I had met Lea Danielsen in Salt Lake City. She, an Athens, Georgia girl whose father taught economics at the University of Georgia and who had converted to Southern redneckism which he now evangelised to high heaven, was doing a stint--I think it was a three month stint--with a health care corporation that placed doctors in positions around the US in Salt Lake. I was living an hour or so south of Salt Lake in Provo studying, researching, and teaching a class on social stratification at Brigham Young University.
I liked living in Provo—at 319 east and 100 north in Provo to be precise. I lived in a small studio apartment in the back of the two storey house. It was a short walk up to BYU, the Y, to the Sociology Department where I spent a lot of time. I also worked part-time and later full-time at Walt West Books on Columbia near the Desert Industries in Provo with the wonderful Walt West. It was one of the best used bookstores I have ever been in, and visited bookstores in Orem and Salt Lake.
For someone like me who was interested in American Christianity, American Protestantism, and Mormonism, the Y was a very stimulating intellectual environment. It was also a pleasant place to teach. One doesn’t go to BYU to party. One goes there to study. Several of the students I met and taught at the Y were as good as any of the best students at the University of Cambridge or the University of Toronto. One of the students I met—Cari Peterson (or was it Petersen?)—for example, knew Dutch, German, and Russian and she was only an undergraduate. She later went on to postgraduate work in German history at Indiana University in Bloomington. It was also a great place to learn about and research Mormonism, which was one of my favourite things to do at the time.
But back to meeting Lea, I met her when my friend Alan Avens, knowing my interest in American religions, “persuaded" me to go up to a Baha’i group meeting in Salt Lake. Lea was a Baha’i, a member of a fundamentalist, literalist, misogynist, and homophobic new religion that originated in Iran in the nineteenth century. I think Alan had met Lea earlier and thought that she and I would hit it off. And we did despite the fact that I was an atheist, something that would inevitably cause some friction between us as we travelled across the US and Canadian Wests.
Meeting Lea did for me what I suspect I did for her; we wanted to camp and hike but we didn’t want to do it alone. Soon she was visiting me in Provo and we were camping and hiking together. We, for example, spent a long weekend doing both at Arches National Park in Moab, Utah.
When Lea’s gig with the health corporation ended in Salt Lake and I decided to leave BYU, the more fundamentalist aspects of the university—the Y is this fascinating mix of fundamentalist religion and liberalism, religion and secular—didn’t sit well with me, we met up in Phoenix where Lea was doing a short stint in an Indian Health Service facility south of Phoenix. I had just written two editorials decrying the lack of free speech at the Y and thought it wise to get out of town. There we planned out what we were going to do next. We decided to drive from Utah to Grand Teton and Yellowstone and on to wider camping and hiking opportunities further north.
When we left Yellowstone we drove, after a several hour delay delay thanks to a 1 September parade in Gardiner, Montana, to Glacier National Park via US 89, a highway that winds its way through some of the most beautiful scenery in the US including the Grand Canyon, the Glen Canyon, Zion’s National Park, Provo Canyon, Cache Valley, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Grand Teton National Park, the Lewis and Clark National Forest, and finally Glacier.
The delay in Gardiner proved to be a problem. Before we got there it turned dark, rainy, and foggy and I was stressed driving along a road that curved from left to right and back again and back again. I was doing all the driving because Lea couldn’t drive a shift and my Camaro was a stick. When we reached Glacier Lea and I had to set up our tent in the dark and in the rain with the limited help of a torch or flashlight. Both of us thanks to the stresses we were under—stresses so intense that my back and neck were throbbing with pain as I drove to Glacier—threatened, thanks to the anger we felt toward each other and the recriminations we tossed back and forth, to break off our camping and hiking sojourn at the top of our voices. By morning, however, we had calmed down and our journeys were back on. Familiarity does indeed breed contempt but it also breeds companionship and friendship, even if, in the long run, sometimes only limitedly so.
After Glacier we crossed into Canada after we were detained by a border agent at the crossing because I had mace that my mother gave me because she feared me driving across the US in my car and mace was persona non grata in Canada. We eventually went, as those of you who have been reading these memoirs know already, to Waterton Lakes National Park, Edmonton, Jasper National Park, Yoho National Park, Banff National Park, Kootenay National Park, and Cranbrook, British Columbia. Eventually we crossed back into the US and headed to Rapid City.
The health care corporation that Lea worked for and which gotten her the short term gig in the Indian Health Service Hospital in Rapid set us up initially at the historic Alex Johnson hotel in downtown Rapid City. From this base we hiked in the South Dakota Badlands, the only place we ever ran out of water during one of our many hikes, visited the famous Wall Drugs in Wall, went to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial, went to look at the bison in Custer National Park, went to Deadwood, hiked one of the trails that circled around the Devil’s Tower National Monument in nearby Wyoming, where we saw four bald eagles and one human, got to experience the joys of hog heaven days in Sturgis, South Dakota and hiked the Black Hills. Additionally, I experienced the joys of getting into La Trobe University in greater Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Toronto, my dream school, for post-graduate studies
There are two hikes in particular that I remember Lea and I doing in the Black Hills. It was a beautiful November day in Rapid. It may have been somewhat overcast but the temperature was 10 degrees (mid-50s F). We thus decided on the spur of the moment, to head into the Black Hills to hike. Our first hike took us across and around boulders as we descended into a gorge. At the bottom of the decline I led the way across what looked like snow. It was actually ice. Upon stepping on it I almost immediately fell, got up, fell again, got up again, and fell again. When I got up for the third time I was in pain. Doctor Lea diagnosed my injury, broken ribs which there. Always ready, Lea wrapped a fabric bandage around my ribs and we, as we had to, hiked on.
It was not the first time I had been injured while camping and hiking. Somewhere—was it in Canada or perhaps in the Redwoods parks north of the beautiful Arcata California?—my eye was scratched by a tree branch while Lea and I were out hiking. It was incredibly uncomfortable experience thanks to the fact that my eye—I think it was my right eye—would not stop watering or blinking. Thankfully, Doctor Lea made me an eye patch and put it on me. Within a few days I was back to “normal”, as “normal”, that is, as an always outsider like myself can get.
After finishing the hike Lea and I decided to hike up the highest peak in the Black Hills, Harney Peak (now Black Elk Peak) and its over 2200 metres or over 7000 feet. The hike was amazing. It was snowing those incredible large snowflakes. The sky bathed the green, brown, and black pines and the brown mountain in purple. There was only one other person on the trail—he was coming down as we were going up.The snow kept rising and rising. It was magical. We returned to Rapid happy if rather worn and me in pain.
The corporation that Lea worked for decided to transfer us into a new hotel later during our stay in Rapid City. In our new hotel we were given an apartment with three upstairs bedrooms, a downstairs kitchen, and a living room complete with television on which I watched the uncensored version of one of the best television shows I have ever seen, Tales of the City, on PBS.
Eventually, Lea’s contract with the Rapid City Indian Health Service ended and we hit the road again. This time we were off to Winslow, Arizona. Lea flew and I drove down via Utah, where I spent a night in the Roberts Hotel, the same hotel I had stayed in when I arrived in Provo to look for a flat. On the way down to Winslow I listened to my Dallas Cowboys beat the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl on the radio.
Before I forget I should tell you, dear readers, that Lea and I did stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. We didn’t, however, see any flat-bed Ford or beautiful young lass slowing down to take a look at us. We were really happy, though, that Flagstaff was just an hour away.
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