Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

By Karin Anderson

"This masterwork flouts expectations."
—FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review

Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened mother traveling an evocative route through the arid West. As her narration fades, the ancestral dead speak directly: a ragged Mormon boy yearns after a Shoshone family. A defeated polygamous wife shuts her mouth for good. A hoarder's queer son demolishes the artifacts of his lonely Idaho childhood. Descendants of British squatters sustain family delusions until a devastating suicide shatters their royal dreams. An elite colonial clan gradually awakens to the stark blue of the Great Salt Lake. The dead yield no answers, but they conjure vivid mortal moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.

KARIN ANDERSON is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, heretic, and English professor. She hails from the Great Basin of Utah.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Torrey House Press
• Release date: May 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781948814041

Karin Anderson

Karin Anderson has worked for the New York Times and the Washington Post. She has received numerous national awards from Pictures of the Year and the National Press Photographers Association.  www.karinanderson.com

Book preview

HOMING

I get paid to call attention to the beautiful mysteries of life. Here’s one: isn’t it weird that I trade words for money? I’ve racked a slim retirement fund by making certain noises at certain hours. Certain marks on certain screens. But five years off the finish line I don’t know that I have the stamina to collect. How many more earnest lies can I produce?

I tell my children so often they hear it as maternal white noise that every person who gets dropped onto this planet will trudge through sorrow. But not everybody gets to take in the goodness we’ve seen. And not many can keep hoping for more. We’re not starving. We’re not yet fleeing our homeland. We live in the remnants of a beautiful place. We love each other even as we drift in strange directions. Lies, maybe. Earnest, yes.

I used to believe the stories we told were more or less reliable maps of the universe. But the longer I look the weirder they get. A story is an incorporation of ghosts, morphing over the huge landscapes of our very small lives. I don’t believe in ghosts but even so they interrupt when I wish to think about something else. Sometimes I fight my way through a crowd just to mutter Good Morning to the actual bodies at the kitchen counter.

A homeless guy at the Salt Lake Central station usually reaches the peak of dispute with his own legion just as I catch the commuter train for work: Oh yeah? You have no idea what you’re talking about you crazy fuck! Fuck you! Get the fuck away from me, you disgusting fucks!

The train comes in. People get off. People get on. The train pulls out. Sometimes he’s still there when I return, but by evening he’s either beaten back the disgusting fucks or this is the hour they’ve overcome him. I believe he keeps the plaza safe for the rest of us and I’m grateful.

I used to watch my now-dead father walk around the house and yard quietly retorting to his personal ghosts. I smirked but now I answer to him in my own hours. He shows up in various ages and moods. He comes in settings and scenes. Although we come from Utah and Idaho, my early memories take shape in southern California. I was three when my parents rented a little pink house in Santa Ana, four when we moved to Canoga Park (a pomegranate tree from the yard behind ours draped its generous branches over the fence), and midway through kindergarten the year they bought a two-story house in Brea, in a brand-new subdivision shaved out of shady Steinbeck-era avocado groves.

In Canoga Park I went to school with children who were mostly as pale-faced as I was, but there were kids across the tonal spectrum. My just-older sister Marti had a friend named Allison Toyota, willowy and glamorous. Her shining black hair was sculpted into bangs and a clean pixie line at the back of her neck. Allison was smart like Marti. Allison spoke to me like a nice sister, petting my shoulders and smiling down from her slender height. I was enamored and wished for such a friend of my own. During playtime in the kindergarten yard, on the sunny edge of the kidney-shaped sandbox, Mrs. Updegraaf told us to reach for one another’s hands and I obeyed, happy to make contact with a girl who resembled Allison Toyota. But she jerked her hand away and pushed me backward. She said, You don’t hold my hand! You’re not my friend! and turned to beckon a flowing princess with yellow ringlets who promptly sprang to. They giggled and turned in my direction and the girl with ringlets said, We hate you! You think you’re so smart!

I learned nothing from any of this because my thinking was rudimentary and my emotions were as nuanced as the eight-color box of extra fat crayons allotted to my classroom desk.

