time that she would die of heart condition-related illnesses, came to the East and spent time with us. I took her to New York where she spent time with my sister who was living in Palmyra New York, and then she came back and moved in with us for a time. When the Job in Connecticut was winding down I got orders to move to Maryland after going to San Francisco and spending six weeks there while Kay took care of Mother. It was a tough time for Kay to have to do that knowing that Mom was going to move with us to Maryland for another period of unknown duration.

The move took place and we got a nice home in Gaithersburg Maryland with a room that Mother could stay in until she decided to return home. She was a widow for the second time by then and her health was so bad that it took a lot of attention from Kay to take care of her. I was traveling almost constantly after my job took hold in the Bechtel Gaithersburg office, the Church there was different and not as fun as it had been in other places and I was unable to do anything in the Church. As a result, our marriage was again at stake because of our own choices and the outside influences that were plaguing our lives along the way.

We stayed only ten months total in Maryland and were soon off to the West to live in Pacifica California. I got another promotion with the company and this opportunity to move west again nearer our homeland. Mother had gone home by then and had died a short time later. I returned to Utah briefly to the funeral and then got back to the business of getting ready to move to San Francisco to take my boss’s job in the Manpower Development Department of the company.  Getting ready for the move to the West was exciting and fun for the family and put life back into our marriage for a time. We had not seen many of the historical places in Washington, D.C. because of my constant travel, so we set some goals to see all of them before we left. We managed that and saw all the important things in the city like the museums, the Capital, the White House and other monuments, and then we went off to the other sites like Gettysburg and Fredericksburg. And then we packed up and moved.

I had already found a place for us in Pacifica while I was there on my initial visit to get oriented to the new job, so we moved right into this nice house in a secluded subdivision not far from the city where I would be working. I started commuting to the city by bus at first and then later by Bart, the new rail system that Bechtel had been building for over ten years. Our involvement in the Church was good and we were both able to take on jobs there. I was lesser involved because once again travel started to be an issue that took me away from home at least two weeks out of each month. But life improved for us, the kids loved their school and after a couple of years we took advantage of the sites around the city and the mountains along the Sierras. We purchased a rubber raft and a camping trailer and were set to have “quality” time as a family. We did as much as we could, but it wasn’t what it was cut out to be when it all folded out on the surface.

During that period of four years that we struggled along in Pacifica we took on another foster child that was arranged for by the Church Foster Program. He was a Native American Indian about thirteen years old who would live with us during the school year and go home to Snowflake Arizona in the summer. That was okay and worked well for us since the boy was Doug’s age and they became instant friends and companions while they created much of the chaos that boys that age can create. They got lost in the woods once, got picked up for shoplifting at the local Safeway Market, found a wallet with several hundred dollars in it and turned it over to the police and they received many kudos for their good deeds.

Kay became pregnant during our stay in Pacifica. It was a strange happening that was initiated by Kay for the purpose, she confessed later, of saving our marriage. Nothing else had worked according to her, like buying the boat and camping trailer, so in a last ditch effort to do something about what she independently believed was our ailing marriage she went ahead and set it up so she could get pregnant and despite her one ovary was success on almost her first attempt. I didn’t have an inkling that our marriage was on the rocks since it seemed okay to me on the standard that I had in mind for it. I remained steadfastly loyal to Kay and never even thought about being any other way. I always opened her doors for her when we were together, I took her on frequent dates, we spent much time together and I always held the chair for her at the table before she sat down. I provided her with all the material things that she needed and believed I loved her and had respect for her in all matters, both physically and mentally. But Kay saw it different and wanted to do something about the matter.

Not long after our third child, Matt was born Kay became pregnant again with our last child, Kara. This one, however, was mutually agreed upon by her I and the rest of the family. Before our four years was up in Pacifica and we were once again on the move we decided jointly that another child to go with Matt who would be about two years difference in age would be a good thing. The older children were so much enthralled with Matt; they too encouraged their mother to have another baby. We all went along with the idea and as soon as it was possible, Kay was pregnant again.

In both of these last pregnancies the doctors were concerned about Kay’s age and the fact that she was prone to having more cancer, so they watched her closely through the entire pregnancy. When Kara was born because of some genetic thing or Kay’s age, it was never determined, Kara was born with club feet. Kay was so devastated by the happening, though Kara’s feet were something that medically could be handled, that she had her only other ovary removed while she was in the hospital without ever consulting me about it. I believe she was still agonizing over what she believed was our failing marriage and wanted it so that she would never have any more children.

Kara’s condition was temporarily taken care of by casts that later became special shoes and braces, but within a couple of years she was acting like a normal child with her feet more or less corrected for the time being. Later in life she continued to have some problems, but they never held her back much from becoming an active and wonderful child.

We left Pacifica around 1974 and moved north about sixty miles to Petaluma California where we bought a small ranch with a wonderful house located on it.  It was a move I had dreamed of for years to get away from subdivision living and have a place where our kids could grow up and have the freedom I had as a child. I wanted them to have animals and a garden to take care of. I wanted them to have places they could roam and be free and I personally wanted once again to have those things myself. Kay was hesitant to go along at first, but I pushed ahead, took her house hunting and soon we were making the deal with the Realtor.

Coincident with our move to Petaluma California I was seconded to a Bechtel project that would for the next year and one half require me to be away from home on an international assignment in Algeria for over thirty percent of the time. That amount didn’t seem like much, but when it came down to it, it seemed more like full time. Kay suffered through all of this with me and took care of the house and farm as much as she was able to, but every time I would come home after being out of the country for anywhere from two to six weeks at a time, I would find the place in chaos. On my return it never failed that while I was gone the children had acted up, the cows were constantly escaping from the broken down fence, the earwigs were overrunning the house or the gophers were taking over the farm and eating our garden. In the ensuing months, our well was getting polluted from our neighbor’s sewer and our babies, Matt and Kara were getting sick. Kay went a little crazy during that time and toward the end of our two years there, despite the fact that we had attempted a number of strategies to ward off our impending divorce, like getting rid of our small camping trailer and buying a large camping trailer. Nothing had any effect on how Kay was beginning to feel. Finally she contacted an attorney and announced that it was all over for us.

We didn’t go through with the divorce right then, but hung on, got rid of the farm in Petaluma and returned to subdivision living in a new home we purchased in Rohnert Park California only eight miles from our lovely farm in Petaluma. The move seemed to take away some of the stress Kay was feeling and I was free from my Algerian experience, so it looked like we had something going for our marriage again. The kids were at first doing fine and we had a real nice home that I was busy fixing up. I started first in the back yard with a nice garden, lawns, sidewalks and a beautiful patio. This I did in my spare time, which was all the time I had at home, and was causing problems again since I attempted to provide a good home and comfortable things around us. My propensity and values for those things that I had inherited from my father overrode almost everything else that was going on in my life and blinded me at the things close to me like my wife and the attention she was craving for. She mentioned during this time that she felt like a “dish rag” most of the time. I couldn’t figure out what she meant, and continued with my next project—namely the front of the house.

We managed to get along for four more years in this new home in Rohnert Park, but it was not always good. Doug was a continual problem by then and eventually moved out of our home. Jan was growing up and needed to go to college, so we sent her at barely eighteen to Utah where she stayed for a while but couldn’t adapt to the large school environment at Brigham Young University. She later moved back home to enter college in a local school that took care of her problem, but when she came back she saw a change in her mother that had come about from months of therapy that we were in by that time to fix our marriage. Jan didn’t like the new mom and that caused many frustrations with the entire family unit.

In the midst of all this Kay’s father and mother came to visit and while they were there her father, Al Robinson, had a heart attack and died one evening in our house. Kay was devastated by the death, but it was made worse when her mom decided to blame the death on her and summarily called Kay’s sisters and told them all that Kay had killed her dad.  Kay had enough stress going on in her life by then and this only made it worse. After that for a period of time until our plans changed again and we were off to Utah to live, we had a good life that looked like things were going to work out for the long term.  Kay backed away from the legal actions she was taking to get a divorce started and we decided to make a new big move in our lives and I would leave Bechtel and start doing something on my own.

For almost two years we worked on that proposition of finding what I might do for a future career. I had finished my Master’s Degree by then and knew about business in a new way, so I did market research on several possible career options. Kay was fully behind me on this move and it seemed like it was good for us to have this new goal. After much work and travel when we even went to Quincy California, a place in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, where we investigated buying a store that Kay could run while I taught in the small college in the town. But that plan like many others I had suggested went sour when Kay would resist and think things were too risky.

