So. Until August 14th or so, I’d never been to Salt Lake City before. My dad took me on a driving trip all over the Southwest when I was about 15, but he did his best to avoid populated Mormony areas; when I was about 22 I went on a family trip where the motel was on the Utah side but the casino was on the Nevada side, and that’s about it.
But on August 11th, my sisters and I loaded up the family van and my middle sister’s tiny Saturn and we, well, drove to Utah. She’s transferring to the University of Utah, and this presented the perfect chance for me to actually go and visit real live Mormonville, USA. Before we got there, the most Mormon places I’d ever been to were Palmyra and Nauvoo during their pageants, and the Polaris Amphitheater, when Pres. Hinckley told 7,000 of us (7,000! All Mormon!) that we were going to get a temple here in Ohio.
I was more or less expecting the LDS equivalent of Vatican City. Everyone dressed modestly, sparkling streets, lots and lots of men in suits but not looking as stressed as the guys I saw the year we visited New York. Subconsciously, I think I may have also been expecting mountains of Books of Mormon on display, and either choirs or loudspeakers blaring hymns and selections from the Children’s Songbook. Suffice to say, save for the men in suits, I did not get what I was expecting. It was a very educational experience, to say the least — let me now share some of the things I learned (of course, everyone here has probably been to Utah so many times it just seems normal to you:)
1. Mormons are absolute rubbish at theocracy.
I’m sorry, but it’s true. We’re just no good at it. I don’t even mean just SLC, which isn’t even very Mormon — I saw enough random not-very-celestial behavior (and advertising) in Provo to shake my faith in a Mormon-run Utah forever.
2. Utah Mormons get all the best Mormony stuff.
You guys get distribution centers, radio stations that play mostly LDS stuff (though not as much as I’d anticipated,) and LDS books on sale at Wal-Mart for starters. To say nothing of three temples along one 40-mile stretch of highway. And chapels that actually look like chapels. Dude, the Salt Lake City 10th ward building. Just look at it!
3. Mormons in Utah seem to be in a love affair with bronze and marble monuments.
Seriously. There is a miniature Joseph Smith and Brigham Young across from the SLC temple. There were at least three monuments placed in locations that were impossible to access unless you were willing to violate the laws of man and/or physics. I think SLC actually beats Boston in this regard, though it’s been a while since I’ve been to Boston.
4. There are aspects of Temple Square architecture that never quite get communicated to anyone in the Church outside of Utah.
The Tabernacle has a shiny roof. The SLC temple is small. There’s a wall around Temple Square! There are giant globe things carved into the exterior walls of the Church administration building!
5. I totally get why we have so many songs about mountains in the hymnal, now.
6. If I had been a pioneer, everyone in my wagon train would have died mysteriously in the night, and I’d have set up camp somewhere in the nice part of Nebraska. My gosh, Iowa is boring.
Seriously. I’m putting photos up at my DeviantArt and Facebook pages (and I’d stick some in here if I knew how to do it without breaking my Photobucket account,) but suffice to say that I have at least 900 miles’ worth of photos that are all interchangeable. I was nearly ready to kill my family after four days — the pioneers spend months on that same trail!
7. I get a serious kick out of free Books of Mormon in hotel rooms.
Of course, this is in part because I still can’t believe how many Mormons live in Utah.
8. I randomly decided to look for a particular microfilm while we were in SLC, which is clearly due to the influence of the Holy Spirit.
If I hadn’t looked while we were there, the nature of the index in question would have required me to order some $200 worth of films (over the course of at least two or three months) in order to get the one with all the Molloys on it. Did you know films cost $5 to order now? And that there are 30+ films worth of inadequately indexed “M” entries in the 1890-1950 grantor index for Middlesex Co., Mass.? Anyway, yay for free film access at the Family History Library.
9. They serve Coke at the Nauvoo Cafe in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building!
And so I turn out to be a slightly better Mormon than I thought I was.
10. They put a colony of Hawaiians in the middle of the salt flats!
We ran across this fact on the way to Wendover and that funny land speed record sign. Dude. It’s a barren wasteland. What were they thinking?
Those are the main things I can think of offhand. I’ll probably remember more stuff later — I was a bad girl and didn’t journal properly after the fourth day. Mostly I’m struck by how not-very-Mormon the whole place was. I was really expecting something a bit more Zion-like; instead it felt like a drier, higher altitude version of Orange County. Was this always a faulty expectation, or did things change over the course of the last hundred years or something?