Also in my class was my friend Sally, who lived down the street from us. We lived in a tossed-up tucked-back house. Siblingless, Sally lived with her mother and father in an adjoining culde-sac. Their house was big and in my world deluxe. Sometimes Marti and I fantasized about being an only child with the whole run of a mansion, so we wistfully pictured ourselves in Sally’s position. Sally looked enough like Corey on Julia that I understood my friend was black, but I could make no sense of this because her mother did not look at all like the nurse I loved on the TV series. My own mother wore a crisp white dress like Julia’s to work, and a cap with a velvet stripe that I happily understood to signify the most important kind of nurse. Later I heard my parents mention that Sally was adopted, which explained why Sally’s parents did not look how I had imagined. My parents also noted, in the kind of conversation parents don’t believe children listen to, that Sally’s family was Catholic. My Mormon blood congealed; I knew her family was doomed without the true gospel.

Sally was fun and diverting, and sometimes annoying and bossy and complicated just like the rest of my friends. I attended her birthday party, a large affair with art supplies and paintbrushes and a culminating show for our parents. We sat at a long table covered with butcher paper. I liked to draw and paint. I quickly became engrossed in whatever it was I was depicting, and every time I dipped the brush into the water cup I blew on it gently to stop the dripping. From across the table Sally told me to stop it because she was getting sprayed a little, but I kept it up because I meant no harm. And anyway I was one of the guests, so I was surprised when her mother scolded me for being stubborn and rude. It took me a long time to learn something from this: for one thing, my tribe clings fiercely to the intentional fallacy. No harm meant, no harm done. So don’t tell us to stop it.

Later, after we moved to Brea, our mother sat Marti and me down for a little talk she must have been planning for a long time. She said, Did you two know that your friend Sally was a little Negro child?

I looked at my sister, who looked back at me with her eyebrows raised. We had a sister moment that would evolve into teenage eye rolling. It was as if our mother had set us down to explain, Did you two realize that Tommy is your little brother?

Yeah, I said.

Marti said, Uh-huh.

Our mother, who was gentle and smart and tough, always well meaning, looked peeved and said, Oh, for heaven’s sake. You did not!

Marti and I had a sense at least that there were stories out there beyond our own. This was the United States of America, 1967. Our father came home from work to watch The Huntley–Brinkley Report (I thought it was Honey–Brinkley). Dad read a magazine called Time and sometimes we opened the old issues to scrutinize the photographs. Hippies were a ubiquity beyond the sidewalks of our shiny new suburbia. Although our parents refused to elaborate, we all pointed hippies out when we saw them. Once, driving out of the Malibu tunnel, my edgy-in-Utah, square-in-California parents, three little kids in the back seat, had been stopped still on the highway by a massive love-in. A churning sea of barely clad people surrounded our car. I perceived them as grownups. A skinny white guy wearing a furry kitchen rug as a vest seated himself on the hood of our little Ford Rambler. His long hair flowed like dirty water as he leaned in to wave at us kids. A creamy brown woman in a bikini top and enormous Afro strolled to the side windows and blew us all a warm kiss. Her teeth were white and her eyes dark liquid brown.

Our father flexed his square clean jaw.

Bodies milled and gyrated around us in a hot smear of humanity. Peace and love and sweating stink.

What’s happening? my sister asked. How do they know us?

Hippies! our father said, staring straight forward, gripping the wheel as if he were still driving.

"What are hippies?" I had been wondering this for a long time.

"Those are hippies! Dad said. Right there! Take a look!" Tommy gazed from his car seat and fell asleep in the heat. That’s all we got from our father.

Our dad spent two years as a Mormon missionary in the humid green maze of North Carolina. He’d already served time in the military, stationed in Japan during the Korean War. He’d lost his father a few years back to an exploding jet en route to Cairo. At twenty-three he was a bit older than the standard missionary. I don’t know why he decided, late, on serving a mission. But then again I do. We resist and cling; he was answering to a dead, angry, exacting father.

Missionary dress code at the time required the white shirt and tie still characteristic of the young Elders who sift the streets of nearly every city on the planet. My dad didn’t love the tie, especially in the Southern heat but he said he could live with it. Much worse, in 1958 the missionaries were compelled to wear Rat Pack fedoras well beyond their fashion wave. Once, Dad said, he and his companion stopped their bikes at a crosswalk in Raleigh, waiting for a green light beside a bouquet of campus girls on the sidewalk. My dad had an easy grin, perfect teeth, and a manly cleft chin. His current companion was long and lean, a scarecrow under a Bing Crosby hat. Elders and coeds eyed each other, everybody coy. Elder Anderson shot a grin toward a pretty brunette. The girl smiled wide and sang, "M-I-C-K-E-Y …"

Peals of high-pitched laughter. The light changed and the Mormons hit the pedals.

