On the Back Roads (21 page)

Sunlight now streaking through the trees, still a chill in the air, the band began playing and rolling through the streets of Enterprise as it has on this day for ninety years. In the beginning, the band played from a horse-drawn wagon. Now it's the same wagon pulled by a Ford truck.

“People used to sleep on their lawns so they could wake up to our music. Sometimes the lady of the house would bring out hot chocolate or lemonade,” LaRae Pollock recalled. A resident of Enterprise for sixty-seven years, she has played guitar with the band since 1943. “We always play the same songs. We could learn new ones, I guess, but people would com plain.”

About seven-thirty the band turned the corner off Main Street playing “Camp Town Races.” The truck pulled up to the curb and stopped. But the band kept on playing to the end of the song. Just for Rusty and me, I guess.

Rusty showed her appreciation with her usual tail wag that begins at her neck and works back. But Rusty was not altogether overjoyed when we all took off without her, walking across the square. That was where the aroma of frying bacon was coming from. This was no coach-class breakfast sizzling and popping on two, four-foot grills. About fifty people waited in line, carrying on as if at a family reunion.

Visiting around, I discovered that everyone was connected to Enterprise in some way. As usual, I was an oddity. In horse country, my white Reeboks stood out.

“Come on, eat with us!” somebody shouted.

The parade came next. Among the curios towed down Main Street was a weathered, wooden building: Utah's oldest tithing warehouse. “It was used in the olden days to store food,” Mayor Merrill Staheli told me. “Someday it will be in the town park, when we get one.”

The Afternoon was busy with foot races and pie-eating contests for the kids. And there were a lot of kids. Obviously, this is no retirement community.

By late afternoon, dust was rising from the rodeo grounds at the edge of town. The rodeo arena was half circled with trucks, campers, and horse vans. Contestants pinned numbered cards to their shirts, having paid their two-dollar entry fees. Riders exercised their horses and looked over the competition. Although a tank truck was spraying water on the grounds, a haze still hung in the air.

Layne Gubler killed time honing his roping skills on a set of dummy horns. Repeatedly, he threw his lariat over the horns and yanked it taut. He never missed. “Like riding a bicycle,” he said. “Ya never forget how.”

In most of Utah and other Western states, learning rodeo skills is as much a part of the public school system as learning to play football or baseball. Of course, this sport requires a larger investment than a baseball glove, but there was no shortage of horses here. In most cases, one horse fits all. Incidentally, Enterprise High School has no football team, but it's a significant competitor in rodeo.

Steve and Janet Staheli's four children are all rodeo competitors, two of them since the age of five. “It's no more dangerous than whatever else kids do. It takes training and practice. With that comes confidence, for both the kids and the parents,” Janet Staheli told me. “We go as a family to thirty-five or forty rodeos a year, all over Utah. We also farm. Sometimes I think that's secondary.”

The next day, I stepped into the Big Valley Café on Main Street. Mule-deer and elk antlers covered the counter as did a year or two of dust that must blow in through the open door. Glass-eyed deer heads stared from the wall.

“If it's not a café, why don't you take down the café sign?” I asked Troy Truce Truman, who was in the back shop tacking a piece of green felt around the skull plate of a set of mounted antlers.

“People know my shop is in the café, so the sign makes it easy for them to find me,” Troy replied, without looking up.

Deer-head mannequins and country-western music surrounded Troy. His radio cracked when the fluorescent light blinked.

“It started as a hobby, but about five years ago it became a business,” he said. At thirty, he is a self-taught taxidermist and cabinetmaker.

“Around here a lot of us hunt. We enjoy the table fare and a trophy now and then. Still, you know, I see people coming up here to kill a mule deer just for a trophy.” Although mounting trophies is his business, this was a sore point for
Troy. “It's becoming a rich man's hobby, a power thing. They aren't after meat. They won't even eat it.”

Two women stopped by. They had found a freshly killed bobcat beside the highway and wanted to know if Troy might put it in his freezer. We looked at the dead animal spread out on the concrete stoop in front of the café. Troy identified it as a healthy female, not yet fully grown. Two young boys, skateboarding, came to stare but said nothing. I could feel the sadness among us.