Finally we made the jump. Kay and I decided to put the home up for sale in Rohnert Park and she would go to Utah for a special vacation to assist her sisters in making up a family history book for her mother. We did that and she left, and the day she left the house was sold and we started making plans to move to Utah. Kay bought a house in Bennion Utah. I right away started packing things up for the move. Kay and her sister and brother-in-law came back to Utah, we rented two trucks to move our things, and in a matter of four or five days we were out of the house on our way to Utah.

I came back to California after this short “vacation” that I had taken from Bechtel and resigned. That same day I acquired a contract to be a consultant the next week with Bechtel, and I officially moved to Utah to begin our new life in the home where we had moved to in Bennion.

Our new residence was adequate but not totally to our liking, so with that in mind and my propensity to always have a project at home to work on, I started finishing the basement. It was a fun project that involved all of us and Kay seemed to be satisfied to be taking part in this nice completion of the home’s unfinished features. We spent about $15,000 on this project, but it was money out of pocket since I was making good money on my consulting business that took off with a flurry as soon as I moved away from Bechtel and the corporate environment. Life between Kay and I seemed to be okay too for the time being, but behind it all was Kay’s all-time dissatisfaction with the marriage.

Soon after the completion of the basement we purchased a motor home so we could have “quality time” with the family when I was not traveling. We had this notion that it would become a vacation item for us as well as a business where we would rent the motorhome and make some money back from the large investment we had in the unit. That worked fairly well for a while, but we soon learned that renting these units was a very difficult venture that seemed always to turn out badly for us every time we rented the motor home So we stopped doing that and jumped into our second rebuilding project with the home.

The house was cold and dark inside so we hired an architect to redesign the place and we went about to find a builder that would do the work. One year later after we had lived “temporarily” in our motor home while the house was gutted, we had the place looking like we wanted it.  It was a marvel to see and I loved the place. Kay, however, took an immediate disliking to the new home, and was again becoming depressed about our marriage and how our lives were going. The house didn’t do the trick for us like many of the other fixes that we embarked upon during our years of marriage.

While Kay was involved heavily in her church activities at the time and as Relief Society President in the Ward a woman approached her that was desperate for help. She was the daughter of a long-time family in the area and seemed okay with her need that Kay was filling. Soon, however, the woman was spending all her time with Kay and things at the same time took a shift for the worse for Kay and me. Finally like I had suspected there was a homosexual relationship going on between this woman and my wife, and Kay again wanted out of the marriage. There was no backing out this time. Kay was set on going the full route and had someone who was filling her needs now better than I had ever been able to, so just before I left the country for an assignment in Saudi Arabia we signed the papers, divided everything up and were out of the marriage. This initial legal matter was culminated about January 3 in 1983.  Basically it was over and we only had about six months to wait until it was final.

We had been together for over twenty-one years by then with an up and down marriage that had many good times and some bad. But overall, I would judge that our marriage was a good one. We had fostered three children who were wonderful, though troublesome at times. We had taken care of two foster children and changed their lives forever. And we had experienced some good and real spiritual times together over these years. Kay, I know looks at the marriage differently and still retains many resentments against me. I will never understand all of this, but accept it and still love the woman in a strange and distant way even these many years after our divorce. When we meet as we do several times a year for family gatherings, I still want to look good for her. And strangely enough I still feel some loyalty to her. I’m clear about not wanting to live with Kay again, but I don’t mind seeing her from time to time when we have these family get-togethers.  I guess I will love this woman in some way for the rest of my life, but I am not sure things will ever change for her. I look back on those seasons of my life, not with distain, or regret, but with sorrow that between the two of us even after twenty one years, we couldn’t make a go of it.

Chapter 6—Ibex, a Utah Ghost Town

After driving over one hundred and fifty miles on paved roads into the West Desert of Utah, and then turning off onto an unmarked seldom-traveled dirt track I went another eighteen miles following my GPS guidance system and coordinates I had for the ghost town I was looking for, Ibex Utah. I had left Salt Lake Valley very early in the morning for the long ride and arrived there just as the sun was coming up. I had read about this ghost town and had been almost there one time before while visiting Fossil Mountain about two miles to the northwest. Something strange had drawn me to see Ibex, I wasn’t sure what, but I followed my intuition and found the time to go there. It was springtime and I knew it would be cool, so I also planned to stay a few days and explore Fossil Mountain again while I was there. I was alone on this trip.

Ibex is listed in several places in Utah History annals as a ghost town that was short lived and only existed between 1903 and 1917. It was a silver mining area that was opened up with a few mining claims that were followed by a mining company that saw the potential of the place and built a mill and mine operations complex. Two hundred miners once lived in the town, and according to the records, only fifty thousand dollars worth of silver was taken from the operations. The closest town to this place is Delta Utah to the east about fifty miles. What’s left of the town is reached now by going west out of Delta on a paved road, U.S. Highway 50, then turning south to travel on dirt tracks that meander through the desert another eighteen miles. U.S. Highway 50 is one of the older roads in the United States that in the early part of the 20^th Century was the only good road to California from the East. Nothing is left of the town of Ibex now except a few old fences, foundations and old trees that must have been planted there when it was a town. To the east of the town in a wide semi-circle is a series of cliffs that lift out of the sandy floor sheltering the town and obstructing any view to the east. The cliffs are red colored rock that is weathered into round vertical pillar-like structures that look like they may have been carved by man rather than by the elements. Cutting into the cliffs in three places are small narrow canyons with sheer walls that seem to have been cut out of the rocks with many centuries of rain and flooding. The rocks are a soft sandstone-type material, which would explain the weathering that has taken place with them. To the south and north of the town, high hills rise in slow waves tapering off as they go to the west. Looking west and a little bit northerly, the large and dramatic Fossil Mountain takes up most of the view from the town site. 

The view from Ibex is really quite impressive standing where one of the town roads once existed. It was interesting looking at how the picture changes with each quadrant of a turn. It is truly a beautiful place and I got there just as the desert flowers were blooming while there was still a little moisture in the ground to sustain them. Anywhere I looked I could see these small white and red desert flowers no bigger than a dime blooming in between stones or old cast-away items from the town. Around them the grass that early in the morning was still glistening with dew. It was quiet and only the ringing in my ears was audible to me after I got out of my car. But most of all, I noticed the intense quiet of the place and marveled at it.

After stretching my legs from the long drive to Ibex I took a tour of the village remains walking where streets once had been and attempting to see if I could recognize any building foundations that remained. I was anxious to understand a little about this place and what had motivated it to be what it once became. When I had read about the town there was not much to learn, but it had been a substantial town for a short time with homes for two hundred miners and their families. There must have been at least one bar and whore house since that was the tradition in those days, and I am sure that there were some people in the town that opposed the initiation of places of ill repute and bars. Most of the miners, I am sure, must have migrated there either from the mining operations in Ely Nevada over a hundred miles to the west or from north of Delta in the Eureka Mining District.

While I walked around the village occasionally kicking at something I saw on the ground to see if it had any relation to the town. I also actually found some rock foundations that remained showing where some of the buildings must have existed in their time. In one location I saw an old iron pipe sticking out of the ground that must had served as a source of water to that home or business. That struck me as odd, and soon I was speculating on how the town got its water and from where. The canyons cutting into the cliffs were the most likely source so before I did any more exploring of the town that morning, I ventured to the east where could enter the most southerly of the three canyons.

I picked that one to be first since it was a little larger than the others and I could see trees and undergrowth suggesting that there might be a spring in this canyon. The cliffs were just a short distance from the village site, so I didn’t take any of my tools of exploration or my GPS. I simply headed that direction hoping I would find something interesting.

I entered the canyon watching every step I took and listening for any rattling in the bushes. I was not too far into the canyon when it narrowed down and became full of rounded boulders that were covered with multi-colored lichen. Because of the height of the walls it became a little dark and I could tell that other than direct overhead sunlight, this canyon seldom had any direct light. Soon I was climbing over boulders that blocked my entrance up the canyon and after I had crossed over several of them without seeing any sign of water, I returned and committed to go into the other canyons until I could go no longer.

