Dispatch from Hanksville, UT
Text, photographs and web design by Erik Gauger

When I stop at a gas station to stretch my legs under a blue sky, I notice some homes, wooden fences and a few trees. I ask the blonde teenage attendant what town I am in. Her expression and reply makes the question feel somehow forbidden. “Hildale,” she mutters, looking away.

The town name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, but the presence of trees, shrubs, those fences – might make this a good spot to check for any new species of birds I had never seen before. The Utah-Arizona border, north of the Grand Canyon and east of Las Vegas, is a weird sort of biological zone. Some creatures exist here that exist nowhere else in the world. More likely though, a little town with its trees and fence-posts amidst all this dry scrub and red earth might attract some migrating birds, moving south to Mexico in the fall.

I get in the Jeep, cross the border into Arizona a few hundred feet later, and pull into the small town. I find a dry wash with some trees and scrub, where I park the Jeep and focus my binoculars.

In the distance are a number of homes. I can’t place my finger on it, but something seems wrong about these homes. For one, several of them are very large, like hotels almost. But they do not have the tell-tale signs of American wealth – these homes have no manicured yard. Many are unpainted – bare concrete. Junk lies scattered around the properties, the roads and driveways are dirt. There is no activity in the streets. No cars drive past mine. No one is walking outside, although the day is pleasant enough.

I try to resume back to my binoculars and the rocky wash – after all, I am on vacation, and all I want to do is go out into Utah on a thousand mile journey, looking for lizards and squirrels, a sort of American safari. Then I notice a curtain rise, and quickly close, in one of the odd, cold, dark houses behind the wash. I glance at my binoculars? Should I?