Thoughts on a Landscape of Faith. By NElda Ault.

I received an email the other day from good friend and fellow folklorist NElda Ault, which contained three beautiful photos of Decoration Days near her home in rural, central Utah.

Throughout our graduate school days, NElda and I spent a great deal of time talking about the nuances in the drastically different landscapes we call home.  I remember one afternoon as we were driving through rural Kentucky, a landscape that is much like my native Arkansas,  she mentioned how she missed the wide, expanse of the desert.  The hills and thick groves of trees in the southern mountains, she explained, felt cramped in comparison to the openness she was used to back home in Utah.

That comment stayed with me.  Although I had never been to Utah, I suspect the openness would overwhelm me and leave me longing for thick clusters of vegetation.  We went on to have many subsequent conversations, ruminating on how the landscapes we internalize in our childhood years often frames our adult perceptions of the world—past, present, even future. I love the way NElda helped me to understand more about what it means to call a place home.  Whenever I see a photo of the western deserts or those huge mountains, I think of NElda and her love for open spaces.

So naturally I was so excited to see these graves from out west. There’s the obvious differences in the landscape between the Decoration Days I know in Arkansas and the dryer earth of Utah. But I was also intrigued by how familiar the graves look with the row of silk flowers and the mountains in the background.

Best of all, NElda was so kind as to write up this essay about the photos, her childhood, and, as she so wonderfully called it, “a landscape of faith.”

You can read more of NElda’s beautiful writings at her blog which you can visit by clicking here.  All her posts are beautiful, graceful, and expand ideas of what it means to call a place home.  You will love them.

 

San Diego is the land of my birth, but I call a mountain valley in northern Utah my homeland.  Sandwiched between nativity and upbringing, though, is a sliver of years spent in the desert of central Utah, where my parents brought their two daughters and a canary in a yellow Ryder truck, claiming a piece of the wild American West for their own.  To hear my dad tell it, we were a part of a great California diaspora that took place during the late 1980s, forsaking forever the ocean, my mother’s brothers and sisters, and the clamor of big city that eventually became the last straw.  In exchange for our eastward trek through the mountains we received three years of unkempt ponytails whipping in the breeze as we peddled small pink bicycles down the middle of the road, cows herded down Main Street on a weekly basis, and a secure little world interrupted only by a few sudden and tragic farming or horse accidents.  We moved away north when I was eight, beckoned by water, by jobs, by better education.  The Sanpete County of my memory is therefore tinted by the little girl that I was there, forever engraved as a dusty Wonderland, a surprise waiting behind every sagebrush.

During this past Memorial Day weekend my family and I took a journey to visit the desert that we called home for a few years.  Twenty years have changed the face of the little town of 200 that we knew, but the dust and the absence of stop signs was the same.  Because we had the time, and because we’d never had many reasons to drive up into the hills east of town before, we turned off the highway onto the dirt road leading to the Fayette Cemetery.

Fayette Cemetery one row. Photo by NElda Ault.

 

I haven’t spent much time in cemeteries (can I admit that and still be a folklorist?), and I’ve never lived in a place where my people are buried, so I don’t have many Memorial Day or Decoration Day traditions I call my own.  This cemetery, only a couple of acres big, has no manicured lawn (actually, no grass at all), and no impressive stone monuments towering over family plots.  There are headstones of all shapes and sizes, many pioneer names that matched the families we knew when we lived here.  Most graves have been mounded up with the surrounding dry, cracked dirt, others covered with lava rocks held in place by two-by-four frames.  All of them cattlemen and sheep ranchers, farmers, school teachers, mothers, fathers, children, all scraping for years at the desert land, hoping to conjure up a home, a living, a crop.

Grave decoration here consists of placing bouquets of silk flowers in a row down the middle of the grave mound, a little parade of flowers growing up out of the impossibly dry ground, bringing to mind the scripture about the desert blossoming as a rose, a sentiment often inscribed in pioneer journals.

My sister hunts for lizards, I snap a few photos for my friend and fellow folklorist Meredith Martin-Moats, and my parents search for the neighbors and church members they knew and remembered.  What strikes me most, standing there in the unfiltered Sanpete sunshine, is that this cemetery isn’t very big, considering the age of the town it serves.  This tells me something not about the people who live there in that little town, but about the people who left and never came back, even when they died.

If you climb another couple of hills past the cemetery, you will find the reason a town exists at all: a small spring of water emptying from a metal tube into a small pond that then flows westward toward the scattered farms and houses.  As of 1990 when we left, this pond was the only water for miles that was deep enough– you guessed it– for baptisms.  When we moved away and my sister and I found out that other Mormon kids got baptized indoors, we felt bad that they had been deprived of the only occasion in which it was okay to walk through mud while wearing white socks.

Fayette Cemetery three rows. Photo by NElda Ault.

 

I hadn’t thought about it until now, as I realize that those hills above Fayette, Utah 84630 form a kind of landscape of faith, one in which sins are washed away and loved ones are laid to rest while the living wait for a reunion of some kind down the road.  A place in which families can chart the growth and passage of their ancestors and descendants, creating a chain you can see stretching from horizon to horizon.  The faith that a planted seed will grow and the faith that those who’ve gone on are not lost are not so far removed from this landscape where life crawls out along the irrigation ditches and where silk flowers burst from the dry, unforgiving earth.

by NElda Ault. 2011.

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