And then I realize suddenly where I am. The name Hildale comes back to me. I am parked between the twin communities of Colorado City, on the Arizona side, and Hildale, on the Utah side, both of which are, on this very day, embroiled in international controversy. Even in Europe and Asia, these two communities are making headline news. These towns are ranking right next to the Iraq war and the Presidential campaigns in news coverage.
And yet, where is the press? Then, I realize, in my white rented Jeep, I must appear that journalist dumb enough to try – flown in from some news agency that doesn’t know any better.
These twin communities are a stronghold of Mormon fundamentalism – polygamy, cruel social conservatism, absurd laws, a radically literal interpretation of the Book of Mormon. The community’s ‘absolute ruler’, Warren Jeffs, is on trial after being arrested last year, and the trial is revealing a story of a nightmarish place, like a little slice of Taliban Afghanistan, right in our backyard.
That these communities engage in forced incest, that teenage girls are regularly raped and forced into odd polygamist marriages with old men, has never been a secret. That this community must keep the proportion of men to women unnaturally low – to keep the stock of women high - is also no secret.
For years, the media has reported stories of young men excommunicated from their community. The idea is to keep more women for the inner circle of polygamist leaders, by dishing the young, buff men out into the real world. The excommunicated Mormon youth, with no knowledge or understanding of the world outside Hildale and Colorado City, are quick prey for drug dealers in roadside towns like Hurricane, a roadside gas-stop near Zion Canyon.
The pattern for these boys is so often the same – a burger-flipping job, an addiction, a brain fried months after being blindfolded and thrown out on the side of a road.
That Hildale and Colorado City have the highest incidence of a certain form of mental retardation in the world (too many are related to just two polygamists) also does these American refugees little good.
But why America turned their shoulders to this sad practice is beyond me, and so the arrest of Warren Jeffs, his trial, the press attention – it’s a bitter sweet victory in a country still blind to the effects of growing fundamentalism permeating our culture, our politics, our foreign policy.
Warren Jeffs enforced strict rules about keeping these communities shielded from the rest of America. This might explain why all the television sets have been dumped in the wash. No internet, no Big Love, and as for communicating with outsiders – stay away from them. Jeffs would explain: If outsiders approach you, act with hostility.
And I was just hoping for a gnatcatcher.
Oak growing on an overhang in
the Glen Canyon area.
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