* * *

Grand entertainment in our home in 1967, Brea, California, consisted of watching our father wrangle a roll-up tripod screen while our mother closed the curtains against the suburban light. One of us kids was granted the honor of flipping the switch on the industrial-strength green projector. The hot little fan inside emitted a faintly chemical breeze. The sculptured avocado-hued carpet scratched our crisscrossed ankles but it didn’t matter. This was a magic show in a way my own children, who carry telephones with tiny movie screens, who take pictures and post them to five hundred people in a couple of digital moves, will never appreciate.

I loved seeing the pictures of my sister Marti and me snug and adorable in snapwaist footie pajamas, or dolled up in Easter bonnets on Utah’s Capitol Hill or running on tiny legs toward the receding California surf. In 1967 I turned five, so those photos were arrested fragments of a very recent past. For me they encompassed all the time there ever was. But for our parents they were vivid moments in the continuum of much longer lives.

I disliked the glowing images of my father in a tie and hat. What is now to me a charming photograph of a young man feeding pigeons in a deciduous park was vaguely ominous then. The fedora signified an intractable past. I strained to see beyond the boundaries of the screen, shifting sideways and craning my neck to perceive something more. It seemed my parents could float right into the scenes. Spurred by the visual prompts, they carried on with stories. They left us children behind in their murmurs and concurrings. They laughed at private jokes. In those moments they were people from another world and it frightened me. Maybe I caught some metaphorical whiff of nonbeing, the voids before and after a brief slideshow. It was a world in which I was not even a premonition. Nor my sister nor little brother. My youngest sister Teri is similarly unnerved by photographs of us before her time: she just doesn’t exist.

It strikes me now that the brightly lit images held the sweetest seasons of my mother’s life. She sent the generous excess our way but her heart went to our father. Maybe I knew we were only a byproduct of the central show. That’s enough! Make a new one now! I’d command, in 1967, back when I was five with my vivid young parents. And a new bright image would appear.

On a brief and overdue sabbatical I hit a writer’s block I couldn’t afford, anchored by a belated existential crisis that I had neither time nor resource to quell. Cause of crisis is typical fifty-four-year-old divorced white woman/working mother stuff: I can’t deny I’m aging. I have not lived sensually enough and maybe it’s too late. I love someone but am now too damaged to configure.

I broke my damn leg acting like a teenager and I’m not the right age to bounce back.

I’m packing too many postponements to ever relieve the pressure.

I want my mostly grown kids to get on with their own lovely ludicrous lives and leave me to salvage mine. And, God, I do not know how to let them go. I cannot perceive my own features on the other side of the gulf.

I no longer know who to be.

I can reason myself out of an absurdist impasse better than anyone. Not looking to chat about it but this one is potent and threatens to exterminate everything precious. Bills and to-do lists were not distracting enough so my stopgap response was to get in the car and drive, like any self-respecting scopophilic American. This in the season of the new Sagebrush Rebellion in which fringe Mormon cowboys are convinced that God has called them to lead civil war against the government. This in the season of freeway billboards that say GIT SOME Guns and Ammo and barn walls painted with Civil War in the West! Call 1-800-KIL FEDS. This in the season of planning my strategy for easing as many students out of the classroom as I can before the one with the right mix of passionate intensity blasts me into a red smear on the whiteboard.

I’ve spent a lot of time, post-Emersonian that I am, trying to figure out why it is that living in beautiful scenery so often turns human beings into violent fanatics. It’s not what Wordsworth predicted, or Thoreau or Whitman or Brigham Young. Hawthorne maybe. I believe we live in a season of peculiar and mounting hate. Still, I live here and I intend to gape.

February is cold where I live so the best direction for low-budget wandering was south. The southernmost city in the United States I had an alibi for driving toward was Safford, Arizona, where my father was born. I had never been there. Dad’s memories of his very early years were vibrant as a magic lantern. He had a roster of little stories set in that town, all stocked with the charm of first consciousness.

