Tucker Utah and the Infamous Thistle Landslide of 1983

Back in the spring of 1983 I was engaged to be married to . . . an utter git.  What can I say?  I was only 17, he was older, handsome and charming.  That he was also manipulative, mean, abusive, and not particularly bright?  That knowledge came AFTER I said "I do."

One night, a couple of months before the wedding, the now-ex and I drove up Spanish Fork Canyon to visit his Dad and Step-mom.  This would be the evil Step-mom my ex hated beyond measure.  Her sin?

Marrying his father.

Well, marrying his father and not being willing to put up with the ex's stealing, manipulation, and all-around BS.  See, his Mom--his SAINTED MOTHER--was actually not such a saint.  She . . . engaged in behaviors that led to divorce, and she went on to marry the guy she was "behaving" with (or so the story came to me).  The ex hated him, too.  And then his Mom committed suicide when he was a teen.  Which made him hate both step-parents all the more.

Of course.

Anyway, so we drove up Spanish Fork Canyon to the tiny (non-existent?) "town" of Tucker, Utah.  This drive took us past the tiny railroad town of Thistle, Utah.  This becomes important later.  The date?

April 14th, 1983.

The ex's paternal family owned the only digs there in Tucker.  The Skyview Cafe.  Actually a cafe, a motel, and a gas station/service station.  A run-down kind of mess, but, as I said, the only game in "town," and, in fact, the only place for miles to grab a cup of coffee or a place to crash (or fill up the tank).  Sadly (and yes, it does make me sad), the Skyview Cafe is gone.  My last Amtrak trip up Spanish Fork Canyon found an empty expanse where the old buildings once stood.

An OLD postcard, no idea who took the pic but it was likely in
the fifties, judging by the cars.

This was my first time meeting his family.  And oh, my hell.  First, the "gourmet restaurant" where his "chef and professional caterer" Mom had worked her magic?  Was an utter dive.  I mean, it wasn't roach-y (I don't think), but it was your average western desert/country greasy spoon.  A lot of scalded coffee stink and cigarette burns in the linoleum.

Second?

His family.  Wow.  WOW!

His Grandma was a wonder, truly.  She went by "So-So," and her biggest brag was that she was older than God and had her cigarettes shipped in special because they didn't sell them in Utah.  Precious few teeth, and an astounding capacity for booze.  In fact, the whole lot of them were drunk when we showed up, and got drunker as time passed.  The Step-mom was SO nice to me it became obvious she was either being nice because she knew it drove the ex crazy OR she was trying to drown out any awfulness he might have filled me with concerning her.  Quite possibly a little of both.  I liked her, but who knows if she liked me?  And his Dad?  Kept smiling at me with his shot teeth and bleary eyes and telling them to "be nice."

And let's not forget the older brother.

Holy cow.  Apparently, the ex had once shown up with a drag queen/hermaphrodite, and the older brother had never forgotten the drunken encounter.  He kept poking at me, asking if I was "real."

It was, overall, a hellish night.  It was also almost my last.

Oooh, I know, isn't that all ominous sounding and stuff?

See, 1983 was a VERY wet year in Utah.  Like flash floods and Salt Lake's State Street sand-bagged and turned into a river WET.





One of the things leveled by the heavy rains and astounding snow pack?

The very highway we'd traversed to reach Tucker.  That's right, US Route 6, our happy highway to Tucker, slid away in a giant slump, eventually damming up the Spanish Fork River, taking out the rail road tracks (bye-bye, Amtrak--the then-Rio Grande Zephyr [now California Zephyr] was last train to come through for months), and demolishing/submerging the little town of Thistle.  And it's funny (funny interesting, not funny "haha"), we saw the work crews, the cop cars, the railroad vehicles on our way up, but had no idea why they were there.

We sure knew the next day, after our seemingly eternal detour and backroad path back home.

Poor little Thistle, huh?

Check out this site, it's the Utah Geological Survey's Thistle page.  And then here, from a more Rail Road-y perspective.  Good stuff.

And this whole story?  Utterly pointless, I guess, but if you've read it, thank you.  You've made me happy.  It was the most expensive landslide in United States history, so hey, you've been enriched by my "I was there" account!