The second canyon was more open and dry. There was very little natural growth anywhere and there were no trees of any size like the other canyon. Up this canyon about three hundred yards it opened up and the cliff walls faded into the landscape. I could see clearly that there was no water for the next half mile or so since the canyon floor turned into a dry swale. Returning down to the cliff face near the town, I walked to the north a few hundred yards and entered the last of the canyons that were cut into the cliffs. This one like the first was deep with high walls and stones covered with lichen. In some places moss even showed up behind stones and in crevices in the walls. The canyon was definitely more likely to be the source of the old town’s water.

Not far into the canyon I saw the first indication that there had been a water line coming down the canyon when I spotted a rusty old two inch diameter metal pipe sticking out of the sand on one side of the canyon. Further along I saw the remnants of a larger four inch diameter pipe that was mostly rusted but still distinguishable as a water main. I continued walking up the canyon and when I rounded a curve in the narrow walking area in the bottom of the canyon, there in front of me was a large dam that was at least twelve feet high made from stones that had been cut from the existing walls or fallen rocks fit together in a manner that suggested that someone with highly technical rock cutting skills had done the job. Two pipes were extending out of the end of the dam. One was near the bottom of the structure that was the remaining piece of the four inch pipe that I had seen earlier. About five feet up the wall was the other pipe also cut into the stone face of the wall and obviously one time into the water back of the dam. It puzzled me why the two pipes were that way, one above the other, so I decided to find a way to scale the dam wall and see what was above the structure.

The dam didn’t offer any way to easily get over it, so I walked back out of the canyon, worked my way around to the north and over an area where the cliffs were not so high and got on top of the flat area above the cliffs. It took quite a while to find a way around and back into the canyon so I could get back to the upper side of the dam, but I finally found it and was walking down the canyon toward where I had left the lower section of the dam. The bottom of the canyon was similar here like the other section below the dam. It was basically flat and with a level bed of sand between the walls of the canyon. Here it was a little narrower than below, and I could see that one time it could have held a great deal of rain water or natural water coming from a spring. The sand in the bottom of the canyon, unlike below the dam, was damp and when I dug into it with my hand about six inches it was completely saturated as if it were a running creek that had penetrated the sand and was flowing down the canyon.

When I got to the upper side of the dam I could immediately see why the upper pipe had been placed in the dam. The lower section where the four inch pipe had been installed had most likely been filled with sand like I was walking on until it had covered the big pipe. To keep water flowing to the town, a second smaller pipe had apparently been installed. Maybe, I thought, by then the town size had diminished so that a two inch pipe was all that was needed for the residents.

I was still curious to know where the water source that filled the dam was. The day was still young so I ventured up the canyon that unlike the middle one stayed almost the same—a narrow high wall cut in the earth; except as I got further up the canyon the walls got smaller and finally about a half mile beyond the dam, I was in open country looking into an area I learned later after looking at my map of the area was Horse Coral. I could see why the swale was called coral. It was about a half mile wide and extended to the east a mile or so. It was green and lush with grass, and I could see remnants of a fence that once cut across the canyon that may have held in horses used in the mine or the village. I could also see to the north of me what may have been the mine site. I walked a little bit in that direction and found some old mine dumps there, but the evidence was so slight, I was not sure that this was the place where the miners had found the silver and extracted it. These small mine dumps I believed were simply prospector’s diggings. The mine, I concluded must have been in another location.

I was about ready to swing around to the north and find my way down over the cliffs and back to my car when I seemed to be getting a strange sensation pulling me to the south. I don’t know if I was just imagining this, but I couldn’t get the first canyon I had entered out of my mind and felt most urgently that I needed to walk south and see if I could find the upper portion of that canyon that I was unable to reach from the village area.  My mind kept telling me that I should just go back to the car, but the other force just kept at me until I relented and headed south.

I had to walk quite a long way over one hill and down through what I had believed was the upper portion of the middle canyon and over another easy climbing ridge before I believed I was in the upper most section of the first canyon I had ventured into earlier. When I got there I decided to walk downward and see if I could actually get out and back to my car that way easier than I had when I attempted to come up.  I continued downward for some time before the canyon suddenly broke into a deep gulley walled on each side by this funny rock that looked like large match sticks standing on end.  Big boulders now came into view and I had to negotiate over them and around them to proceed down the canyon. Soon the vegetation that I had seen below began to show up and I was certain this was a very wet canyon. Around one curve I saw a small spring gurgling out of the side of the canyon under a rock. The spring, however, only went a few feet and disappeared into the ground. I sat down by it, cleaned some of the sand away so I could get a handful of the water and tasted it.  It was cool and wonderful, and especially refreshed me after the difficult hike I had experience getting there. I didn’t move from that place for a while, but sat down, cradled myself back against the rock and took a rest.

The rest was refreshing and soon I was feeling drowsy. After all, I had gotten up so early that morning and had taken several hours to get to this place. Now that the urgency I had felt about getting there was over and I was sitting down, I realized how really tired I was.  I remembered having some weird sensations when I first started to get drowsy that I could hear voices somewhere in the silent distance. It seemed to me like women’s voices, but I was not sure. I concluded that I was just falling asleep and was getting some parts of a dream mixed with the ringing in my ears. I ignored what it was that I was imagining and dropped off to sleep. After waking up I decided that I should carry on down the canyon and see if I could get back to my car and set up my camp.

I walked no more than one hundred feet down the canyon going around two blind turns and suddenly came upon a wide place in the canyon where another branch fed in from the south. This was a beautiful small opening with trees on one side and rocks that looked like benches on the other. I could had stayed there forever it was so wonderful. At the bottom section of this open space right where water would have traveled during a storm, there was what looked like a man-made dam of sorts. It was like simple dams I had seen on fishing trips near camp grounds where someone had placed rocks in the bottom of the stream to block the water and make it higher so they could bathe or children could play. As I stood there pondering why a dam of this sort would be built there, those voices that I had heard previously came back to me. There was a slight breeze that had come up suddenly and the leaves of the small maple trees were rustling, so I didn’t know if that was it or once again my imagination playing tricks on my. Finally I just relaxed and enjoyed the place for a while rather than break the spirit of what I was experiencing with trying to figure it out.

I stayed in that place about fifteen minutes before I crossed over the small dam and attempted to continue down the canyon. I had only gotten about fifty feet from the open place when the going got so difficult I decided to return and see if I could make it up the small branch canyon that went south and get up on the ridge that I supposed was south of the old town. I stopped again in the opening when I got back there to just tune into the experience I had before and waited for it to happen. Once again when I sat down on one of the rock benches that were on the north side of the opening I could distinctly hear those sounds that reminded me of a group of young women laughing and chatting feverishly. In a moment the sounds went away and again I was convinced I was hearing the whistle of the leaves on the nearby shrubbery. When I was convinced enough that this was the case, I started up the side canyon and in minutes was on the ridge. I followed a deer or other animal trail (I wasn’t sure there were any deer out here, and thought it might be sheep or antelope that had made the trail). The trail didn’t go down the top of the ridge, however, it just continued south over the ridge and into the next swale, so I broke away from the trail and headed down the ridge. In no time I could see the town and my car sitting where I left it. In minutes I was there looking for a place that I might camp.

I was so tired by then that instead of organizing my campsite like I had thought I would do, I put up my favorite camping chair with the leg rests under a nearby cedar tree and sat back satisfied that I had experienced enough of a great first morning at this wonderful historic place I the desert. In minutes I must have fallen asleep since I didn’t remember anything for hours afterward. It was past noon when I woke up and all I could think of was getting something to eat. I made some sandwiches from my cooler and after cleaning up decided where I was going to park my car for the best advantage campsite. My bed was in the back of the pickup and all I had to do with it was move the stuff I used for camping and cooking out of the way and get into bed. I knew I could do that later, so I just relaxed rather than getting my camp ready for a couple of days stay at this interesting place.

In the late afternoon I decided to take another trip into the part of the town where houses had once been and attempt to figure out what was the layout of the town and what evidence I could acquire from what was left, of what the town had been like in those few years that it existed. I was sure it had not entirely been abandoned when the mining stopped and would be interested in finding some evidence that life went on there for years past 1917 when mining operations stopped. 