Here’s one: at the elementary school there were two lunch lines. One was for Anglo kids, the other for Mexican. Anglos got hamburgers or meat loaf, limpid spaghetti or macaroni and cheese. Mexican kids got tamales and tacos and tightly wrapped burritos with roasted chiles and refried frijoles. Little Tommy wanted lunch from the other side.

No, you can’t eat that, the teachers said, steering him firmly back to the Anglo line. That food is too hot for kids like you.

Probably that’s why we all crave Tabasco.

Here’s another: the men and boys in the Safford Mormon ward went to pick beans at the Church Welfare Farm. Seven-year-old Tommy’s job was to guard the stash of ripe watermelons cooling in the dammed-up stream until the picking was done.

Don’t let anybody make off with these, he was instructed. Be a big boy and keep them safe.

Tommy picked up a stick. He patrolled the stream banks, vigilant and self-important. Soon enough he spotted a Mexican kid about his age, creeping through the tamarisk.

Get out of here! Tommy shouted. He waved his arms. He whacked the ground with the stick. He started to holler for reinforcements but the muchacho shot away like a cottontail.

Tommy reported his heroics when the big men came back.

Aw, said the stake president, Spencer Kimball. You should have let him have one.

As far as I know my father never went back to Safford after his family moved north to Salt Lake City, closer to home folks. I don’t believe any of his siblings did. My grandmother Connie, who inhabits much of my own early memory, was troubled by the little grave where they’d left a newborn daughter. At one point she looked into having the tiny body exhumed and transported to the family plot in Idaho but the coroner in Safford recommended against it. Likely the wooden casket and its contents were reduced to dust. Maybe it was the stark gravesite that kept anyone from returning—a story too poignant to be disturbed.

Or maybe Safford was Eden for my father’s original family. The place before the defining sorrows.

Could have been the formidable distance. I discovered on this long drive, seventy-four years after my grandparents loaded their young family of seven into the car and left that dead malformed baby behind, that it wasn’t just the miles. The geography is staggering, only partly what I had come to expect from Arizona. Grand landscape reassures me that Why Be is an unanswerable question, and so I tend to stop asking for a while and feel better. Eighty or so years on a planet like this one is such a puny interval it usually seems reasonable—even sweet—to see it through.

I’m generally satisfied to believe we exist to watch sunlight strike Permian planes. But I was driving south in a chokehold of personal crisis so maybe I wasn’t myself.

* * *

In the middle of my first grade year, Dad took a job writing contracts for Morton–Thiokol in northern Utah and we migrated toward home circumference. We lived for a year in Perry, a tiny orchard town just below Brigham City, a reasonable commuting distance from Thiokol set on the north shores of the Great Salt Lake. Since California schools taught children to read in kindergarten, I was the only kid in the class who could make out every word in the first grade reader. Again this generated accusations that I thought I was smarter than everyone else, but I feared the opposite. I was haunted by a singular terror that I was the only person who didn’t understand what was going on. It was a language thing. I was endlessly quelling a notion that words meant one thing to me and something else to other people. I was afraid I had learned the language wrong, that I had linked intelligible sounds to the wrong objects and therefore assembled different meanings from everyone else. A whispering black line occluded each sentence I deciphered. I had begun to avoid television because I feared internalizing the wrong messages, pitching beyond communal human comprehension.

A freakish moment after I started school in Utah worsened my anxiety. The first day on the playground of Perry Elementary I heard a sickening noise. I didn’t even register it as a sound. Hearing it felt like the time I had bitten into a brightly colored ornament at Christmas. I knew the candy red cherry wasn’t real fruit but I had anticipated the sensation of smooth plastic resistance against my teeth. Instead the surface gave way to a hardened foam that shot a sharp chemical taste up through my sinuses, down my throat, and right on into my bloodstream. Queasy for hours, I believed I would die of poison but I was too ashamed of my childish misjudgment to report to an adult who could rescue me.

That is, I would rather die than reveal how stupid I was. And now on the playground I was seized by that same chemical revulsion at the sound of an electronic bell, a tone I had never heard and could not process. All the other kids turned and ran to line up and our teacher, a very old woman named Mrs. Snow, shouted at me to get over here this minute like a good girl and I rushed to comply.