Enterprise has a population of about 1,200 people and probably a third again as many horses. Some owners shoe their horses. Sandee Probst shoes the rest. A trim, thirty-one-year-old mother of two and former secretary from California, she is now the only farrier in town.

“I get kicked weekly, but it still beats being at a desk all day,” Sandee admitted, brushing back her blond hair. “I work half a day, usually mornings. I take the kids and a cooler of soda pop with me in the truck. The rest of the day I'm a house wife.”

Sandee, who is five-foot-two and weighs just 115 pounds, went to horseshoeing school in Porterville, California. “My class had thirteen men and three women, all bigger than me.”

Before leaving town the next day, I visited the mayor. Brushing out a vacant lot with a backhoe, he was covered with dirt and sweat. I had enjoyed my time in Enterprise. I wanted to thank somebody, so I thanked him.

Heading north on Highway 18, all I could get on the radio was a talk show from somewhere far off. Gloomy people were rehashing the decay of American society. The host pontificated that nobody cares anymore. “We are all in a handbasket going nowhere good,” he repeated several times.

I turned to Rusty, stretched out on her traveling seat. “That bozo has not a clue what America is about. He is like a shallow-rooted tree that can only report what goes on beneath its branches. Rooted, he can't see beyond his own shade, a dark spot of his own making.”

Well, there are a bunch of fine folks out here sweating in the sun, brushing out the undergrowth, doing the best they
can. What's more, they do it every day. If anybody wants to see just how well that works, how well that is turning out, come visit Enterprise sometime. Or thousands of towns like it in America. It's a great country. I love it.

I
nferctate 80 is called the Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway where is climbs over the Wasatch Mountains from Utah into Wyoming. At 6,680 feet, the mountain pass was used by the Pony Express in 1860 and 1861. Before that, it was the Mormon Trail.

Rusty and I are using it this Saturday as we enter America's least-populated state for the first time.

After passing several exits that offer “no services,” we took one of three that offered Evanston. The gas stations at that exit all sported hand-lettered signs advertising clean restrooms. Were they having a contest?

Evanston is a tidy town of 11,000 people. The residential neighborhoods look like those idyllic scenes on Christmas cards. I passed white steeples and houses of red brick. Lawns and gardens showed loving care by those who make the most of a three-month summer.

I parked across the street from the Joss House, a replica of a Chinese sacred temple. It's now a museum. Still, it's the last thing I expected to find. Up here, the bucking bronco and the buffalo vie for the official state symbol. But Evanston is a rail
road town. Of course, mostly Chinese labor built the railroads across the West.

I walked to the restored Union Pacific Depot. With heavy transcontinental passenger traffic, this was a busy train station from the day it was built in 1900. The taffic slowed a good thirty years ago. Thankfully, the ambiance is still here. The depot has two waiting rooms. The one for women and children once had a beautiful fireplace. The other, for the men, once had a spittoon and a potbellied stove. But someone, in the name of “improvement,” took those out years ago.

Across an attractive brick walkway lined with well-tended flower boxes is a Carnegie library. Steelman Andrew Carnegie built 1,679 public libraries in communities across the United States between 1889 and 1923.

Well into my walk around town, it started to rain. Wyoming raindrops are the biggest I have ever seen. It takes only a few, I quickly discovered, to get a person seriously wet. I ducked and ran for the closest cover.

It turned out to be a rambling wooden porch draped with colored lights. It overflowed with a wedding party that had been celebrating for probably as long as I had been in Wyoming. Shaking off the rain, I was handed an opened bottle of beer with a label I had never seen Before. I got acquainted with the groomsmen instantly. What a beautiful bunch! They were dressed in traditional black formal garb from neck to waist. The rest was Levis, boots, and handsome black cowboy hats.

Knowing that I had to get my motor home somewhere for the night, I pushed aside glasses of champagne offered by these beautiful folks I didn't even know. In shorts and Reeboks, I was a curious party crasher, for sure. Still, I have never received a warmer, more sincere welcome my first day anywhere. Wyoming and I were off to a great start.