As I walked about I stayed focused on the ground in front of me. In one place I found the remnants of a barbed wire fence and knew I had located something that would give me come clue as to how long people might have lived there. I had gone to a heritage museum in Myton Utah some time before where there was a barbed wire display, so I was certain I could estimate how old the fence was by the type of wire it had and the shape of the barbs.  I looked at the old rusty pieces of the fence that were still there nailed to an old rotted fence post and for sure they were fairly modern barbs that I was looking at. I tried to remember the dates I had seen on the Myton display, but couldn’t recall. I was only sure because of the shape of the barb that the fence must be newer than the year 1917 when the mines went bust in the area.  That would mean that people lived here longer and maybe even into the 1930’s. Who knows?

With that out of the way I continued my journey around town. In one section of town I saw what looked like the fragments of a foundation of a larger than house building. I kicked around in the sand while I followed the buried stones that formed the foundation and soon realized that this was indeed quite a large building. It wasn’t close to the side of the village where I thought the mines had been established, so I ruled out the possibility that it was the mine office. It was just too big to be that, I surmised. The other options in my mind was that it could have been a boarding house for miners or it could be a bar or bar/ house of ill repute combined. The wider side of the building foundation faced Fossil Mountain and I could imagine if this place was a bar that I could see a large window facing that mountain where people could in the winter sit in the dining hall of the bar or the lounge and look on to that beautiful dramatic-looking mountain.

Right then I felt the need to absorb some of the history of this place and decided that I would find a rock and sit down and wait for that inspirational message to reach me. I found the rock, but no message came through the rock or the ground into my brain. But for a brief minute the ringing of my ears stopped and once again I began to hear women’s voices again. This time there were no trees nearby with quaking leaves, nor was there anyone I could see in any direction from where the sounds were coming. I was amazed by then how clear they sounded and wondered since it was a clear crisp day if the sound originating from Delta more than fifty miles away?  I was completely puzzled by this new phenomenon and put an extra effort into concentrating on it rather than analyzing the sound. The sounds finally faded and disappeared and while I thought about them, I wondered what people would think if I told them about these sounds. To me they were real, but to anyone else, I believe they would think it was a factor of my getting old. For a short time after the sounds quit I experienced complete silence, and then the normal ringing of my ears returned. I waited for a while for voices to come back, but they never did.

I had one last thing to do that day that seemed to me to be logical. I wanted to get a bird’s eye view of the town, and the best way I thought I could do it was to hike up the large mountain that was to the north of the town until I was high enough to get a panorama view of the entire area. The location was good from a photographic point of view, so despite the fact that it was getting late in the afternoon by then and the mountain was pretty steep, I dawned my camera and my back pack with some water and headed out. It took a good twenty minutes to get to where I thought I had a good shot of the village and the general area, so I found a place to sit down, scratched out a nest to sit on that would be a smoother than the simple ground thereabout and sat down and began to take my camera out of its bag.

When I was satisfied that that digital shots I had taken of the village were good, I started to get up to return to camp, but again seemed glued to the site for a while and just relaxed and took the hint that was coming from somewhere deep inside me. This time it was different than before. There were no sounds, but a flittering sensation in my head that my brain was working on something important. It didn’t materialize like it might have in the movies or in a book, but it was there and I was feeling it and sensing that something was about to happen. Nothing of great note happened that could have been called dramatic, however. What I began to see in the back of my mind when I would close my eyes was this picture like something seen from the eyes of a man standing here when the town was in full swing. This man was not ordinary, but was rather some person that belonged to the area. I could imagine this man being one of the remnants of the Goshute Indians that lived all through this area in ancient times. This man I was seeing in my mind seemed to be watching the people in the town with their activities and goings and comings. It was truly possible, I thought, that the Goshute Indians  at the time Ibex was in it prime would still be in large numbers in the area and that they would be dispersed all over the West Desert before they were pushed back out of the fertile areas and made to live on government reservations. This man would be an Indian brave dressed in only a loin cloth and likely carrying a spear or bow and arrow. He may have been on a hunting spree when he visited this area and discovered a village of white people living and working there as if they owned the land.

This fresh new vision of what may have been here in Ibex was enough to shake me to the bones. I was feeling like I was being given something out of the past that was real and significant, but I didn’t know what motivated such an unnatural force to give me this information. I had no answers for those heavy questions, so I just surrendered to them and decided to head down to camp. The sun was getting low in the west by then so rather than leave right then I waited some more while I sat on that hill side looking west and seeing what I could see in the far distant south.

To my surprise, at least five miles away to the southwest I could see what I imagined was a sheep camp. I couldn’t make out what was there, but it seemed from this distance that there was one vehicle, a camp trailer of some sort, and maybe some horses staked out near the camp. I saw no sign of the sheep, but seeing the campsite confirmed to me that there were sheep in the area that could have found that little watering hole in the deep canyon and had blazed the trail that I walked on when I came out earlier in the day. I finally gave up my dreaming about this place and headed down the mountain and camp. I just had enough time I figured that I could make my dinner before it got dark and have a lovely time eating the small steak that I had brought along just for this occasion.

The next morning after a wonderful dreamless sleep and relaxation in the comfortable cool spring air, I decided I would leave my campsite for a time and drive over to the canyon leading into Fossil Mountain. After eating my breakfast, I put a few of my things away, took my small cooler with a few goodies and some drinks and was on my way. I wasn’t sure how long I would be so I took a few extra things along that I could easily carry in my back pack along with my prospector’s pick and some plastic bags to carry back any trilobites or other fossils that I might locate on the way up the canyon.

There is no road into the area leading up to the base of Fossil Mountain so I parked my car where the track ended and began the hike up the bottom of the canyon. This was my second time to enter the canyon. A year before I had been there with my kids and enjoyed digging out fossilized snails, and a few small trilobites. We had read in a book somewhere that there was an abundance of these ancient relics, and that was what had motivated us to go there in the first place. This time it was a little different; I was alone, and I had plenty of time to lag along, hike to different places and I had no pressing desire, really, to do any more than explore the canyon as far up into the base of the mountain as I could go. I still had a few treasures at home from my last visit that I hadn’t given away or made into wall hangings.

As I meandered up through the bushes and a rough deer trail that was in the bottom of the canyon. I didn’t pay much attention to the surroundings for the first quarter mile or so. I had been through most of this area and I didn’t really have much interest in it. I was more interested in moving to the upper part of the box canyon to see how far the canyon actually went before it ended in the steep cliffs that formed a horseshoe-shaped ending to the canyon. All along the way I saw wonderful things that interested me. After a while large stones strewed the bottom of the canyon making it so the trail wound around them like a river in a meadow valley. The stones were large and much worn from the weather indicating to me that they had been there for many eons. Most of the stones were also covered on the sides and undersides with lichens of various pastel colors. The stones also were varied colors contrasting with the tan colored sand that dominated the canyon floor. As I got more toward the ending of the canyon, the walking got so hard because of the stones I imagined it would even be harder for a horseman to negotiate these stone monoliths.

When the going became too difficult and I realized I had been hiking for over two hours because of the slow pace I had set for myself, I decided to find a place to rest. There was one of these large stones not far from where I stopped and I noticed it had a tree growing right out of its middle section. On closer inspection, I realized that the rock had a huge crack in it that had filled with earth or that had been caused by the roots of the tree. The tree was what we informally call cedar, but that is really juniper. It was old as the base of the tree was over six inches in diameter and I am sure from the hardness of that particular tree that it had to be over one hundred years old. I wondered at the time if anyone had ever experienced what I was experiencing right then say eighty to one hundred years before when that tree was a very small one.

After examining the tree I walked around to the downhill side of the rock and found a spot that was being shaded by the tree growing out of the rock and sat down on the ground. In minutes after examining all the debris under me from deer or sheep that had spent time in this same place and looking at some small flowers caught between two large stones to my left, I took out the snacks and the drink out of my pack and dug in.

After sitting a while I found I was getting a little sleepy, so I rearranged my position so I would have a back rest and just enjoyed the morning breeze that was blowing up the canyon bottom. I had been in that new spot only a few moments when I was struck by the notion that once again I could hear voices of women. The breeze had caught me off guard once more and I was convinced that that it was not voices I was hearing, but rather the tree leaves. The sounds persisted, however, so since I was not going anywhere anyway I attempted to tune into whatever was being communicated to me and see if I could make anything of it. It was not long after I had first heard voices that they shut down and I was no longer able to hear anything except the ringing in my ears again. During that period while the sounds persisted I had felt strongly that the people I was hearing were laughing and talking and having a good time with each other. I must have fallen into a deep sleep after that because it was around noon when I woke and looked at my watch, and realized I had been there for over one hour.

