If you’re one of the lucky few who gets Martin Luther King, Jr. Day off work and you’re not sure what you’re going to do with that extra time, perhaps you should plan a visit to your favorite national park. After all, MLK Day is the first fee-free day of the year and we wouldn’t want to squander any opportunity for a free visit to the parks.
Considering the day is dedicated to Dr. King, it should come as no surprise that we would recommend a visit to his national historic site in Atlanta and Memorial in Washington, D.C. And since 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, either location will make a fitting destination for those looking to honor his legacy.
Of course, the fee-free holiday is simply a good excuse to go to a national park, and there are obviously plenty of other things we can do to take advantage of the day. For instance, visitors to the Grand Canyon can go camping along the South Rim, while fans of winter weather will enjoy snowshoeing along one of the many trails in Glacier. If you’re craving something a bit warmer then Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park may be more your speed, while water lovers will no doubt enjoy a paddle along one of the Everglades canoe trails.
If you’re a fan of the national parks, and enjoy taking advantage of these fee-free days, then you’ll definitely want make sure you visit your favorite park on Monday. The next free-entry days don’t come until April 22-26 in celebration National Parks Week. That seems like an awfully long way off at this point.
An upcoming exhibit is causing friction between Palestinians and Israelis, the Associated Press reports.
On February 13, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem will open “Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey.” It will be the first exhibition dedicated to the architectural legacy of the infamous Jewish king, who ruled as a vassal of the Roman Empire from 37-4 B.C.
Best known for the Biblical story of his killing the male children of Bethlehem to try to get rid of the baby Jesus, he was also one of the region’s great builders, expanding the Second Temple and erecting many other monuments.
The exhibition will display remains from his many building projects. The centerpiece will be his recently discovered tomb, shown here, and what may be his sarcophagus, painstakingly reconstructed from hundreds of shattered pieces. Archaeologists believe it was destroyed by Jews to show their hatred of Herod.
Almost all the artifacts are from the West Bank, part of Palestine, and here is where the problem lies. Palestinian Authority officials say they weren’t consulted about the exhibit and that excavating and removing artifacts from Palestine without their permission breaks international antiquities laws. The Israel Museum denies this and says they have authority over the artifacts. They also say the material will be returned to the West Bank after the exhibition closes October 5.
In this part of the world, history frequently gets enmeshed in politics, with both sides trying to claim the land by historical precedent.
The BBC has an interesting article on the troubles archaeologists face in Gaza. Besides a shortage of funding, sanctions keep them from getting many of the materials needed for excavation and conservation. War has also taken its toll, with Israeli bombs hitting the antiquities office and also damaging an early medieval mosaic in a Byzantine Church.
The road unfolds downhill, straight as an arrow, and appears to dead end at an otherworldly collection of sandstone buttes and mesas. We’ve all been here before, even if we’ve never stepped foot in the state of Utah. If you find yourself driving south on Utah Route 163, you will feel a strong sense of déjà vu about 12 miles north of Monument Valley. If the vista seems familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it before in dozens of movies, commercials and music videos. When a producer is looking for a symbol of the American West this is where they come.
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The story of how Hollywood discovered Monument Valley starts with Harry Goulding, an audacious entrepreneur with a fifth-grade education who established a trading post in the area with his wife in 1924. During the Great Depression, Goulding and his wife, “Mike” loaded up their Model A Ford and drove to Hollywood with a suitcase full of photos of Monument Valley. Goulding turned up unannounced at the office of John Ford, a legendary Hollywood producer and was reportedly asked to leave.
Goulding supposedly went out to his car, grabbed his bedroll, and laid it out in the waiting room of Ford’s office, announcing that he wasn’t going home until he was allowed to see Mr. Ford. The secretary called security, but the person who came to escort him out happened to be one of Ford’s site coordinators, and he was enthralled by the photos of Monument Valley that Goulding had spread out on a table.
