Where Heaven and Earth Meet

If you grow up in a small town like I did, and if your father tells stories with the intensity of spirit that mine did, you will be overwhelmed by a sense of place. There will not be a plot of ground anywhere in that town that does not have a story tied to it.

There is a place on the campus of Utah Tech University that ties to a seminal moment and story in my life. It occurred on the day I graduated from Dixie College in May of 1977. My father orchestrated this story. After the graduation ceremony, Dad saw an opportunity. An elderly woman stood outside the north door of the college gym. Dad guided me toward her, addressed her with an unusual degree of respect, then introduced me to the woman named Juanita Brooks. I knew she was someone important, but I had no clue at the time just how important she was or how important it was that my father would make that moment possible. We spoke only a few words to each other that day. I never saw her again, but I have come to understand how blessed I am to be able to say I met her.

In the years since, I have read the work of the eminent writer and historian Juanita Brooks with a sense of respect, admiration, and appreciation, and with a desire to somehow tell the stories of this place with even a fraction of the integrity, artistry, and compassion that she did.

I never had Juanita Brooks as a teacher, but she has taught me many things about telling a story.

For me, a place is not a place without a story, and a story is not a story without a place. I remember lying in the warm covers of my bed as a little boy, the words of the classic fairy tales floating over me like mythic clouds. Even then, I wanted to know—needed to know— where they took place in order to validate them as stories. I knew it was somewhere far away, but most importantly, I knew it was somewhere. Finally, a half century after first hearing the words “Once upon a time,” I stood in the Black Forest of Germany in places where many of those tales had their genesis.

There is another place on the campus of Utah Tech University that looms large in the story of my life. It is a particular office in the administration building where I had several early morning visits with Juanita Brooks’s son Karl. I was a student struggling to graduate from Dixie College and grappling with questions about what to do with my life. Karl Brooks was a vice president of the college. He somehow found the time to talk to me, encourage me, point me in a good direction, and pull some strings to get me graduated and on my way to the next chapter of my life.

When I finally finished my education and my apprenticeship as a journalist and moved back to St. George with my young family, Karl Brooks was mayor of the city. He was the first to champion my work as a writer. His encouragement lifted me to a higher level and opened my vision to loftier horizons.

Speaking of horizons, there is a place on the black ridge west of downtown St. George, now known as Tech Ridge, where you can pull off the road and view, in perfect alignment, three monumental landmarks. Immediately below, like an iceberg in the middle of the city, stands the St. George Temple. On a straight line extending approximately east, you see the inclined ridge of the tower known to the Southern Paiute as Shinobkaib, or Mountain of God. And continuing on the same straight line, you finally reach the majestic horizon cut against the far eastern sky, the wondrously symmetric skyline of the West Temple of Zion.

Over the past forty years, I have grappled with the concept called A Sense of Place. I believe I was born with an overdeveloped sense of place and that it was magnified by my father’s penchant for knowing and telling a story relating to every place I went as a child.

The writer Wallace Stegner, who was a contemporary and an admirer of Juanita Brooks, said, “… a place is not a place until people have been in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it … have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation … it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”

But Stegner went even deeper by pointing out that the geology of a place is just as full of stories as its human habitation. From that spot on the west black ridge above St. George, one can read a geologic story that goes all the way back to the Jurassic. There were myriad epochs of deposition and erosion, of the workings of water, rock, and time, before this place became the chaotic mass of confused landscape that Parley Pratt described here in 1850. Pratt saw a place, “lying in inconceivable confusion … a country in ruins, dissolved by the peltings of storms of the ages … turned inside out, upside down by terrible convulsions in some former age.”

For me, in the context of these three features, the West Temple of Zion represents the creation, even Eden, which is where the concept of place begins.

From the West Temple of Zion, we come to Shinobkaib, a handsome, magnificent, natural monument rising from the desert floor on a majestic incline toward heaven. If the West Temple represents the creation, then for me, Shinobkaib represents the fall, the lone and dreary world where time and the story of mankind commence, where our story begins to grow from place.

Again, Wallace Stegner put it this way: “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.”

The writer Barry Lopez said, “When we come to a place, we need to withhold our judgments and restrain our reactions until we come to know it deeply, until we have immersed ourselves in its history to a level where we have achieved a deep sense of place.”

Which brings me to that glorious iceberg in the desert, the St. George Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It stands monumental and majestic in the middle of the city. For me, it represents redemption through the sacred stories that define my purpose here on earth and what I and my family can become. Story grows from place. And from story, we draw purpose.

West Temple. Shinobkaib. The Latter-day Saint Temple. All three are places where, for me, heaven and earth meet. They are places from which I draw a sense of place, a sense of story, and a sense of purpose.