I gave a shot once again at attempting to understand what was happening in my mind with these voices, but nothing came of it so I decided to get up from my sitting place and start back down the canyon. On the hike up to the front of the canyon I had not left the bottom of it. I felt like it was now time to do a little hiking on the side hills on the way down and see what I could find. It was not until I found a few fossilized shell keepers that I dug out of the rocks and placed into my back pack side pocket that I realized I was getting quite into it and was enjoying the hike back down. Much later after finally making my way back to my truck, I rested there a short time and then returned to my campsite at Ibex town site.

By the end of the second day I had trekked through the village several more times and gone different places looking for evidence of the old mine site. I had also taken a ride to the west side of Fossil Mountain and explored a few rough trails that basically went nowhere. Realizing that I didn’t have much more to do, I broke camp and was going to go back through Delta on the way home, but instead, after looking at my maps, I decided to go south to State Highway going east that fed into Milford. I had never been to Milford before, so I decided to just go and see where the trails took me. My map was not very detailed so I was not sure how far it was to the highway or exactly which directions the trails would take me.

The trails got rougher and rougher as I went farther south, and soon I was going over a small mountain pass that I had not anticipated from the map would be between me and the paved highway. After cutting through the pass going over this mountain, the road took a surprising shift to the east for quite a spell before it came to another mountain that the road was passing by rather than going over. Just before I went around the small mountain, I noticed on the hillside above me a quarry with a crude sign just at the gate of a broken-down fence that once cordoned the area off. The sign read “Zebra Rock Quarry” and much to my surprise as I entered the well excavated area, all the large stones everywhere and the face of the quarry was adorned with beautiful black striped white rocks like I had never seen before. I knew I was on private ground, but with the condition of the fence that had once kept the place private, I was sure that no one would care if I took some of the rocks home with me. In a few minutes of hard labor, I had several of the more easily acquired large stones in the back of my truck and was again on the road heading generally south east around the mountain. I saw some interesting country as the trail continued to go in a southeasterly direction. Finally on one side of me was a huge dry lake bed that extended for miles to the north and south. The trail I was on split as it came to the lake and followed the lake shore in both directions. I took the south route.

Another five or seven miles of this dirt road put me on the paved highway that led into the mountains to the east and paralleled a railroad track that seemed to be a very often used one. The side trip south and then east to Milford had taken my quite far out of the way to get home and I had not eaten since the snack I had up the canyon into Fossil Mountain, so when I got to Milford, to my surprise a railroad switching area, I found the first restaurant that was open and stopped to have a late lunch. It was almost midnight before I arrived home that day. I had traveled almost the entire day and driven a total of about four hundred miles.

A couple of days later after coming home from this strange trip to Ibex and Fossil Mountain I started a book that I named, Those Mountains There Before Me. I didn’t know where it was going when I first began the book, but as the story developed, it became a tale about a man in his seventy’s who went to a ghost town called Ibex near Fossil Mountain and found there a treasure that he took home to his family and eventually found the family to which it rightly belonged. This man who was the main character in the book had dreams and visions as he visited Ibex and Fossil Mountain that eventually led him to the buried treasure that was left there by some women prostitutes who had worked in the town as entertainers for the miners. It was an exciting book to write that pleased me much, since the part of the inspiration that fostered the novel was in actuality the trip I made myself there just a few days before I started writing the book. The other important part of the inspiration came from a poem I had written about the mountains some years before, called “Those Mountains There Before Me,” repeated here for this record:

     THOSE MOUNTAINS THERE BEFORE ME

There before me is this specter,

That ageless monolith

Whose tops cast o'er with snow

Speaks loudly in its noble voice.

I said before when I was far away

They were not so grand.

Yet when I stand beneath their feet,

I'm awed and humbled, slow to speak.

They are only shadows now

As I dream away this night.

But they are still there

Relentless in their power over me.

They stand rigid, now it's winter.

They hold their place, frozen as it were.

In defiance I'm compelled to say,

But wait 'till summer's warmth, you'll see,

The wind will blow you free.

Now where does that leave me

Hidden in my man-made show;

Safe behind my winter's cover am I like they;

So strong now winter's here?

So safe, I stand in cold discomfort.

But what will come of me when wind does blow

And summer comes to share my time?

What will come of me whose strength shows up

With season's cause, rebellious,

Stubborn as I'll be?

Will summer come and warm my snow?

And when this hew

Has drawn its moisture far away

In cloudless skies,

Will I be there as sands drift by?

Bit by bit their gains eroding,

Cutting deep into my sculptured base

Until such time that all still standing

Is but that slender, aging man.

So by and by we both are there,

Changed somewhat by winds of day

And summer's warming breath

From whence there's no escape.

We are only changed but slightly,

Waiting yet another winter to come by,

Remaining for its safety

Underneath a mantle, frozen firm.

And when that one passes yet another day

We'll still be there seeming ageless as one

Views from far away.

But here up close the timeless truth is known.

It's just another day and time will wear away

A tiny portion of what's there,

Of all that's there, and winds will take them

Oh, so far away.

        January 25, 1991

Chapter 7 – Unforgotten Trips to Farm Creek

I once said that the journey of a day and the passing of a night will bring us new experiences and joys like we have never felt should we be ready to accept what comes and lessons learned from it. This is a story about many journeys to a place that started for my ancestors in the late 1800’s and continues for me and my family to this day. It’s a story about a mountain and a canyon far out in the West Desert of Utah. Over the years I have written much about this place and in one particular document, Stories of the West Desert of Utah, that I wrote in the early 1990’s, I chronicle much of what I knew then and what I had heard about that place. This chapter about Farm Creek, a part of this place in the desert, takes some of the seasons of my life where I enjoyed visiting there over the years with family and friends

Farm Creek Canyon is a little known long, narrow canyon making its way up between thick brush, fallen trees and huge boulders of rotting granite rock that begins at the base of Haystack Mountain in the Trout Creek Mountain Range that more or less defines much of the border between Utah and Nevada. Farm Creek is a small, cold water stream that runs all year and originates from a small glacier covered by large pine trees that is cradled under the sheer walls of a cliff rising up over eleven thousand feet on the north side of Haystack Mountain. The mountain itself can be seen from many places in the West Desert as a large rounded baron white granite rock that juts far above the other many peaks on that range of mountains known under several other names that extends from the northern reaches of Utah to about where U.S. Highway 50 crosses into Nevada from Utah.

I first heard about Farm Creek Canyon from my mother who spoke many times of the trips she and her family made there in the early days of her life while she lived in Callao Utah. Callao is located about eight miles to the east and a little north from the mouth of the canyon. She would often tell about outings the families from Callao would have there almost every year. And she also told about parties that were held occasionally with families that got together there from all along the one hundred mile long Snake Valley that reaches from Gold Hill Utah all the way to Baker Nevada. This was a place where families met other families and children met other children that may in some future time be their husbands or wives. It was a place of many games and music and much good food. It was a time when people from these years gone by would drive their horses and buggies for days to be together and where the Kearney Brothers (Mom’s father and uncles) would entertain with their instruments and create frolic in their stories and jokes.

Mother also told me stories about her one-time adventure as a young teenager when her father finally consented through the persuasion of her Uncle Tom and Aunt Ella to accompany a group of families to their yearly trek to the headwaters of Farm Creek at the base of Haystack Mountain where they gathered wood for winter and brought it down from the mountain.  Her Uncle Tom had built a cabin in what they named The Basin at the foot of the Haystack Mountain cliffs that he used many summers while he herded cattle throughout the Basin and lived there for the summer months. That cabin still exists as a legacy of those forgotten years.

My first trip to Farm Creek Canyon was with a group of young men (five of us) who worked together at the Utah Copper Bingham Mine. We had driven out to the West Desert to pick up topaz near Topaz Mountain and after a day of that had gotten bored and decided on my suggestion continue west on the desert roads another fifty or so miles to Callao where mother had grown up and then see if we could get to this canyon that mother had talked about so many time. Everyone liked the idea so sometime in the morning or early afternoon, we headed that way. We were in a car that was not suited to desert and off road travel, but we didn’t care. The driver and owner of the old flatbed truck, Dean Frandsen, just took it as it was and we all hoped for the best. The roads through Callao and down the Overland Trail to the turnoff to Farm Creek were graded gravel with many washboard sections, but the road two more miles up to the entrance to the canyon was something else. Used by farmers and ranchers, it was pretty bad and the old truck (I believe it may have been a 1946 Ford) was not built for that kind of road. Several times we all had to get out and push the truck through sand or pick up and move rocks out of the road to save the oil pan. But we finally made it and found a very nice place to camp.