Mrs. Snow had a way with first graders. She was tough and unsentimental and walked with the authority of years of experience with six-year-olds. During reading time kids in the class would get up and walk over to my desk, pointing to the page. I read the hard words for them: something, marbles, tricycle. But I feared I would get in trouble for doing someone else’s work, or that I would incriminate a potential ally. Mrs. Snow paid no mind but it worried me and finally I asked her, Is it okay if I tell them the words?

Don’t you want to help your friends?

Relieved of my righteous concern, I also convinced myself I was in league with a teacher who approved of my capacities, which was a good thing. But I also remember that year as a stream of little n----- boy stories and jokes from my beloved teacher. Mrs. Snow loved Kipling’s Just So Stories, which makes even less racial sense now that I think about it than it did in the first place. Once Mrs. Snow brought us Rice Krispie treats, which she said were exactly the same treats a little n----- boy from some oft-read-to-us-story hid in his pockets for the friendly elephants. The word, I knew, was a very bad word and a mean one but her use didn’t quite seem to be mean so much as something else I did not understand. It worried me, all the time, weighed upon my mind, but I did not know how to question or protest.

Wagging her finger like Shirley Temple, Mrs. Snow told us tales of a little boy named Georgie-Go-Wash-Your-Face, warning that we might ourselves be mistaken for little n----- children if we came to school without using soap and water the way we ought. I understand that this word is not appropriate for the twenty-first-century page, not even in blank form. Yet it was appropriate for first graders in Perry, Utah, a Mormon town so devoid of ethnic variation in the 1960s that I had to look up, in my fifties, which Native American tribe had coexisted with my Scandinavian ancestors in that vicinity only a century before.

Couched in caveats and qualifications, that word inflected our playground language, foyer talk at church, family reunion jeremiads, jokey asides by high school teachers. I recall my aunt, a strong, generous, hardworking woman unloading in the company of her sisters: she was so damn tired of n----- women screaming at her in her own home, so sick of putting up with those banshee howls every time her kids put a record on the player. Her kids—the same ones who listened to Aretha Franklin and Sly and the Family Stone and Ike and Tina Turner—our cool big cousins who dazzled us with their snark and sophistication, once asked Marti and me when we were visiting from California how we could stand to live in the same place as n-----s. My sister and I were stunned at the blunt force of their terms. But none of the adults, including our parents who probably didn’t want to call out other people’s children, balked at the usage and so we said thinly, It’s fine, although as I’ve said we didn’t intersect much beyond backdrop.

Later that night before bed our mother reminded us that it really was not a nice word and we definitely should not use it, but our cousins didn’t know better and it was none of our business what other people said. So we should leave it at that. And, she added, no matter what make sure you never use that word around an actual Negro.

Whatever else it did (plenty), that word iterated my early fear that language was more brick than window. I longed for, and feared, access beyond.

But if misinformation counts, that season in Perry was a soaker. In review: I learned that little elephants crave Rice Krispie treats. I internalized a Pavlovian response to electronic tones, laying the groundwork for a future relationship with smart-phones. I learned that if I didn’t wash my face I would become a little black child, which I knew wasn’t true but sometimes, in that early season of wondering why I was this but not that, or that, or that—I wished it were.

Also I learned that there might be more to procuring babies than prayerfully asking Heavenly Father for one after marriage. Although I didn’t learn exactly what that extra step was, I crossed one explanation firmly off the list, thanks to a kid named Rory.

On that sunny afternoon, late snow in patches on greening lawns, Marti and I streamed out of the church with all the other kids after Primary, a Tuesday after-school riot. Children stomped the tender lawn or convened on asphalt and sidewalks as we waited for our mothers to retrieve us.

The old church in Perry was a monument. Oldtime red brick, leaded windows, stone foundation. The white steeple lifted the building from the pioneer grove like a tall ship. Rory was climbing the huge ponderosa on the north lawn. A born professor, he shouted a new interesting item of information at each succeeding branch. Topping out near the steeple’s height, Rory grabbed a slender branch with one hand and swung himself outward in a grand gesture.

And I know something about moms and dads! I know how they make babies!

Sister Pedersen steamed off the church steps where she had been doling out farewells. She huffed up the lawn to sight the boy in the foliage. Segments of Rory were lit up by the late afternoon sun.

