Rain. The wind blows the water against the window.
We set out for Temple Square, the center of the Mormon religion, before our flight in the afternoon. The square is walled in on all sides, and is crawling—somewhat benevolently—with young Mormons, who each have a black plastic nametag that includes the flag of…their home country? Country of origin? Nationality?
A young lady hands me a palm-sized postcard, a photograph of the temple, with the most bizarre, surely Photoshop-enhanced, purple cast to the sky behind it. We wander through their museum, through the spiraling-heavenward gallery in the North Visitor’s Center, where the enormous white statue of the Savior stands, surrounded by a gorgeous, if somewhat tacky, mural of the entire universe. Maybe there is some kind of piped-in narration, recounting the history of the heavens and the earth and we missed the beginning of it, or maybe there isn’t any, and we’re just supposed to sit here contemplating ourselves and basking in the wonderment. A few minutes pass, and we awkwardly get up, move through the aisles and back down the ramp.
The Mormons are all friendly and genuine. They are extremely happy to tell you about this building or that building, or to point out a piece of scripture that speaks of triumph through adversity or to the importance of family—one of them opens her Book of Mormon and points to a verse she’s highlighted in pink.
Outside, with the water sprinkling down on us, we stand in front of the Handcart Pioneer Monument, which stands in tribute to the thousands of Mormons who walked to Salt Lake City from Iowa in the 1850s. In the sixth grade, my friends and I were obsessed with the computer game Oregon Trail. Your quest begins in Independence, Missouri, when you purchase extra sets of clothing for your family, as much food and spare parts as your wagon can carry, and a team of 6-10 oxen, who will pull you across the land. This is not, I suddenly realized, the way many of the pioneers did it. Most of them walked. How many of them could afford oxen? Even less could afford extra clothes. It’s inspiring, this massive migration of people from one place to another. They made the difficult—the frightening, the only—choice, to set out for whatever challenges and hardships and frozen dirt awaited them. Because they had had enough.
We are too comfortable. We need more of that motion, that desperate, creative energy to make a new and better life each other.
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In the end, we drove more than 1600 miles—265 more and it would equal the one-way distance from New York to Salt Lake. But that’s another trip, isn’t it? As the plane begins its descent, curving across the sparkling surface of nighttime Brooklyn, I mistake the wing’s navigation light for the moon.
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