I don’t remember a lot about that trip, but I do remember that one of the fellows in our group, Ted Martin, was always talking about snakes and his fear of them and wanted to know how many we could expect to see in this canyon. We all made up great snake stories to tell Ted since he was also very gullible. That night when we bedded down on a large tarp side by side in the open air in our sleeping bags, Ted chose the middle and laid awake most of the night with his pistol under his pillow just in case a snake came by as we had told him they might. He reported to us the next morning that he had heard several snakes crawling by our bags and had even gotten up once or twice to see if any of them had crawled into his bag while he tried to sleep. We had of course told him that rattle snakes, especially are very active at night and tend to look for warm places to crawl into since they are cold blooded animals and need warmth to survive.

The second or third trips to this area and to Farm Creek were made with my children. Kara has especially been the one in the family who wanted to know about family things and couldn’t wait when she was about seventeen or eighteen to venture out to this area with me to see where my mother grew up. On that trip we in a couple of her friends, Wyatt Osgood and someone else whose name I do not remember. The kids loved the place since it is a place of total adventure. In the two or three days that we stayed there we climbed rocks and did some rappelling on the cliffs, we ventured up the canyon until we came to the place where the canyon becomes boxed in with cliffs on all three sides, and we fished for the tiny trout that live in the creek; but mostly we laid around a lot. There’s no place in Utah like this unique canyon for its abundance of wildlife, for the beauty of its surroundings and the quiet solitude of knowing you are alone and far from everyone. I’ve always enjoyed the place for those and may other reasons, and since that one time visit, there have been few if any years when someone in the family has missed seeing the place for the first time or over again.

On the second visit I made with Kara and her friends (I think it was the very next year after our first one; I know it was March of 1991), I spent a lot of time alone and away from the kids writing in my journal, composing poetry and hiking alone. There was a cliff to the south of the camp that I wanted to climb, so I ventured one or more routes attempting to get to the top and never made it, but the effort paid off for me in a number of ways. I learned a lot about the power of surrender in the face of exceeded expectations and limitation; and I wrote two of the best poems I have written after I returned from the hike. Actually I made it almost to the top on two attempts at different routes, but that last fifty vertical feet was more than I had to give it.

Years later and many more yearly trips to the area with my kids, I was working with and in a relationship with a woman, Pat Matthews, who is a practicing clairvoyant in Salt Lake were she has clients who come to her for “readings” about their life and problems.  Pat and I had planned a trip to Farm Creek after she heard some of my stories about the place, so on the designated weekend we traveled there. Pat was an interesting and dynamic woman, like none other I have ever known, and it was a joy to be with her anytime. She was funny at times, thoughtful others and had some great stories of her own about life, about her clients, and about her many challenges in life. On this trip we camped in the old primitive BLM camp ground that has one table and nothing else. We got there in early evening, had some dinner, took a little hike up into the canyon and set up our camp for our night’s rest.

She was especially intrigued by some of the impressions she had on this hike and told me that there were memories there from the Indians who once used this canyon for a place of refuge. I asked her how she knew that, and she said she would show me something and that I should follow her. I was puzzled by her determination to show me “something” and her excitement about it. There was a side canyon that led off the main canyon that was quite large and when she got by this place, she said, “It’s nearby here what we have to look at.” Again I followed Pat up this draw and in a few moments we were standing in front of a large flat brownish colored rock face that had distinct hieroglyphs written all over it. It was an amazing find, and somehow some of the memories that Pat spoke of were communicated to her that day. I was only mildly surprised as in earlier conversations I had enjoyed with Pat she had told me that she had grown up in Western Montana under the care of two Native American Indian women who were sisters of her mother. Under their tutelage she had learned the skills and had qualified as a Shaman by the time she was eighteen years old and left Montana to live in Utah.

When it got dark we made up a fire and for the rest of the evening well into early morning we talked about almost every subject anyone would think of talking about. It was a great time we had by the fire that night and she had been most willing to answer all the questions I had about clairvoyance and how it worked in her life and her business.  I was especially fascinated when she told me how difficult it had been for her when she always knew ahead of time what her children were thinking, what they were getting for her for Christmas and birthdays and what problems they were having in their separate lives.  When we bedded down in our sleeping bags that morning, both of us were asleep in minutes.

The next day we played all day in the rocky surroundings and in the creek. She took me to several more places where Indians had recorded their histories and memories. We hiked to the end of the trail up the canyon bottom and spent some time bathing our feet in a pond of ice cold water that pooled in a washed out rock that was shaped like a basin. On the way home the afternoon of that second day there we were talking about the great experience we had when Pat made a simple statement that we should plan this kind of an outing again sometime, but in another place. I was up for the idea and volunteered that I would come up with something and call her in a couple of weeks. She agreed and we continued on our way home arriving in the early evening.

About two weeks after our weekend at Farm Creek I was on my way to Ogden from home in Salt Lake when it occurred to me that I had not thought about or made any plans about Pat’s and my next outing together. So while I was driving along, I thought about some options, being fully aware that whatever I came up with had to be creative and very special or unusual. I felt like whatever I came up with had to be very unique since Pat had done almost everything one would ever imagine doing in the out of doors. Finally just as I was entering Ogden area the thought came to me that I would surprise her and take her to a place I was sure she had not seen before and would make her breakfast as the sun came up in the east. The place I had in mind was the mountain loop road that went from Payson Utah up to the back side of Mount Nebo and along a skyline drive that circled around the mountain and came back into Nephi about thirty miles to the south. I would plan to pick her up early in the morning before it got light. I would blindfold her before we took off, and then let her be blindfolded until we reached our destination where I would sit her down on one of the benches provided at one of the lookout points along the drive where we could see the sun come up in the east. After that I would fix her breakfast and we would enjoy the morning there before driving the rest of the route back to Interstate 15 at Nephi.

So when I arrived at the place where I was working that day in Downtown Ogden, I called her right away to reach her before she opened up her office for business. When she answered, before I had said one word, she addressed me by saying, “Hi Jack, I was expecting your call this morning.” I was amazed that she knew that I would be calling her that morning and wouldn’t have known it was me by any number or call letters on the phone. She just knew. I said hi to her and told her I was calling to close the loop on our conversation of two weeks prior. She said she knew that already and knew that was what I was calling about. I went on to tell her I had come up with a surprise activity that I was sure she had never experienced before and would enjoy. “Let me guess,” she said quickly. “You are planning to take me to the top of some mountain far away. While there we are going to watch a sunrise, and then we are going to eat some breakfast and take the long way back home.” I was astonished at the accuracy of her guess. In fact, she was right on, except that she said she didn’t know quite what mountain top we were going to.  I asked her how she knew all this and she said that when she gets to know someone well, she has a special sense of what they are about and how their life is stacking up. She can also come up with things that other person is thinking if it is especially about her. After hearing that I simply told her the day we would be going and that I would not be blindfolding her, and that she could see the mountain we were going to visit. I held back telling her that it was Mount Nebo, but guessed she already knew what I was thinking about by then. She never revealed to me if she ever knew where we were going, and when we went there and could see Mount Nebo from the back side, she seemed surprised when I told her the name of the place. We had a wonderful morning and early afternoon driving back from our excursion that day. 

I never saw much of Pat after that. The following winter she had a terrible accident while skiing and was hospitalized for quite a long spell. Afterward she went into deep depression over the accident when medical bills almost put her into bankruptcy and she lost several law suits through the courts when she tried to sue the drunken attorney who had run into her on the ski slopes that day. Later on after a year or so while her business went down and her money was further depleted, Pat got a terrible sickness from a leaking breast implant that put her down for another year or more. During all that period she wanted little to do with her friends and stuck close to her two children who took care of her all that time. When I finally caught up to her and she was back on her feet, Pat and I had another time together for an evening, had dinner and talked for hours at her home. I saw her a couple more times after that, but then we both went our ways and I haven’t seen her for years now.

