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| Beryl Utah The streets are carved into the desert, but most of the blocks remain empty. |
A few years ago I was tasked with visiting some of the most remote places in Utah. I used to live in Cedar City, and I felt fortunate whenever my job kept me close to home. So when I saw Beryl, Utah on my travel list, I was happy about it.
Beryl, a sparsely populated community of about a thousand people -- two people per square mile -- was just over an hour away, to the west. To get there, I drove along a winding little two lane highway that leads over and between all the juniper covered hills that separate Cedar City from the vast west desert, then I entered into the flat desert valley.
To look at Beryl from above one can see how desolate it is. It is brown and gray. Even the sagebrush has taken on the color so that everywhere you look, there's no escaping the desert except perhaps for some blue mountains far in the distance, or a stark circular splash of green where a farmer ekes out a living growing alfalfa.
Going to that part of Utah gave me a feeling of desolation that day. I had been out there to fish at a few reservoirs and enjoyed the solitude. But that day I felt a sensation different from solitude. It wasn't loneliness. It was a kind of despair, but a despair that had no clear reason for existing. As I drove north on that highway and looked eastward where I would soon have to turn onto a dirt road, I was invaded by this feeling.
The road I needed to find was not marked. It was called 3200 North. Since the streets in rural Utah are placed about one-tenth of a mile apart in a grid, and numbered accordingly, I turned right onto a dirt road when I reached about 3.2 miles from the main street. The road was made of packed dirt but it soon became a soft sand path that stretched as far as I could see. There was not much else. There were no houses that I could find. In a few minutes I arrived at an intersection and stopped the car. I was lost. Although I was prepared for some backtracking and retracing of steps, I had not prepared to find myself in the middle of a desert without any homes in sight. I hoped my phone could help me, but there was no service.
I stepped out of the car and walked across the intersection, and I looked east toward the highway. A lone pickup truck was driving north, and soon the sound of its engine faded, and I was all alone except for the quiet hum of an airplane somewhere in the sky.
I turned east, where there was only more brown and gray valley, and beyond that, colorless hills. There was no sign that anyone lived in that lonely wilderness. But it was my job to drive out there and find out. Soon, I was driving through the sand again, looking for signs of life.
After a minute I saw a lump of gray far away, where some barren trees poked above the sagebrush. I drove toward it, turning down whatever path I hoped would get me there, until I came upon an ancient, broken shack.
The shack was the same color as everything else, and was probably abandoned by some failed farmer a hundred years ago. It looked like an old farm house, but over the decades, the rotted siding was replaced with plywood, and now the plywood was a decade or more old, gray, warped, with its layers splitting apart, but held together with rusted nails. The roof seemed to be original, the ancient pine shingles were broken, and sheets of plastic covered parts of the roof, glued down with tar. Old pallets pinned the plastic down to keep it from tattering in the wind.
Someone lived there, according to my reports. A middle-aged woman. All alone.
The wooden gate had been ripped from its hinges a long time ago, perhaps by the wild wind that often blows through the area. The wood had rotted in the dirt for a long time. There was a breeze that day, and an old wind-chime hung from the eave of the tiny porch with only two little pipes that rang softly at irregular intervals. There were stacks of tires, and pallets, and rusty old appliances everywhere. A pile of live-catch traps lay on one side of the yard. One trap contained the skeleton of a cat, still wearing its fur.
The door opened. A short, emaciated woman invited me in. I sat on a decrepit little sofa. She sat on a small bench, and didn't bother to move all the newspapers and magazines before she sat down. She had dark hair and was missing half her teeth. Although she was still in her forties, she had deep crevices in her skin, and looked much older than she was. The smell...it was something I couldn't identify.
We discussed what I was there to discuss. It only took a few minutes. She was nervous and jittery, but she answered all my questions. Then I was ready to leave, but she asked me to stay a few more minutes.
"Do you know much about drugs?" she asked.
"No," I said.
"Ever heard of meth?"
"Yes."
She looked at the floor, blank-faced, then she gazed at me as if she were starved. "My teeth are falling out," she said. She gripped one of her lonely front teeth with a dirty finger and thumb, and jerked it back and forth. "See? It's going to fall out any minute now. Any minute."
Thoughts flashed in my head. The smell, the appearance of the woman, everything about the place...it was almost certainly a meth hub of some kind. I had been trained to watch for these signs, and I had been told to stay away if I ever saw them. But I was new at this. I was naive.
I stood up to leave, and the woman gripped my wrist with the wet fingers she had just pulled from her mouth. "Is this the last time you'll be here? Will you come again? Maybe you could come again."
"No, I've got to run. But thank you."
She maintained her grip on my wrist. As gently as possible, I pried her fingers off, and made for the door. She did not follow me, but begged for me to stay, or to come back another day. I shut the door behind me, and walked back over the trail between the piles of junk in the yard.
Once I got back on the sand trail and headed toward the highway I saw an old van, bright orange, coming my direction, toward the woman's house. I pulled over into the sagebrush to let it pass. It stopped beside my car and sat there with the windows up, but the windows were so darkly tinted that I couldn't see inside. I drove forward, crunching over an old sagebrush, listening to it's gnarled limbs scratch the bottom of the car. Then I watched in my rear view mirror. The van did not move. Its brake lights shone red for as long as I watched.
In a few minutes I was back on the highway and drove for a few hundred yards, then I pulled over and looked toward the van. It was now an orange dot in all the gray, and was still sitting where it had stopped. I waited for a few minutes, until I saw it move again. I watched it turn down a few of the roads I had taken, toward that lonely old house and soon disappeared into the desert.