life as understood

Two things happened over the past few months that have caused me to take a greater interest in my heritage. These are they:
1) my son was born, and his name is my name too.
2) Sarah and I made the decision to leave the great Eastern Idaho/Northern Utah region where my family has lived for generations. And as I admittedly take great stock in geography and how it defines people, I've been particularly desirous to take in as much of my beloved region as I can--the region that has shaped me so profoundly. In fact, all summer long, I've been wanting to take a heritage tour, a la my favorite movie, Everything is Illuminated.

The realization of said tour has taken place only slowly, in meandering steps that haven't left deep impressions. For some reason, I've purposefully been treading lightly. The hunt for the farmhouse in Kimberly, Idaho where my grandmother grew up with her homesteading Danish parents hit an anti-climax when my dad's weird cousin, the current inhabitant, didn't invite us in. I didn't push for it. I also lived literally across the street from my other grandmother's childhood home in Logan, Utah, for nearly two years without ever venturing in.

Frankly, it was enough for me to grasp things generally, until I found out about Russian Settlement. I knew I had to see it, touch it, breathe it in.

Nobody seems to know whether or not the hundred or so clannish religious outcasts from Russia who settled in Park Valley, Utah in 1914 had a name for their town. Like the village itself, the specifics are lost to history. Driven out by the rising Bolsheviks, they came first to California, and then became uneasy there following another incidence of persecution. Upon seeing a brochure for cheap land in which to "invest dimes and reap dollars" in Utah's far northwest corner, the troops picked up and re-settled. This photo, which I took last week, is probably exactly what they saw: nothing. 96 years later, the whole area remains empty--too wild to tame. Eventually, the poor band of Russians couldn't sustain themselves any longer and abandoned their desert settlement in 1918, just over three years after arriving in the supposedly lush valley.

As I wandered the dusty field where the town once stood, handling shards of bright purple glass and rusty rectangular cans, I wondered at the reasons that these people so quickly entered the realm of the forgotten. My grandfather, born in the valley in 1921, remembers the history, but he's one of only a handful, I suspect. It doesn't help that the area is ridiculously, romantically remote--seven miles on unmarked dirt roads to a town which in 2010 still boasts neither gas station nor cell phone reception. Limited grocery shopping and small doctors' offices are still an hour to two hours away.

What struck me more than anything was that, besides the remoteness, the main reason we don't remember Russian Settlement is that they didn't die, didn't eat each other like the Donners. As I surveyed the only existing "structure" of the town, a tiny picket-fenced cemetery with two graves--sisters--I realized that nobody else died. Though the harsh land so much as drove them away, only two out of a hundred people didn't make the long trek back to California, a remarkable feat for that time period. Their experiment failed, but they made a decision and conceded before things got really bad. History, it seems, doesn't shine upon societies that fail untragically.

After surveying the scene and its artifacts, I took a few more pictures of the dry landscape and turned the newly filthy Honda Civic back the other way toward the dirt "road" on which we arrived. By lingering at Russian Settlement, I delayed our own emigration to California for nearly two hours, but to me it was well worth it. The region may be behind me now, but as I've begun to introduce myself to others here on the coast, it seems a more palpable part of me than ever. I will be back to settle the arid land someday, I promise.