She craned her neck. She cupped her hands to her mouth like a megaphone. Rory! Shut your mouth and come down from there!

Rory crowed like a bantam. My sister told me what they do when all the kids are asleep!

Rory! Come down now! I’m going back inside to call your father! Do you want him to come here and take a belt to your behind?

Rory beamed downward and posed a question to all but Sister Pedersen.

Don’t you want to hear how moms and dads make babies?

The big boys, fifth and sixth graders, answered in chorus from the base of the tree. Yessss!

More Primary ladies materialized to stand in an urgent colorful row of blowing skirts.

Rory! they shouted in unison. You hush and come down! Down! This minute!

Okay! Rory called. Here! It! Goes!

The women flanked, traveling fast toward a gaggle of children, grabbing arms, trying to herd us back in the building before Rory could fill us in on the dirty secrets of reproduction. But it was too late.

Here’s what they do! They take off their clothes and then they rub their bums together. And that’s how babies get inside moms!

Sister Pedersen looked about to faint.

Sister Tibbets stood on a stump to address us, as if we were suddenly going to sit in neat rows and hearken. That’s not how it happens, boys and girls! Do you hear me! Rory is incorrect! Do not go home and tell your parents that this is how babies are made, because you will be one hundred percent incorrect!

Another teacher, a very tall one, strode to the tree in her skirt and blouse, shoes off. She looked determined to climb up there herself to apprehend the criminal. I was more invested in what would happen to Rory once she grabbed him than in entertaining the bizarre vision he had invoked. Probably like every other kid in our baby-making community I had mulled over questions of small siblings. But Rory’s explanation was so outlandish that I dismissed it outright. For once I was confident I was in on the true facts. My parents would never, ever do that—and yet anyway here we were, Marti and me, and Tommy at home, fully existing. So what now, Rory?

I did want to see whether that grown lady could climb a tree. But Marti tugged at my arm and pointed to our car, and there was our familiar (and pregnant with another brother) mother, beckoning.

My personal stereotype of Arizona hatched itself in a visit to my mother’s parents when Marti, Tommy, and I were small. Our grandfather Carlie Lenz was an oldtime Idaho rancher. Born in the right skin, endowed with the right inclinations in a magic historical moment, he was the real thing if there ever was one. What John Wayne pretended to be. But by the time I knew Grandpa he only kept a few cattle. A few for him was a hundred. He smelled like Pendleton wool. He wore bolo ties and oval silver belt buckles. His voice was a hoarse rumble.

Grandma Ellen told us to call her Gram because Grandma made her sound old. Her hair was orange and she wore cat-eye glasses and red lipstick. Compared to our unadorned and methodical Grandma Anderson, Gram Lenz was exotic. Gram fashioned herself after Nancy Reagan and Jane Russell. She knew how to pose for photographs: turned to the side a bit, shoulders squared forward, one hand behind her back, feet in a handsome ballet stance. Later when we started to go bad my siblings and I entertained each other by trying to catch her off guard with a Polaroid camera, but it was a waste of precious film.

By the time my generation appeared, Grandma and Grandpa Lenz were in the habit of leaving the subzero winters of southeastern Idaho for the sunny climate of Arizona. They were, Gram explained, Snowbirds: retired people who flocked to warm places during the cold northern months. My grandparents had picked up this pattern earlier than some of their contemporaries as their youngest daughter, my aunt Louisa, suffered from respiratory stress. Twenty degrees below zero in an Ashton January was in her case life threatening. Far more fascinating to Marti and me, however: Aunt Louisa had a glass eye. I imagined it was magic, like a crystal ball. I wished for one too.

I used to think I remembered the Christmas we spent in Mesa, but it’s likely extrapolation from the square Kodak prints, 1965. Marti and I wear stripey jumpers of many colors and black Mary Janes with ankle socks. We’re looking sharp in our white-rimmed sunglasses. Tommy is a baby in our mother’s arms. Dad sports a crewcut and chinos. Mom is slender in a formfitting floral dress. Gram and Grandpa and mostly grown Aunt Louisa stand with us as tall two-armed saguaros surrender in the background. Later in Idaho summer, a picnic drive to the transparent plunging Mesa Falls in Island Park below Yellowstone caused me to believe that