A second woman I took to Farm Creek either before or after my time there with Pat Matthews I went there with Joan Burdett. Joan and I have been friends since the mid 1980’s, going places, fishing and hiking together and hanging out summer after summer while fishing and camping. Joan had never been to the West Desert so on one of my yearly pilgrimages I was planning I invited her to come along. We did the normal things I was used to doing when I took someone to that place. We stopped over in Simpson Springs, I told my many times told story about my Grandfather Williams’ experience at Table Mountain south of Simpson Springs, we stopped along the way to look at desert flowers and look at old mine dumps, and even drove up to the ghost town of Fish Springs Mine. Callao was also on the docket before we made it to Farm Creek where we made our camp for the weekend.

I had my old Land Cruiser then, so after doing the normal things like hike into the end of the trail at Farm Creek and enjoy the water coming off the rock cliff, we took a drive out of the canyon and ventured up over the mountain following a very steep jeep trail that was by far the most adventurous route I had ever taken with my Cruiser. It was not only steep, but in some places muddy and vary dangerous with drop-offs on both sides and places where even in the lowest gear of that very powerful automobile, it was tough going.

I had told Joan about the Basin and what Mother had told me about the family’s experiences of bringing wood out of the area and about a load that slipped and almost killed my mother’s Aunt Emma. That was just something that I told Joan, but when we were actually precariously hanging side saddle in the car along this same route Mother had taken seventy or more years before, it made it even more frightening to Joan an indeed to me too. That mountain is a very lonely place and it was obvious that very few people went that way to the Basin above Farm Creek. The thoughts of tipping a car over or breaking down in a place like that were totally frightening.

Once we entered the place, however, the going was very good and the Basin itself was beautiful and well worth the trip there. First it opened up into a valley with the beautiful cliffs of Haystack Mountain on the left and a wooded area that went up to a rounded ridge on the right. The road went steeply up out of this first basin, and then as it went over a swale, there was another more beautiful basin where my mother’s Uncle Tom’s cabin was still sitting off to the left, literally under the shade of the sheer cliffs that were the north side of Haystack Mountain.

Joan and I first went over to the cabin and I told her about the story Mother had told me that I recorded as one of the chapters in my book, Stories from the West Desert of Utah. It was terribly exciting seeing the old cabin and recalling how Mom and her aunt sat on the hillside one evening as her aunt told my mom the sad story about my grandmother’s ill health. This was the first time Mother had heard the full story that eventually caused her father to move to Salt Lake where his wife could get good medical treatment. It was also interesting to know the place where Mom experienced her first encounter with a boy that she had a crush on who was the son of one of the other families that came on the wood-gathering quest.

To finish off our own quest of the area that fed water into Farm Creek, Joan and I ventured on up through the Basin going west until the road ended at the top of a ridge overlooking the large deep canyon to the north of us that was parallel to Farm Creek Canyon. This upper part of the canyon, like Farm Creek was not accessible from Snake Valley as we could see clearly there was no road in the bottom and the canyon was pinched off by a narrow series of cliffs that would prohibit any traffic from coming up the canyon to its top. We were not sure how anyone could even get into that canyon like we had from the basin above Farm Creek. Perhaps, we agreed, the road we were on was the nearest place where anyone with a vehicle to get to this area.

It was near the end of this road and to the left of us hidden by large pine trees that we saw the reason the water in Farm Creek was so cold. There in shade of the trees was a large glacier partially hidden by a rock fall from the mountain and cliffs to the west. No wonder it never melted back in there. The ice was almost totally covered with this large rock pile; plus it was in the shade of trees that must have been at least a hundred years old.

Over the next few years Joan and I made several more trips to Farm Creek and on one other occasion with some of the children with me, I made another trip with them into the Basin in my old Land Cruiser.

On another interesting occasion of visiting Farm Creek Canyon, I went there with a young woman who had heard me talk about the place and begged me to take her there. We went and camped out for two days having a wonderful time walking and hiking around and over the rocks that were so interesting to see and climb on. During this trip the woman was talking constantly about her problems and especially about an issue that she had come to recognize after working with my company, Ultimate Adventure Inc. where we had used her as a Contract Facilitator a few times. Her issue was one of trust—especially of men. During our stay there she started talking about this and I took the challenge without her knowing it to test her level of trust and see what the woman was really made of.

To set up this secret exercise with her, I suggested that we hike up the middle of the canyon to the water fall that was where the trail stopped. I told her about the pond and the water fall and said that it would be a good place to go for a short, but interesting hike. The trail going into this area as mentioned before is littered with broken and downed trees and in several areas the only way to continue up the canyon is to cross the creek and sometimes crawl on hands and knees to get under bushes blocking the way. This occurs several times if one is to make it to the end of the trail and see the waterfall. We hiked on up that trail and finally got to the falls and for a short time sat around the pond soaking our bare feet and enjoying the ambience of the place. I was soon hearing what I had expected to hear from her as we sat there talking. She wanted to continue telling me about her trust issues. I listened, but had in mind all the time the exercise I would spring on her. Finally my time came and I took out a bandana I had in my pocket and put it over my eyes tying it as tight as I could get it so I was completely blinded. And then I got up offered her my hand and told her I wanted her to take me back to camp while I was blindfolded. I knew this would take her trust issue to the max and surmised correctly that the issue was about her, not anyone else. In setting up the initiative, I told her that I completely trusted her to get me down safely and challenged her to just do her best and go along with me. She was very reluctant to do this and kept on for some time arguing with me that she wasn’t strong enough to do that, and what if I fell and broke a leg, or what if she couldn’t help me down the mountain because I was more than double her size. I knew from her work with us on the ropes course, however, that she was very strong for her size and I also knew how confident she was with her physical skills. It was just her mental voices that were holding her back from taking the challenge.

After some time of this bantering back and forth, I just stood up and started down the mountain on my own, still blindfolded. In seconds when she saw me stumbling and almost falling into the creek, she realized that I was very serious about this and ran up to me, grabbing my arm and began to take me down the creek side. It was amazing how well it went and how confident she was when she realized that I trusted her completely and it was up to her to know that the exercise was all about her trusting herself, not about me trusting her. It was a wonderful hour that it took us to make it back to the camp and when we got there, I was walking with another woman, almost. She had grown a foot taller and was much stronger than before we left to go. I continued to know and see this woman for a year or more before she went to Alaska to go to school. Every time we met or talked she mentioned to me how much she had grown and learned from her work with us in the ropes course and especially our trip to Farm Creek.

It’s now been several years since I visited Farm Creek, but my kids are continuing the custom. While I was in residence in Mozambique (from February to June of 2008) two of my children, Matt and Kara and their families ventured out that way staying one night in Farm Creek and then going on south eventually coming to the small cave that has warm water spewing from it. The last leg of their long journey took them to Baker Nevada to Lehman’s cave and the area where my mother’s mother was born, and where my great grandfather homesteaded in the late 1800’s. This was to be their children’s first trip to the place, and I wonder if they too will continue the tradition when they are adults. I may or may not be able to fit a trip in to that area this year, but I am sure I will make it again several times before I am gone. There’s a tradition to keep up and I am strongly aware of it. As it has turned out Kara and her family have indeed kept the tradition going to travel to Farm Creek and thereabouts almost every years that she and her husband have been married. I suppose it will continue with their children also. We shall see.

Chapter 8 – Experience in Haiti, February/March 2010

As soon as I saw this five year old Haitian girl and took her hand in mine, I knew I was in the right place doing the right thing. This is something I’ve noticed over the years; that there are some people in this world (adults and children) with whom I am immediately drawn to and feel like I know from the moment I see them.

This girl was one of those people. She only had to take my hand and I knew her and knew that for some reason she had captured my heart. I had been invited to Haiti and would stay there for a month on invitation from Rebecca Maesato, principal and founder of the Foundation for Children in Need (http://www.childreninneed.us ), to assist in rebuilding an orphanage that had been ravaged by the January 12 Haiti earthquake.

This child was one of many orphans and displaced children I had seen that morning. There are about fifty children in the facility called Infants of Jesus Orphanage located near the center of the earthquake ravaged city of Port Au Prince, Haiti. Most of the children are orphans, but some of them are children who had been deposited there by one or more parents who were not able to take care of them for one reason or another. Many of the children crowded around me as I approached them, as they did the others who were with me on this expedition. Only two other children connected with me like this little child who came and took my hand.