Oh, and the "it was almost my last" bit of drama up there?  I was referring to the ex's drunk driving that night/morning, not the slide.  I do find the slide oddly apropos, though.  Much like our marriage, you know?   An ugly, slow, lumbering thing that inexorably plowed through home and hearth, leaving in its wake devastation and heartache.

Yeah.  Look at me wax all poetic and stuff.

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Now, while I have you here, I want to talk about a ghost town in Utah.  I may have discussed it before.  It's called "Old Frisco," and there's a particular headstone there that captured me years ago, and I'm hoping someone can help me out.  

See, I first saw the stone in 1994.  Hubby and I were just dating then, and we'd decided to take a rockhounding roadtrip through Utah and Arizona.  A few weeks, no real set destination.  One of the places we wound up was Old Frisco.  It wasn't, at the time, a going concern, and so we explored pretty thoroughly (always on trails and out of adits, of course).  The town has some amazing old charcoal kilns outside of the main area, plus a gallows frame and some still intact old buildings.

There was no fence around these guys when we were there, but folks kept climbing on them
and taking bits, so up went the fences.  Which people often tear back down.

Old Frisco was an amazing place in its heyday.  It had more bars/saloons per capita than any other town in the United States.  It was a scary place, rivaled Bodie, California for sheer "lawless old west" stuff.  Bodie, of course, is in better shape, being cossetted by the Rangers and kept in a state of arrested decline.  

What really grabbed me at Old Frisco?  The graveyard.  From what I've heard, efforts have been made to restore this small cemetery, in which children were greatly overrepresented, but when we were there, the place was torn hell to breakfast.  I found myself standing over a broken, knocked over, shot at, half-obscured with sand and silt gravestone.  I bent down, read the inscription (what I could read--the part of the stone with the first name was mostly gone--might have been Timmy, Tommy, Jimmy, Sammy, or some other "ends with y" name), and found myself on my knees, crying.  Understand, I wasn't the crybaby then that I am now.  But it was wrenching, it was so awful to me. 

"Tis a little grave, but oh, have care, for world wide hopes are buried here.  How much of light, how much of joy, is buried with my darling boy."  

Trite?  Maybe, but life in those days was HARD, and this town, judging by the ages on the headstones, ate children.  Like a Stephen King story, it devoured kids.  

The rest of the headstone?  What was left told us that this boy's last name had been Staples, and he died December 27th, 1881 at the age of one year, four months, and 27 days.


There's a photo I'm hoping to include here, but it's on Flickr and I'm looking to get the owner's permission first.  It's a photo of the headstone much as it appeared when I saw it in the 1990s.  Below is a much older picture:

See, here's the thing--in this picture, you can see that the headstone was still mostly intact.  You can see that the name is still there.  It was clearly in better shape in the early 1970s than in the early 1990s, though you can absolutely see the evidence of grave robbing (the casket dug up, the bones scattered about and bleached in the sun).  NO, the folks who took this picture weren't the grave robbers--they came along after, were horrified.  I found this picture on a mostly defunct website dedicated to ghost towns.  I edited the shot because there was a young girl in the picture named "Trini."  I didn't think it would be appropriate to put her face on my blog without her permission.  I emailed the folks who own that site, but they have no memory of the name on the stone, and say they have no way of reaching Trini, who might know.  I DO know Trini's last name (maiden and married) and the area where she lives, but my attempt to email her was not fruitful--I got no response.  

What I'm hoping is this--that someone, somewhere was in Frisco in the 70s (or earlier) and remembers this headstone.  I just want the boy's name.  Why does it matter to me?  Because my heart broke at his death, 113 years after the fact, and it never stopped hurting.  These people lost their boy, and they lost him in a gawdawful place.  They likely gave up everything for a shot at making a life based on crap promises and unrealistic dreams of gold and silver.  Their baby boy died here.  And I'd like to know his name.  I'd like to know their names, too.  I mean, wouldn't you want someone to care that you had existed, to roll your name off their tongue 132 years after you'd died?

