Beyond Beehives: Poetry & Prose Commemorating Utah's First 125 Years of Statehood

Beyond Beehives

Poetry & Prose Commemorating Utah's First 125 Years of Statehood

Copyright © 2021 by the League of Utah Writers

Individual works are Copyright © 2021 by their respective authors

All rights reserved. The stories in this book are the property of their respective authors, in all media both physical and digital. No one, except the owners of this property, may reproduce, copy, or publish in any medium any individual story or part of this anthology without the express permission of the author of the work.

The contents of this book are fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, place, or event is purely coincidental. Any opinions expressed by the authors are their own and do not reflect those of the editors or the League of Utah Writers.

Cover design © 2021 by the League of Utah Writers

Edited by Sarah Murtagh

Formatted by FireDrake Designs | www.firedrakedesigns.com

Print ISBN: 978-1-7354841-3-6

CONTENTS

Foreword

Gilder Lehrman Utah History Teacher of the Year Quinn Rollins

Memorial

Margot Monroe

Questions and Everything

Talysa Sainz

Searching for Some Place

Cassidy Ward

Dystopia From Ground Level

Jaron Hatch

The Sanguinity of Sego Lilies

Rosemary L. Wise

Rose People

Mark Mason Taylor

Catching Stories in Desert Cracks

Natasha Rogers

Cartoon Landscape

Amanda Freshman

Remembering Jordan Park

Letitia Archuleta Lester

The Nurse

Grace Diane Jessen

Letters to Pioneers

Heidi Voss

Heart Map: Airdrie, Scotland, 1848–Logan, Utah, 1890

Susan Izatt-Foster

Helper, Utah, America

Whitney Oliver

Note Found in an Abandoned Clock

Johnny Worthen

Triples

Rebecca Marie Robertson

Red Rock Mesa

Denis Feehan

Where Quiet Talks

Jef Huntsman

The Tombstone of Lily Gray

RG Hughes

In the Cemetery

D. Pat Thomas

A Concert at Saltair

J. T. Moore

Utah Unformed

Jonathan Reddoch

Peter Sinks

John M. Olsen

London Belle

Bryan Young

Small Town Whales

Alexis Hansen

Still Here

Alex Jay Lore

Not So Dark a Sky

Aren K. Hatch

This anthology was made possible through a generous grant from the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement and Thrive125.

FOREWORD

Gilder Lehrman Utah History Teacher of the Year Quinn Rollins

I’ve lived in Utah most of my life, and I love it. At times I feel my home state is unique, or quirky, or quite a character—all those things you say about a family member whom you love but don’t always understand. It’s very much how I feel about the Beehive State. I can’t always explain it, but it’s home. 

When I think about Utah, the first things I think of are the landscapes. When I’ve left the state, for months or even years at a time, I have the distinct homesickness of missing the mountains, and feeling cradled and protected within the mountain valleys that I was raised in. Oftentimes being described as sheltered has a negative connotation; when I think about the mountains sheltering me, it’s a feeling of warmth and love. It’s hard to imagine a concept of home without the mountains as a backdrop. They’re always there, a constant when so many other parts of our lives are in turmoil. The mountains and canyons are a refuge, a place for reflection and peace. I’ll often leave work and head into the canyons along the Wasatch Front to find a bit of that peace before returning home.

All told, I’ve spent months of my life camping in the wilderness of Utah, and I constantly feel the urge to return. The granite mountains, the red rock, the west desert, the wetlands… there’s infinite variety within our borders, and I spend as much time finding it as I can. There are times driving to or from work that I wish I could freeze the sky in a moment of sunrise or sunset, so everyone could see the skies that I see. I’ll check Instagram later, and sure enough, other Utahns saw it... we’re immersed in beauty. 

