“So we see the same scenery twice?”
“It looks better going out.”
“Oh ranger, do you live in that little housetrailer down there?”
“Yes madam, part of the time. Mostly I live out of it.”
“Are you married?”
“Not seriously.”
“You must get awfully lonesome way out here.”
“No, I have good company.”
“Your wife?”
“No, myself.” (They laugh; they all think I’m kidding.)
“Well what do you do for amusement?”
“Talk with the tourists.” (General laughter.)
“Don’t you even have a TV?”
“TV? Listen lady… if I saw a TV out here I’d get out my cannon and shoot it like I would a mad dog, right in the eye.”
“Goodness! Why do you say that?”
“What’s the principle of the TV, madam?”
“Goodness, I don’t know.”
“The vacuum tube, madam. And do you know what happens if you stick your head in a vacuum tube?”
“If you stick your head…?”
“I’ll tell you:
“Hey ole buddy, how far from here to Lubbock?”
“Where’s Lubbock, sir?”
“Texas, ole buddy. Lubbock, Texas.”
“Well sir, I don’t know exactly how far that is but I’d guess it’s not nearly far enough.”
“Any dangerous animals out here, ranger?”
“Just tourists.” (Laughter; tell the truth, they never believe you.)
“Where you keep these here Arches anyway?”
“What arches? All I see around here are fallen arches.”
“Does it ever rain in this country, ranger?”
“I don’t know, madam, I’ve only been here eleven years.”
“Well you said yesterday it wasn’t going to rain and it did rain.”
“Did I? Well, that shows you can’t ever trust the weather.”
“You work out here all year round?”
“No sir, just for the summer.”
“What do you do in the winter?”
“I rest.”
“How much do you get paid for this kind of work?”
“Too much. But I give part of it back April 15th.”
And then, after a brief and deadly dull lecture on the geology of the Arches, I send them on to the campgrounds and picnic grounds—“Be sure to let me know if you get lost”—relieved, happy and laughing. It’s a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true—nobody will ever take you seriously.
In the evening, about suppertime, feeling somewhat guilty and contrite—for they are, most of them, really good people and not actually as simple-minded as they pretend to encourage me to pretend us all to be—I visit them again around the fires and picnic tables, help them eat their pickles and drink their beer, and make perhaps a trace of contact by revealing that I, too, like most of them, come from that lost village back in the hills, am also exiled, a displaced person, an internal emigrant in this new America of concrete and iron which none of us can quite understand or accept or wholly love. I may also, if I am lucky, find one or two or three with whom I can share a little more—those rumors from the underground where whatever hope we still have must be found.
Among the visitors on this last big weekend are many Moabites and other native Utahns: the Mormons, the Latter-Day Saints. Some of my liberalized friends regard the LDS with disdain; they see in the Church only a bastion of sectarian foolishness and political reaction and in its adherents a voting bloc of Know-Nothings, racially prejudiced, religiously bigoted, opposed alike to the graduated income tax, the United Nations, urban renewal, foreign aid, legislative reapportionment, public welfare, Medicare and even free lunches for schoolchildren— actually or potentially a rabble of John Birchers.
What can you expect, they ask, of a sect which gave Utah a governor like J. Bracken Lee and Eisenhower a secretary of agriculture like Ezra T. Benson? Which denies full church membership to Negroes because they are believed to be the outcast sons of Ham? Whose patron saint was an angel called Moroni? Whose founding father