Within weeks, Ford’s team was in the area filming “Stagecoach,” and he went on to shoot six more films in the area. John Wayne and other Hollywood luminaries were in the area so often that Goulding’s Lodge became their home away from home. Wayne, Ford and Goulding gave English language names to many of the area’s buttes and mesas, and hundreds of westerns have been shot in the area over the decades, not to mention scenes from a host of other movies including “Thelma and Louise,” “Easy Rider,” “Back to the Future III,” “Windtalkers,” and “Mission Impossible II” to name just a few. It was also the place where Forrest Gump got tired of running, and last year Johnny Depp was in town to film scenes from “The Lone Ranger,” which comes out in July.
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Even if you haven’t seen any of these movies, you’ve surely seen Monument Valley in a Road Runner cartoon, in a commercial or a music video. But even though the place seems immediately familiar, I wasn’t prepared for how awe-inspiring the scenery is. Everywhere you look, there are towering buttes and mesas, with every shade of red imaginable, and the panoramas are completely untarnished by tacky development. There is no Starbucks, McDonald’s or any other chain within many miles of this magical place.
The area gets just a fraction of the tourist trade that the Grand Canyon gets and, at least in the winter and summer, most of the travelers are from overseas. I was glad to have the place practically to myself in early January but I couldn’t help but think that Monument Valley deservers a lot more visitors.
If you want to get a taste of Monument Valley’s Hollywood connection, consider staying at Goulding’s Lodge, which has comfortable rooms with great views, not to mention John Wayne movies every night. Either way, definitely check out their free Trading Post museum, which is filled with interesting movie memorabilia and trading post artifacts. I also highly recommend their guided backcountry tour, which gives travelers an opportunity to see areas of the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park that are off limits to non-Navajos and offers insights into Navajo culture and traditions.
According to Rosie Phatt, my Navajo tour guide, locals never get tired of Monument Valley’s breathtaking vistas, but they have gotten used to all the celebrities who descend upon the area.
“Johnny Depp was here in April when they were filming scenes for TheLone Ranger,” she said nonchalantly. “He stayed in his own RV and nobody bothered him.”
As a native Californian, few things get on my nerves more than hearing the abbreviation, “Cali.” I don’t know why it irritates me so much, but I suspect it’s the knowing, insider-y tone that usually accompanies it. “Yeah, man, I just got back from a trip to Cali. It was hella cool.”
Aaargh. Also right up there is “Frisco.” Let me just tell you that Californians do not, ever, under any circumstances, refer to their state as “Cali,” nor “The City” as “Frisco.” San Francisco even famously had a laundromat called, “Don’t Call it Frisco.” I also dislike “Berzerkley,” “San Berdoo (San Bernadino)” and “The States (anyone in Hawaii referring to the Mainland).”
With these grating abbreviations in mind, I asked my Gadling colleagues what city nicknames bug them. The response was fast, furious and lengthy. Below, some highlights:
Anna Brones:Portlandia. Don’t even get me started.
Libby Zay: I personally hate “Hotlanta.” It’s also pretty annoying when people add “tucky” or “neck” as suffixes. As in, Fredneck, Maryland, or Brunstucky, instead of Brunswick, Ohio … I suppose Pennslytucky would be more of a geographic region.”
Author admission: Guilty as charged, Libby.
Kyle Ellison: “Lost Wages,” for Las Vegas, and “N’awlins” for New Orleans.
Elizabeth Seward:It depends on the day whether or not these bug me. I wish I didn’t know so many. “Beantown”; “Chi-town”; “Sin City”; “Nasty Nati (Cinncinati)”, “C-town (Columbus)”; “SoBro (South Bronx, oy)”; “Marighetto (what locals call my hometown of Marietta)”; “City of Angeles”/”LaLaLand”/”Tinseltown”; “The Big Easy.”
Elizabeth, I promise to never refer to my hometown of Thousand Oaks as “Thousand Jokes” again.
McLean Robbins:“Naptown” for Annapolis and “The District” from anyone not a local to Washington, DC.