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And that's about it.  My Dad and Step-Mom sent our boy an electric/acoustic guitar with a small practice amp.  I think I wrote about it earlier?  Well, it came today.  He still doesn't know what it is, and hubby wouldn't let him open it until he gets home from work.  So it's here on the floor, still boxed, waiting to be opened.  I've taken to referring to it as the "guiltar," because I so creepily just leapt in and demanded my Dad send it to my boy instead of taking it to Goodwill.  Cost him a hundred bucks to ship it, and I feel like a total bucket of scuzz.  The words were out of my mouth before I could get a hook in and draw them back.  On the bright side, our boy gets an acoustic/electric.  On the not so bright side, I suck.

Do not reprint without permission. © KAQ

Nonnies and Art

I am a strong advocate for breastfeeding mothers and the babies who so need to be nursed.  I am a strong opponent of formula companies, who manipulate, throw money at doctors and hospitals, and all around do whatever they can to turn a buck, even though doing so is absolutely harmful to babies.  Formula was created for emergency situations when no real baby milk was available.  Formula companies then went on a rampage, a campaign to create as many "ohhh, baby can't nurse, let's make money" situations as possible.  Which is why such ridiculous things as "baby's allergic to mother's milk" (barring galactosemia, which is very rare, that's just not true), "baby isn't thriving" (formula companies create the growth charts that show the naturally slower growth of breastfed babies as "failure to thrive"), and "mom's just not making enough milk" (breastfeeding is supply and demand--give formula, and milk supply goes DOWN) have become common to our society.

To learn more about common breastfeeding myths, click below:

Before you think I'm downing women who don't breastfeed, think again.  I'm downing a medical establishment that gives women crappy information, a formula industry that absolutely misleads the public, and a society that has so sexualized and objectified women's breasts that using them to feed babies is considered nothing short of scandalous.  As someone who has both held a bottle and breastfed a baby, the difference is clear and deep.  I don't despise women who've missed out on that--my heart breaks for them.  I wish the doctors, the nurses, their families, their friends, and their community had risen up in support with accurate information and helped them to put those formula companies back where they belong--providing emergency sustenance for babies who have no other options (even donor milk).

No one I knew (hubby aside, of course) was particularly supportive when I decided to breastfeed.  I knew it was something I would do because it's the normal, healthy, natural way to feed a baby, and nothing else begins to compare.  I wanted to do what was right for my child.  Period.  It's not that "breast is best."  It's that "breast is normal, natural, and healthy."  Formula is none of those things.

When I first started nursing, it was tough.  I'd had an emergency c-section (after almost two days labor), and things went downhill from there.  We managed to take care of latch issues in the hospital, but then my incision ruptured, and then I wound up in the ER with a pulmonary embolism.  Practical upshot?  Pump and dump for a week because of the radioactive isotope used for the lung perfusion.  Getting back to nursing after a week of artificial nipples that early on?

That was tough.

Yes, I had pumped around the clock to keep my supply up, but I had a cheap, nipple-thrashing grocery store pump (these days, my insurance would cover a GOOD breast pump AND a lactation consultant, THANK YOU, PRESIDENT OBAMA!), and wound up pumping milk PINK with blood by the end of the week.  My nipples were cracked and miserable, and the pain when I finally was able to put my boy back to the breast was indescribable.  Think lemon juice and sandpaper.  On personal spots.

While this was going on?  My mother, who had steadfastly refused to lend me the 40 bucks for a good manual pump (an Advent Isis), piped up with an eager offer to pay for formula, telling me I'd tried so hard but it was okay, that I could stop trying.  I'm sure that my sister's failure to nurse had nothing at all to do with Ma's gleeful offers to supply us with formula.  

And my sister?  Lots of outward, "Oh, hey, cool, mmm-hmm" and a lot of snide, utterly unsupportive stuff around the edges (like spending every Sunday breakfast going on and on about how disgusting her mother-in-law was for nursing past one year).  But hey, she failed, she knew she'd failed, she failed for a crappy reason (not wanting to give up her caffeinated sodas), and she knew it.  That she even tried to act supportive is something.  I think she wanted to be supportive even if she didn't feel it.

My husband's family?

Mmmm.

Let's just say that the overwhelming opinion there was "ew."  Yes, "ew."  It's one thing to be ill-informed and make mistakes because of it--we all do that.  But to strenuously defend your ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence?  Well, there's a word for that.  A bunch of them, in fact.  Like they say, when you KNOW better, you DO better.

