Letter from Utah: Part 9 of 12

This post is part 9 in a series of 12. You can download the entire essay by clicking here, or you can read the serial installments as they appear.

We meet my friend, the writer Rob Williams*, in St. George, a town of nearly 70,000, where he is doing research for a novel. We check into the Super 8 Motel, and find a Thai restaurant down the road. Despite being so close to closing time, they seat us quickly and the food is warm and good—and the company is lovely. At some point during the meal, the restaurant staff begins to move all the chairs around into a circle, away from us, but still in earshot. Everyone sits, and someone—the manager? The owner?—starts to lecture the kitchen staff about sending entrées and appetizers out in the wrong order. Then he starts delivering a strange, rhetoric-rich speech on why working at this particular restaurant, with this particular crew, is important, character-building work. He asks everyone in the circle to talk about how this job has made them better people. “Well…” we hear one of the waitresses say, “I know I do not work here for the money, so it must be something bigger.” Her tone indicates that she does not know what that something might be. They start vacuuming around our feet. Point taken.

The next morning, after a hearty breakfast at the Bear Paw Café, and compulsory photographs of all of us in front of the big Bear Paw sign, the three of us drive up to Snow Canyon, a National Park where much of the “The Conqueror” was shot, a 1956 Howard Hughes-produced flop starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan.

We climb up onto the red sand dunes where mothers are playing with their children. “Can you feel the radiation?” Rob says.

In the early 1950s, the United States Government began aboveground nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, only about 130 miles west of St. George. One of the tests, the detonation of a thirty-two-kiloton monster known as “Dirty Harry,” would cause citizens in St. George to remark on the sudden appearance of an odd metallic taste in the air. (Residents of Three Mile Island would note the same mysterious tang on the wind.) Dick Powell, director of “The Conqueror,” died of cancer in 1963. John Wayne died of cancer in 1979. The film’s other stars, Agnes Moorhead and Pedro Armendariz, also died of cancer. By the mid 1980s, 91 of the 220 cast and crew members had developed some kind of cancer, and roughly half of those 91 had died. Lots of things come into play with something as unpredictable as cancer—John Wayne smoked five packs a day—but these are significant numbers. In the nearby town of La Verkin, farmers reported that after fallout wafted through their grazing fields, their goats, literally, turned blue. William Sleight, a longtime resident of St. George, wrote about the blasts in his diary:

May 19, 1953:
Beautiful morning. We left St. George at 4 a.m. for Las Vegas, Nevada. We were watching for the A-Bomb explosion on the desert north of Las Vegas. At 5 a.m., just dawn, we saw the flash which lit up the skies, a beautiful red, visible for hundreds of miles away. It was a beautiful sight, a hundred miles or more away from it….I drove for ten minutes, then stopped the car on the roadside, got out and soon after we heard the report of the blast. It rumbled as thunder, not quite the same as other blasts we have heard. This is the 9th in a series of ten, another next week. It makes me shudder when I think of what misery we may face when men start dropping these terrific bombs on our cities. Some fanatics are now clamoring for their use in Korea.

After we came back on Highway 91, we were stopped and a young man examined our car with an instrument to see if we had picked up any radioactive dust while traveling on the Highway. Found none so we missed a free car wash (which would have been appreciated). . . .

Returned to St. George in a high wind, which seems to always follow these explosions.

*Okay, here you are Rob. Are you fucking happy now?