The natural beauty of Utah is but a stage for the beauty of the people who live here. The complicated history of Utah, from the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan peoples, through the historic tribes of Native Americans, through government explorers, trappers and mountain men, Mormon pioneers and miners, railroad workers, and entrepreneurs. The first decade of my teaching career was spent teaching Utah history to seventh graders, which likely sounds terrifying. But it was rewarding in ways I couldn’t have foreseen. Learning more about the history as I taught it to young people and going beyond the Mormon story that many Utahns grow up with made me see how rich the human landscape of Utah’s past is and the claim that every Utahn should have on it. Our state is more diverse—and our history more diverse—than it’s often credited with. We should all see more narratives than we typically see, hear more tales than we typically hear. Sometimes that means opening conversations with people outside of our normal circle of friends, sometimes it’s going into a historical archive, sometimes it’s just leaving the echo chamber of social media. Learning more about Utah and Utahns will always pay off. 

Growing up, my father would tell me stories about what his own parents and grandparents had done to build the state. We’d go to downtown Salt Lake City and he’d tell me about Auerbach’s department store, and about the architecture that shaped the city around us. When the Newhouse Hotel was demolished in 1983, we watched from the upper windows of a building on Main Street, and he grieved its loss. That same year, we helped fill sandbags for the flooded City Creek that was diverted to run down State Street. The interactions between the old Salt Lake City of my childhood and the new one taking shape around us are sometimes controversial, but always compelling. I’ve gone from being thrilled at the Days of ‘47 Parade, sleeping out on Main Street as a teenager, to watching my parents march with Mormons Building Bridges in the Pride Parade, to cautiously joining that celebration myself. This is a city in the midst of transformation, and I feel very much a part of that change. 

I consider myself a city boy, always living in Salt Lake City or its suburbs, but I was also fortunate enough to have a family cabin outside Panguitch, on the edge of Panguitch Lake. Getting a glimpse of rural Utah and the triumphs and struggles that they experience has given me a more well-rounded understanding of what Utah is, piercing that bubble that I’ve spent most of my time in. When I first started spending time there, it felt completely foreign to me, to the point of feeling wrong. This wasn’t the Utah I knew; it was somehow less than what I knew from my life in the urban corridor of the Wasatch Front. But... that’s Utah too. Panguitch and Ephraim and Levan and Tremonton all also get to stake a claim in Utah’s history and traditions and twenty-first century politics, and I need to honor their place in shaping my state. 

The stories and poetry you’re about to read excite me. I love this state. I love its history. I love its potential and its future. Seeing these works of fiction and contemplation are an analysis and celebration of everything I love about Utah. The landscape, the history, but above all, the people. We’ve taken this piece of the West and made it our home. Honoring the people before us, from the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloans, through the current Native tribes, and then into the European settlers who were my own ancestors—everyone who comes to Utah comes here for a reason. If they’re lucky enough, they get to stay and call it home. These stories and poems are from authors who have done just that.

Read their stories. Consider writing your own. Everyone has a story to tell. What’s yours?

— Quinn Rollins

Gilder Lehrman Utah History Teacher of the Year

MEMORIAL

Margot Monroe

My grandmother always commemorated Memorial Day. Her husband, my grandfather, died when my father was a year and a half. She’d decorate his grave and other relatives’ with bundles of flowers taken from the snowball bush and rose bushes in her backyard.

I didn’t realize I was watching the end of our known world through this ritual.

Each year the flowers bloomed a little earlier, until, at the end of her life, the snowballs had withered before she could cut them for her graveyard visit. She was old and tired at this point, so she clipped them anyway and took them to the cemetery, where the greying flowers adorned her lost loved ones’ tombs.

I feel like a bottleneck of history; all my ancestors converge in me, and I await my posterity. So many people risked so much and traveled thousands of miles for better lives. Both of my grandfathers were born in Salt Lake to immigrants: one to Mexican parents and the other to Dutch. My Mexican ancestors yearned for more opportunities, and my Dutch ancestors fled war-torn Europe, getting out before World War II. All of these journeys, to find safety in a promised land for their posterity.

They all had the comfort of a safe place to go. My great-grandmother came here on the advice of the United States Ambassador to Mexico. Salt Lake was a safe, wholesome place. The Mormon Church likewise drew my grandmother with promises of safety and community.