Meg Nesterov:Calling cities the Paris/Venice/X/ of the North/East, et al.
Sean McLachlan, resident history buff: Missouri is often called “Misery,” generally by outsiders from northern states and occasionally by frustrated Missourians. The term actually has old roots. The 18th century French settlers in Ste. Genevieve found the place so boggy and full of mosquitoes that they nicknamed it misère.
“Why do some people not like that we have two mommies?”
That was the first thing that 7-year-old Faith Foster asked me when I walked into her family’s home, which is carved into a 400-foot-high, ¼-mile deep rock some 30 miles from the nearest town in rural southeast Utah. Faith’s parents aren’t lesbians; they are polygamists.
%Gallery-176236% Mention the word Utah in a word association game and the first thing people will say is “polygamy.” Utah natives get a little tired of the jokes and stereotypes, but there is no denying that polygamy, or “plural marriage” as its practitioners prefer to call it, is a part of the state’s history and culture. In 2008, the Denver Postestimated there were about 37,000 polygamists in the state. Although polygamy is illegal and Mormons outlawed the practice more than a century ago, authorities in Utah don’t typically prosecute consenting adults who take multiple spouses.
Shows like “Sister Wives” and “Big Love” and books like Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” have stoked the public’s interest in polygamy, and the ongoing saga of Warren Jeffs, the leader of the break-off Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who is currently serving a life sentence for sexually assaulting children, has brought further scrutiny into the polygamous lifestyle. (The stars of “Sister Wives” have filed a lawsuit, charging that Utah’s law banning polygamy is unconstitutional and on January 17, a federal judge will hear arguments in the case.)
I wanted to meet a polygamous family because it’s a part of the state’s heritage that I wanted to better understand. I also have a personal connection to a bigamist – now deceased – that I never learned about until recently.
My father’s sister, now deceased, married a man whom she thought was single in Delaware in the ’70s only to see him taken away by the police after just a few months of marriage. The knock on the door came after his first wife got wind of the fact that he’d married my aunt and he was imprisoned as a bigamist. My aunt, who was one of the kindest persons I have ever known, had no idea that he had another wife living in another state and severed all ties with him.
Muffins for Polygamists
How many artisanal muffins should one buy for a polygamous family that includes a husband, two wives and 13 children? That was the question I faced on a wintry morning last week at the Love Muffin Cafe in Moab, Utah, as I prepared to visit the Fosters at their lovely, cave-like home in a community called Rockland Ranch, which is about 45 minutes away from Moab, a mountain biking mecca and a base for Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.
The enticing muffins were $3 each but I didn’t want to shell out $40 or more for muffins, so I bought just a half dozen and resisted the temptation to eat any myself on the long drive out to Rockland Ranch.
I had arranged to meet Lillian Foster with a little help from Anne Wilde, a plural marriage advocate based in Salt Lake City who once owned a second home at Rockland Ranch, but could tell that she was apprehensive about meeting with me. When I called Lillian to set up the meeting, she explained that Enoch, her husband, and Catrina, Enoch’s first wife, were in Missouri.
“I’ll have to get my husband’s permission for this,” she said.
Somehow I doubted that he’d welcome a journalist into his home, and my fear magnified when I called a day later and Lillian said that she hadn’t heard from him. But shortly after I explained that I planned to visit Rockland Ranch whether she had time to show me around or not, Lillian called back and said that Enoch had agreed to the meeting.
Life on the Rock
Rockland Ranch is not the kind of place one would stumble across by accident. The community of about 20 families, most living in homes carved into a mammoth rock, is located on a dirt road off of a lonely, paved road that dead ends at a panoramic view of the Needles section of Canyonlands National Park.
As I turned off of Route 191 onto the Needles Overlook road, I noticed there was a parked car with a bumper sticker that seemed like a fitting introduction to the neighborhood. “Darwin is Dead. Jesus Lives.”
