A Brush With Greatness

A few days before last Christmas, my ninety-four-year-old mother had a stroke. She was taken by ambulance to the emergency room at St. George Regional Medical Center, where she was whisked into the hands of amazing and wonderful doctors and nurses. There in the ER, for the first time in my immediate family, I looked mortality straight in the eyes. They were the wonderful eyes of my dear mother, who delivered me into this world seventy years ago.

My two brothers and I were with her through several days and nights in the ICU. On one of those mornings, I walked into her room to find her halfway out of bed. She was on her way home. When she was finally “settled” into a patient room on the first floor, we were able to take my ninety-three-year-old father to see her.

Through a series of complications that I won’t go into here, and after conferring with a competent and compassionate team of palliative care specialists, we took Mom home in the care of hospice, and she passed away peacefully during the first week of the new year.

I share this for two reasons. First, to express appreciation to the excellent folks at Intermountain Health Care, from ER to ICU to rehab to palliative care and hospice; and second, to set up the story I would have loved to share with all those health care professionals who cared so superbly for my mother.

My mom, Peggy Nielson Hafen, grew up in the town of Blanding, in the southeastern corner of Utah. It was a community founded in the early 1900s by families who came from the pioneer settlement of Bluff, twenty miles to the south, and by refugees from the Mormon colonies in northern Mexico who fled their homes, farms, and ranches ahead of Pancho Villa’s raiding parties. My mother’s mother was one of those refugees from Pacheco. Mom’s father came from Bluff, the son of a Hole-in-the-Rock pioneer and a prominent ranching family in San Juan County. Mom was born into that storied Four Corners country late in 1931, a place where just a handful of years earlier some of the last skirmishes between cowboys and Native Americans occurred.

Mom grew up loving to go to the ranch on Elk Mountain with her dad. She rode her horse around the foot of the Bears Ears and down into the majestic canyons among the natural bridges. After graduating from San Juan High School, Mom, like many of her classmates, made the long and circuitous journey to St. George to attend Dixie College in the early 1950s. In those days, you couldn’t get from San Juan County to Washington County without swinging deep into Arizona or north into central Utah. Much of the route was dirt road.

My father, on the other hand, had only a short block-and-a-half walk down Tabernacle Street to the campus of Dixie College. And that’s where he met the cute little coed and cheerleader who would become my mother. After my dad returned from combat in the Korean War, they were married in 1954. Mom made the transition from the daughter of a San Juan rancher to a St. George suburban housewife.

I entered the picture in 1955 and grew up accustomed to traveling the scenic byways between St. George and Blanding as our family made the twice-yearly journey to visit Grandma and Grandpa.

One of the most memorable aspects of those long journeys was the drive through Monument Valley on the Utah–Arizona border. In summertime, the valley’s massive red buttes and delicate thin spires stood powerfully majestic against the hot purple sky. In winter, I gazed through the frosty car window at an otherworldly landscape dusted in white.

Every time we drove through Monument Valley, Mom would tell the story of how, when she was a girl, she got to meet the great John Wayne out there among those buttes. One day in the late 1940s, her parents drove her and her older sister down to Monument Valley to visit the set where John Ford was filming a movie called She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

“I had my picture taken with John Wayne,” Mom would always say. “It was my one brush with greatness.”

“Where’s the picture?” I would ask.

“Who knows what happened to it,” she would say. “One of these days it’ll turn up, and then you’ll know I’m telling the truth.”

I never questioned my mother’s honesty. As a boy, I always knew she told the truth. And a half century later, her integrity was still beyond reproach. But I always thought it would be fun to see that photo. Every time I’ve driven through Monument Valley as an adult, I’ve thought about Mom and her teenage encounter with the biggest movie star of her generation and longed for a glimpse of that enigmatic photo.

Nearly five decades passed from the time I first heard Mom speak of the picture with John Wayne—nearly a half century of wind and rain and wispy clouds floating across that mysterious valley. Then, I went to visit Mom one evening. We worked through our usual items of discussion: updates on the kids and grandkids, how things were going at work, upcoming events to be noted on the calendar. After a while, Mom casually mentioned she had something to
show me.

She slipped into another room and returned with a small rectangular piece of paper in her hand. She reached it toward me, and I saw it was a photo. Then, in one of those bright white moments of epiphany that come but a handful of times in a lifetime, I realized it was THE photo. I saw my teenage mother—my honest, beautiful, wonderful mother—leaning fondly on the hip of the legendary John Wayne, his right arm extended down over her shoulders, his giant hand squeezing her tight to him. On the other side, encircled in the Duke’s left arm, was my Aunt Erma in a similar pose, proud as a San Juan girl could be.

Mom explained that my cousin had recently come across the photo tucked away in a box and forgotten all these years.

“So, there it is,” Mom said. “Proof I did not make the story up.”

“Mom,” I said, smiling from ear to ear, “I never questioned the story.” And it’s true. I’ve never questioned my mother’s integrity, nor her utterly complete and selfless devotion to her role as my mother.

“It was my one brush with greatness,” Mom said proudly.

“No,” I said. “It was John Wayne who had a brush with greatness that day.”