I must admit I am jealous. There are no safe places left on Earth, and I don’t want to know how quickly that destruction is coming. The snowball bush withered twenty years ago before Memorial Day. The house has long since been sold, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to visit to see when the flowers faded. From the extreme drought in Utah, to devastating floods in Germany and China, to the heat dome covering the western United States, to temperatures incompatible with life in the Middle East. I have no New World to take my family. There are no New Worlds left.

And even if there was a New World, someone already lives there. The lies of the past, virgin, untouched land, were just that. Lies. There are no untouched lands, just other people’s homes. And colonizers pushed the indigenous people into the same conundrum. How to keep their families safe? How to maintain their culture and way of life? Do they fight? Do they move? Do they assimilate?

The olive undertones of my skin are the whispers of ancestors who survived conquistadors and plagues. My white skin speaks to the assimilation. I see it in the food I prepare, in the way family recipes have been handed down and adjusted. My Spanish is rudimentary at best. I am a blanquita and the older I get, the more I yearn for my forgotten heritage.

My grandfather cannot speak Dutch; he did not speak it as a child out of fear for his safety. War with Germany loomed, and Dutch sounded too close for my great-grandmother’s liking. I started studying Dutch as a pandemic pastime. I want to regain what we’ve lost, but not only that, how do we rectify the evils of the past while addressing the needs of the present?

And the needs of the present are great. Life in a desert is already precarious. Throw a multiyear drought on top, and I worry for the long-term survival of my family. Our Great Salt Lake is drying up. I can only imagine the dust storms that will envelop the valley. Water has a marvelous heat capacity, and the lake moderates our temperatures. If the lake is gone, I cannot imagine the incredible fluctuations between night and day.

Safety is relative. My grandfather’s parents fled a war and found prejudice. The same is true here. We don’t have beachfront property to be imminently swallowed by the sea, but the dust storms will follow soon enough.

The only safety available to us now, is the safety that we make.

I think of my grandmother. She flew into Salt Lake with a job and housing lined up, forty dollars and a suitcase that broke in St Louis. A young widow with a young child in a foreign land that became her home. That tenacity, the willingness to fight for her family, fight for what she needed, inspires me.

I can only see my grandmother’s tenacity in the face of disaster, vowing to bring her family through. It’s all we can do as climate change bears down on us. We’re preparing as best we can, solar panels on our house and the decision to have only one child.

I can’t find a New World, but I will certainly do my best to make one. Our only hope, to keep our families safe is to take care of what we have.

I think about that snowball bush, and I wonder if that will be the only tribute to our species. We have destroyed the Earth. Destroyed our home because there was always someone else’s.

Will that snowball bush keep blooming, or will it become humanity’s last memorial? A withered bush, used to mark the graves of our fallen loved ones, now marking humanity’s grave.

Margot Monroe is a romance writer living in Salt Lake City with her husband, daughter, two Italian Greyhounds, and a flock of black-capped chickadees and lesser goldfinches in her backyard. She's the Secretary for the Salt City Genre Writers chapter of the League of Utah Writers. You can find her at www.gowritemargot.com

QUESTIONS AND EVERYTHING

Talysa Sainz

Whenever I come back to Utah from a vacation or a camping trip, people comment on how dark my skin is. It used to be a compliment. When I was younger, I was so proud of my darker skin, how I could be tan in the middle of winter when all my classmates were not. But my skin was not darker because I was luckily tan—it’s darker because I’m Hispanic.

I knew I was different. My name and slightly darker skin set me apart. But I saw that almost all the educated and respected people in my life were white—teachers, my parents’ coworkers, friends’ parents, police officers, anyone of authority—white was the standard. I wanted to be educated. I wanted to be respected. So I dressed like all the white kids did. I refused to eat Hispanic food. I became the smartest kid in class just to prove I could.

Growing up in Utah as a part-white Hispanic child meant I spent most of my childhood pretending to be white. There was nothing wrong with being Hispanic, but I didn’t know that.

I saw how Hispanic kids were treated here. Ignored, dismissed, insulted, made fun of. I didn’t want to be treated like that, so I unconsciously pretended I was white, like almost everyone else in Utah. My name was Mexican, but I wasn’t. Which is why being racially profiled came as