I
drove through a meadow of midsummer green and up a little bluff that displayed an enormous
L
of white rocks. Instantly, I was in downtown Lyman. With a population of 1,900, it's supposedly the biggest town in Bridger Valley. I am taking their word for it today.

Nothing moved on Main Street. Nor is there a sign that anything ever has. Six lanes wide, there's not so much as a pickup truck left in front of John's Bar and Lounge from last night. Even the air doesn't move. Flags hang like plywood from every street-side light pole.

“Rusty, something is about to happen here that everyone knows about but me, like a high-noon shoot-out in the middle of Main Street.”

Rusty just stared at me from the other seat. I dropped the subject.

Then I past the Mormon church with its perfect lawn. The parking lot was full, pickups mostly. What a relief! Things are just as they should be on a Sunday morning in a mostly Mormon town.

Halfway down Main Street, I saw other signs of life at the 7-Eleven. I parked in front. Inside Tami Chandler worked the
levers of a machine coated with frost, streaming orange Slurpee into a foot-high container. Watching the process—it took a while—was a hefty lady with a tattoo on her shoulder.

“Can one person drink all that?” I asked as Tami handed the Slurpee t the woman.

Her wide face, a total grin, turned toward me. I noted a second tattoo, a rose, partially hidden by the top of her low-cut dress.

“On a hot day they go down like nothin'.” She held up the family-size slurpee so I could get a better look. “See, that ain't much.”

I wanted to ask about the rose tattoo but didn't dare. I knew that, too, would be offered up for a better look.

Tami's husband Bruce sat behind the counter. He is a trona miner. When Tami works, on weekends, Bruce keeps her company.

Trona mining is the biggest industry in southwest Wyoming, which has the world's largest mine.
Trona
is the natural source of soda ash used in the manufacture of glass, baking soda, soap and detergents, sugar, soda pop, paper, even junk foods. The five trona mines, forty miles east of the Bridger Valley, reportedly produce 90 percent of the soda ash used in the United States and 25 percent of the world's supply.

The mine of the FMC Corporation, the largest but typical of the others, is a subterranean city. It has about 2,000 miles of underground “streets,” more than the city of San Francisco. They are wide enough for two-way vehicle traffic and go down as deep as 3,000 feet.

The mines operate day and night. Pay is good. The miners even have a non-contract fringe benefit. Because their clothes pick up so much soda ash on the job, they don't have to add soap when they wash them.

Rusty and I spent the night at the KOA Campground near Lyman. Clark Anderson owns it. As if a father of eleven doesn't already have enough to occupy his time, Clark is running for county supervisor. He will win. He is a likable guy. He jokes that the real winner may get the fewest votes. “Then he won't have to do all that county business,” Clark jokes.

T
he next day, I accepted Clark's offer to use his car to visit Fort Bridger. Rusty stayed with the motor home. Since Clark had a couple of friendly dogs, Rusty preferred it that way.

About fifteen miles from Lyman, Fort Bridger is a state historic site. Restored and reconstructed in fine and authentic detail, it recreates several layers of U.S. history beginning in 1843, when mountain man Jim Bridger and a partner built a trading post here. Fort Bridger was first an import ant supply point on the Oregon Trail, a 2,170-mile route that nearly half a million emigrants used to cross the better part of the continent. Through here passed the greatest human migration in history.

The Mormon Trail traced the Oregon Trail east of Fort Bridger, but it split here and proceeded into the Salt Lake Valley. By 1850, Jim Bridger was gone. The Mormons ran the trading post.

When the U.S. Army ran the Mormons out in 1858, Fort Bridger became a mili tary outpost.

With the military came Judge William Carter. He had the concession to sell whatever the military commissary did not,
everything from eyeglasses to whiskey. The customers of his Post Trader's Store were emigrants, Indians, railroad builders, settlers, and soldiers. Carter died a wealthy man in 1891. His descendants still live around here. I met one of them.