After a mile or two on the dirt road, a massive curved rock with solar panels on top and colorful houses carved within came into view. Bob Foster, Enoch’s father, a polygamist who had three wives, 38 children and 87 grandchildren, founded the community in 1979. According to Nancy Lofholm’s excellent story on the community in the Denver Postin 2008, Foster, who passed away four years ago, founded Rockland Ranch after being “excommunicated by the Mormon Church, stripped of his seminary teaching job and convicted of bigamy.”
According to Lofholm, Foster leased the Rock and the surrounding 80 acres from the state of Utah and spent the preceding decades “blasting and carving it into his vision of a Christian community ever since.” At one point in the ’90s, Foster even operated a B & B at the Rock that drew a mostly European clientele.
As I drove past a hand-painted 15 mph speed limit sign, I saw a home with 13 bikes parked in front and an American flag befitting a roadside Perkins restaurant and knew I’d arrived at the Foster family home.
A cute, freckle-faced girl answered the door and a mass of children scurried around the kitchen. Seven-year-old Faith proudly showed me her notebook, which had a full page filled with the same line – “I love my family very much.” I asked where their mom was and Faith, in turn, asked me why some people don’t like families with two moms. I was speechless and thankfully Lillian walked into the room moments later.
Dressed in fashionable low-slung jeans and the kind of country-western themed blouse that the star of the TV show “Nashville” might wear, Lillian, 25, immediately disabused me of the notion that only an unattractive woman with few marriage options would resort to being part of a plural marriage arrangement.
My first order of business was to make sense of the sprawling sea of cute, friendly kids whirling around the house. Lillian, who has been married to Enoch, 33, since she was 18, told me that she had five kids, ranging from 7-year-old Faith to 3-month-old Joseph. Catrina, Enoch’s wife of 15 years, has eight children, with a ninth on the way.
The Fosters home school their children – Lillian teaches the younger children and Catrina is responsible for the older ones. I was interrupting their school day but the kids seemed to view my arrival as a pleasant break from their routine.
Lillian gave me a tour of their impressive home, and if I hadn’t looked up at the natural rock ceiling, I might not have realized it was a cave dwelling. The family’s deep religious devotion was obvious – there was a bible on the table with their names embossed on it, and there was a sign taped to the bathroom door that read, “Did you think to pray?”
“Whose room is that?” I asked, pointing to a doorway with a sign that read “Man Cave.”
“That’s Enoch’s office,” Lillian said. “It’s kind of a joke because it’s actually the only part of the house that isn’t in the Rock.”
Lillian told me that she could show me her bedroom but not Catrina’s.
“Since she’s out of town, it just wouldn’t be right,” she explained.
After the tour, Lillian took me out for a tour of the community and told me a little about herself and the Rock. There were 18 homes, most of them built by her husband and some of his partners in the community, with four of them still under construction. It’s a mixed community with some polygamists and others who are in monogamous relationships.
Anyone who wants to live at Rockland Ranch has to pass a six-month “trial period” where they are expected to spend time in the community and ingratiate themselves with their future neighbors before they can buy a home.
Lillian took me into a few of the half-built homes, and showed off the community’s solar panels, their water system, swimming pools, playground and a place they call their “Charity House,” which has a non-profit, volunteer-run community convenience store, a small gym and an unfinished area that will some day house families that can’t afford to buy a house in the Rock.
We climbed up a series of wooden ladders so Lillian could show me the view from the top of the Rock and she made fun of how carefully I ascended the ladders.
“I thought you said you were a hiker,” she joked.
As I surveyed the alpine scenery, Lillian asked me how I felt about plural marriage and seemed to relax after I told her that while I would never want to have multiple wives, I saw no reason why other consenting adults shouldn’t be able to live however they saw fit.
“That’s why our country was founded,” she said, as we walked down towards the end of the Rock towards a cluster of solar panels. “It’s freedom of religion.”