Or you just pretend you don't know better.  You pretend better is gross.

One night, hubby went over to his sister's for some family thing or another.  I was still recovering from the blown c-section incision, so I was home.  My father-in-law was dawdling our boy on his knee, bouncing about, when up came a bit of blat.  Father-in-law laughed, said, "Oh, I've been spat up on by a whole lot of babies in my time--it's just formula!"  Hubby grinned and said, "That's breastmilk."

Father-in-law nearly dropped our boy in his disgusted rush to get it off him.

That was my support system.  People who didn't care, people who wanted me to fail for weird "family politics" reasons, and people who were disgusted by breastfeeding.

I did it anyway.

While we're on the subject of breastfeeding, if you ever find yourself, for any reason, feeling the need to throw out some insult that describes women who nurse (and shame on you for that)?  Don't make it "nipple Nazi," okay?  One, it's stupid, and two?

It's too soon.  I think it's always going to be too soon to compare a maniacal freak who oversaw the murder of millions to ANYONE who isn't also overseeing genocide.  Okay?

Thanks.

Talked to my Dad today.  I do enjoy talking to him, it's fun, and it's interesting.  We talked about a lot of things, our conversations always range over a broad array of topics.  Our politics sometimes merge, often don't, but we're good at staying out of the hairy stuff.  Not sure why that's so hard for some folks.  Today, we talked about my Mom's car accident and how my Dad, who was busy helping run a military base in Saudi Arabia, had to get himself smuggled out of the region because, same day my Mom was broadsided by a drunken teen, Israel and Egypt went at each other.  It took almost two weeks for him to get back to the States, and it involved him sometimes having to pretend to be things he wasn't.  Very cloak-and-dagger/action-adventure.

We also talked about playing guitar, and how the both of us had tried so hard at different times to learn, but just don't have it in us.  Then he said, "I've still got this damned electric acoustic here--I'm about to drag it to Goodwill."  Without even thinking, I said, "Whoa, are you serious?  Send it here for my boy!"

Bad form, I know.  It was out of my mouth before I knew it.  But my boy would LOVE to have an electric acoustic, and it's out of our range.  My Dad didn't say what kind this is, but he said it ran him around 400 bucks a few years ago, so it's probably a nice enough instrument. He says he's going to look into packing it up with UPS and shipping it.  Thank you, Dad.  Sorry I'm such a slob.

We also discussed a statue he just bought of the Capitoline Wolf suckling Remus and Romulus (speaking of breastfeeding, huh?).  Apparently, he had a version when he and my Mom were married, but has no idea what became of it.  I don't think I remember it.  I might, there's a tickle there, but nothing I can grab.  

This is exactly the piece my Dad purchased

We also discussed a pair of large-ish (maybe 3x2) paintings he and my Mom purchased in Europe back in the early 60s.  One of a hill beyond a swamp, with a fence post and some grasses, the other of a windmill on a hillside.  These painting are a big part of my childhood, I loved them even though I have no clue what they REALLY looked like--years of heavy smoking made them markedly darker and more morose-seeming than they likely really were.  Sadly, flood after flood in my Mom's basement left the swamp picture, ironically, water damaged and, eventually, molding.  We left the poor, molding swamp pic in Utah, but we brought the other with us.  The artist's name, my Dad says, was Wolfgang Stau.  He was the "company artist" when my Dad was stationed . . . somewhere in Europe, I've forgotten.

I have no doubt that, cleaned, the colors would be much more vibrant

Someday, I'll have the money to have this painting repaired and framed.  Until then, it hangs in my husband's office.  We love it.

And that's about it for today.  I really don't have much political or otherwise to say (well, there is Utah kicking around letting folks carry concealed WITHOUT a permit, but jeez, only so much I can type in one sitting).  So that's it--I hope y'all are having a wonderful day, and I hope tomorrow is even better.

Cross your fingers those fools on the hill get a budget going before they put my husband out of work with a shutdown, huh?  A budget that doesn't include the petty, pissy, childish "full repeal of OBAMACARE" BS.

And there.  There's the politics.  G'night!

Do not reprint without permission. © KAQ