I would learn later that her name was Sufferance (quite an appropriate, but strange name for this helpless child). I never learned her last name or much of anything else about her except that she was very shy, and that she had no parents. Another girl named Chantiel later connected with me much in the same way as Sufferance and as I got to know here I learned that she wanted to go to school and wondered if there was any way I could help her. She was nine years old, and had no parents either.

It was striking to me over the next month while I visited and revisited the orphanage day after day how I learned to love these children and the orphanage staff. Every time I came there I could be sure those two would seek me out, and that if that didn’t happen in the first few minutes of my visit I would be looking for them. But in one way or another, on every visit, they and I connected.

Neither Sufferance nor Chantiel spoke English, nor did I speak any of their languages (they spoke French and Creole), but we were still able to communicate. If I was sitting down I could be sure that one or the other would be sitting on my lap sooner or later jabbering to me while I talked to her. It didn’t matter at all that neither of us understood each other, we were still communicating and getting to know each other. It was only through an interpreter that I learned their ages and the things they told me about their families, being lonely and wanting to be able to go to school. After I had been there a few days a little three-year old boy joined forces with me and continually sought me out when I was in the orphanage. His connection with me was not as strong as it was with the girls, but I enjoyed his company and his need for me just as much. As the construction project was finishing, I took time to show some of the older boys how to use scrap wire to make wire toys like I had seen in Africa. On one occasion, some of these same boys taught me how to make the simple kites they make in Haiti, while I showed them how to build a U.S. type diamond-shaped kite and a box kite. As we had a good March wind that day I flew the kites with the boys and enjoyed being a kid again.

There’s a strong and luxuriant power in what I had with these children in the same way that I have had in similar situations with other people over the years. I have heard descriptions of such phenomena like “aura,” “soul mate,” and such, and I am sure at some level they are accurate, but to me it is more than those simple descriptions. It goes further than that. It is like I am feeling full; that there is some unearthly power that is being manifest that is pulling us together and bringing this connection about. I see no value, however, in attempting to analyze this special feeling. It’s all right with me that it exists and that the gift is mine to enjoy. For me it is something tangible that I can believe in, hold on to, and feel within myself. I know too, that in this receiving like the connection I felt with these three children, there is an element of giving since I could see the happiness in their actions and in their eyes.

All this had become possible because of a dear friend of mine, Leah Hollinger, whom I had come to know in 2004 in Ethiopia. We worked together for four months on a humanitarian project as Fellows for the NGO Ascend Alliance. On about February 3rd of this year, I received a Face Book message from Leah which I quote: “I know this is very short notice, but would you be able to travel to Haiti with my mom for a week, leaving this [next] Monday?” That Monday was only four days away. After reading a little more of the details of this message I knew it was something I had to do and wanted to do as well. I didn’t leave exactly on that Monday, but I was on my way to Haiti the following week on the 15^th. On this trip to Haiti, which lasted almost exactly one month instead of the initial proposed one week, I traveled with Leah’s mom, Rebecca Maesato, with whom I would also be working. Among other things the major focus on the project was to rebuild a wall that had fallen down that surrounded the orphanage. 

Like most people know by now, Port Au Prince Haiti was hit by a massive earthquake on January 12, 2010 which killed over two hundred thousand people and left the city in ruins, uprooting hundreds of thousands of people who had to live in tent cities and hovels made from tin, tarpaulins and any other materials they could find to make shelters. 

My first week in the city involved getting acquainted with the project at hand, calculating the equipment and supply needs, and beginning the purchase of some of the critical supplies we would need to start the project. That week was a nightmare of movement about the city, attempting to find vendors that could supply and deliver the materials and supplies and finding ways to haul those supplies to the orphanage. We had to have the materials on site by the next Saturday, only four days from when I got there, so that the masons and general contractors that were coming from the U.S. would be able to start without delay.

As I had expected, getting quality concrete block, washed sand and graded clean gravel was an extreme problem. Most construction throughout the city, I found to my chagrin, was done with inferior materials and incidentally, in my opinion, was a major factor in the destruction of many of the buildings and walls in the city. Everywhere I looked I could see from the rubble that lay on the ground from commercial and residential properties that low quality materials were used in the construction. After many tries, however, I was able to get most of the material I wanted in the quality standard I had hoped for. One glaring example that I was never able to resolve, was the fact that I could not find any quicklime, or calcium oxide that could be mixed with the cement and sand to make proper lime mortar for the blocks. So the masons we had come from the States were continually frustrated because the mortar mix they were able to make would not stick to the bricks. As a result, the entire wall was made with a modified method of laying the blocks with no mortar in the vertical joint. They did partially mitigate that problem by laying vertical and horizontal rebar in the block courses to strengthen the wall.

There were still things to buy and to be delivered when the ten masons and general contractors arrived. Much of the block had been purchased but not delivered—same with sand and gravel. Not all the cement we needed was on site and the first day we still did not have a concrete mixer. We found a neighbor who had one, however, and hired the unit he had along with an operator that was required by him. On the second day the men were on board, one of them went to the Caterpillar dealer in the city and rented a backhoe so that the debris from the wall and fallen buildings could be gathered up and moved to a giant pile. The orphanage director wanted to keep the debris so that it could be used for fill in a low spot in the two-acre plot that on which the orphanage was built.

The men worked hard throughout the week enlisting the help of some local masons and laborers. By a chance while we were buying some materials at one of the hardware stores we ran into a contingent of U.S. Army people. After talking to them briefly, we learned that they were not very busy and would like to come to the orphanage to work with our people if that were possible. We set up a meeting on site with them for the following Wednesday. They came and brought their commanding officer who approved the Army’s participation and the group came back in force with about twenty people two days later. They loved being there, worked hard on the cleanup and building project and spent a lot of time with the children.

I must mention that our U.S. masons and general contractors spent all of their spare time holding and playing with the children in the orphanage. Many cried when they had to leave when their work was done. In that short week that they were on site they did an amazing lot of work, but they also developed some very special bonds with the children. The Army people came back two more times, each time spending time with the children, handing out food and clothing and other supplies and giving the children the hugs and love they so desperately needed.

During that second week we were surprised to see other NGO groups come to the orphanage handing out food and other supplies to the orphans. On one of the days a small contingent of Navy people and Embassy officers from Brazil came to the site with a truck load of food and ten large tents that they set up for the children. That was an awfully nice gesture on their part since one of the critical needs of the orphanage, since several of their sleeping quarters had been destroyed in the quake, was to have some place where the children would not have to sleep on the ground in the open or under tarpaulins. The Brazilians also brought several dozen foam mattresses that could be used in the new tents.

My third and fourth weeks in the city entailed working with Becky to get the guest house that she had rented ready for an oncoming expedition of ten women and one man. They arrived the day after the men from U.S. left, so we were very busy getting the basics done like purchasing food, chairs and foam cushions for the visitors. We got most of what we needed, but there were several things around the big house that needed to be done. Namely there were tables that needed to be built and shelves attached to walls. Outside we had to buy more batteries for the inverter system and purchase a good generator. For the kitchen there was a stove, refrigerator and freezer that Becky purchased the first day that the group arrived. I was mostly involved in the building operations with new tools that the women brought from the States, so I didn’t spend much time with them. But as it had been the first two weeks, transportation around the city was the most nagging issue and purchasing what we needed for the house and feeding the volunteers was about second on the list.

There are many more things I could say about the logistics of my trip to Haiti, but what I came back with was to me more important. While there I had a good look at that power of these small children we saw in three of the orphanages we visited. Every time I went to one of these places I got the strangest feeling that I was among god-like people who almost glowed with some strange force that touched me inside. It was more than hearing their sad stories and the reasons they were in the orphanage. It was more than giving them the hugs and love that they so badly needed. It seemed to me that when I was in their presence I was with them inside in a place that gave me strength and nurtured my soul. I was touched by these children of many ages, including the three twenty-some year old boys that were part of the contingent that Becky had brought off the streets many years ago who accompanied us on all of our work and travels throughout the city. I came away from Haiti on the 15^th of March 2010 a different person than what I was when I arrived. I don’t suppose that I will ever understand the full nature of that experience, and I don’t really care. It was enough just recognizing it as another season of my life worth recording.