I asked her how her parents (whom she said were now divorced, but had been in a monogamous relationship) felt about her marrying a married man at age 18.
“My father was thrilled,” she said. “Because he knew Enoch and he knows what a good person he is.”
She said that plural marriage helped her “become more like Christ” in that she had to accept and love Catrina, which strengthened her character. Lillian, who grew up in Kamas, Utah, claimed that she detected no jealousy on Catrina’s behalf when she joined their household and didn’t hesitate when I asked her if she’d mind if Enoch took a third or fourth wife.
“You don’t take more wives unless all parties agree to it, but if the Lord directs it then great,” she said.
I also asked Anne Wilde, who was in a polygamous relationship before her husband died, why she or any other woman would be willing to marry someone who already has a husband.
“Because it’s a principle that was in the Old Testament: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, and so forth,” she said. “There were 30 men mentioned in the Old Testament that had more than one wife. The Romans changed it to monogamy and we’ve had that ever since. But we believe it’s a biblical principle and Joseph Smith restored the principle of plural marriage. In order to receive the highest degree of the celestial kingdom you have to have more than one wife, living in harmony and righteousness.”
‘Against the Stereotypes’
Wilde said that polygamists don’t get marriage certificates after their first wedding; but they do have religious ceremonies, where they are given “priesthood sealings.” Some brides take their husband’s name, others do not; some dress in a traditional wedding gown but not always; and many couples host fairly standard wedding receptions, even if it isn’t a first marriage.
The Denver Post story asserted that five of Rockland Ranch’s families were exiles from Warren Jeffs’s compound in Colorado City, Utah, and Laura Lofholm, the author of the piece, told me in an email that Jeffs kicked the men out because he saw them as a threat to his harem. Lillian denied that anyone living at Rockland Ranch had a connection to Jeffs, whose group once numbered about 10,000 strong, and insisted that she found him and his followers as repellant as the rest of the country. Anne Wilde was equally emphatic in denouncing Jeffs.
“We’re against the stereotypes – child abuse, welfare abuse, underage marriages,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Salt Lake City. “Those things have taken place, mostly in the FLDS community thanks to Warren Jeffs. We are very much against those things. We’re law-abiding citizens in every way except when it comes to polygamy – but that’s one thing we won’t compromise on.”
I told Lillian that Faith had asked me why some people didn’t like the fact that they had two moms and she said the question probably came up because Faith told a stranger at the supermarket one day that she had two moms and the woman gave them a dirty look.
“I hated to have to tell her that some people don’t approve of our living situation,” she said.
Lillian asked me about my life and as I briefly outlined all the places I’ve lived in or visited, the gap between our life experiences seemed vast.
“I’ve been to all the neighboring states plus Missouri one time,” she said. “But I don’t get a chance to leave this rock very often.”
I asked Lillian if she could introduce me to other members of the community but she said no one else could see me on “short notice.” I felt like the family was trying to manage my visit but after saying goodbye I decided to wander around a bit on my own. But on a cold weekday morning there was no one out and about.
I drove around to the back of the Rock and was surprised to see four or five freestanding houses, plus two rather dilapidated trailers that Lillian never mentioned. Just as I was beginning to wonder why the backside of the Rock wasn’t on my officially sanctioned tour, my rental car got stuck in the snow.
When I left the house, Lillian was getting ready to nurse Joseph, and the last thing I wanted to do was go back to the house and tell her that I decided to snoop around the back of the Rock and now needed help pushing my car out of the snow. As I made a huge racket spinning my wheels in vain, I had a bad feeling that someone was going to come out of one of the trailers with a shotgun, but I eventually managed to push and maneuver the car out of the snow.
As I drove away from the Rock, I thought about Faith Foster and the question she asked me. As a country, we’ve grown much more tolerant of alternative lifestyles in recent years. But are we ready to tolerate plural marriage? Should we be that tolerant? And will society judge Faith and her siblings harshly because they have two moms and a dad? Someday, I hope to return to the Rock to find out.
