Two Days in Utah

Someday, this marriage will have ended a long time ago.

photo by Tonya Morton

We arrived at the cabin late morning, in the rain, after a two-hour drive from Durango, Colorado. I had been following the rain forecast for weeks, watching the storms increase and decrease in likelihood. Watching the predicted rain shift from evening to late afternoon to early morning.

The trouble was, I couldn’t remember whether the dirt driveway was drivable when it was wet. Even the gravel road from the highway could be a problem. My fear, for weeks, was that we would turn off the highway and discover we couldn’t get in. And then, what? We would have to wait. Hours, at least. Possibly a day or two days. I refused to budget an extra day or two days for the cabin. I wouldn’t do it.

I begged the universe as I watched the forecast. Please don’t make me wait an extra day in Monticello, Utah. I had the cleanout crew coming. I had the realtor coming. Please, just let it all work. If it all works, then we can get everything done and leave, and we’ll never have to do this again.

If there’s one important thing I’ve learned in the past year, it’s that you don’t have to keep anything you don’t want to keep. You can just call someone and they will take away all the things in your house. Even a whole lifetime’s worth of things, or multiple lifetimes’ worth. If you just ask, someone will take it all away. Before this year, I wouldn’t have known how much comfort I would get from the existence of these people. Estate companies. Antique dealers. Junk collectors. You can call a phone number, even in the most rural place, and someone will come. All your stuff will be gone. It’s an extraordinary thing.

When it came time to face this land and the old cabin in Utah, I spoke to a local realtor. I was hoping she’d know someone who could help. There wasn’t much left inside the cabin, as far as I could remember. My ex-husband and I had taken out most of the valuable things years before, and the last few truly interesting pieces were gathered into his collection last summer. But there were a few items of furniture. I made a list of them from memory—a wooden chest of drawers, an antique brass bed. There was an antique gas pump. Some paperback books and oil lamps. Old glass soda bottles and strange little things that someone might like.

Within a week, she had put me in touch with a couple from Moab who had recently opened an antique store. They would be willing to haul out any junk and garbage in exchange for keeping anything of value. This seemed like an incredible bargain to me. I put a pin in the map and sent it to them, the only easy way to help someone find the place, and we agreed on the date and time. This date, this time. Noon on the fifth of May. But, of course, we’d arranged it all before it was supposed to rain.

Paul and I turned off the highway under gray skies. We took the county road past a field of winter wheat and a dried-up pond. We dropped down into a wash, then up again and made the turn onto the private road. I held my breath. The road was slippery, pitted, with large rocks jutting up from the clay, but it was drivable. We passed the overgrown entrance to the neighbor’s land, and I began to measure from memory the distance to our turn.

“It’s there. After the tree.”

“Really?”

It looked like no one had driven in since I was here last July. The old tracks were nearly indistinguishable among the scrub and scraggly grasses. This was a relief, I decided, watching Paul unlatch the thick chain that blocked the driveway. Maybe the grasses would help to hold the ground together beneath the car. Still, by the time we reached the cabin, our tires were entirely caked with red mud.

I removed the lock from the door. Paul lit some Palo Santo to help clear the air inside, and we walked through the cabin together, room to room. Nothing had moved. The curtains were all pulled, the blinds were down over the windows. There were new water stains on the floor. I began to move old pails under the dripping ceiling joists. We pulled our N95 masks over our faces as we continued to walk around. I was worried about mouse droppings. I couldn’t help but think of the woman who’d just died in New Mexico from hantavirus.

We opened a few drawers and cabinets, looking for anything private. Paul found my ex-husband’s pill bottles and I stashed them in my purse to throw out later. I didn’t want anyone else seeing those bottles. He went out to the car for the garbage bags. I stood on the front porch and looked out over the land, breathing in the wet sage and juniper as a light drizzle continued to fall all around.

I heard the couple from Moab miss the turn for the driveway, the unmistakable crunch of gravel as they turned around their trailer on the road and came back again. I stood at the top of the driveway and waved when I saw their truck come into view. A hand waved back, out the window, and slowly they made the turn and drove in.

Paul had started a fire in the wood stove from the pile of kindling. It wouldn’t last long, but it took a little of the damp chill out of the place. The four of us stood in the living room, discussing how we would pack it all.

“You think you can get that gas pump out?” Paul asked the couple.

The man tipped it a little, rocked it back and forth. “No problem.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to keep anything?” The woman asked me. She picked up an old White Castle mug and then placed it back on its shelf.

“I’m sure.”

“We could make a pile for you in one corner–”

“No.” I smiled. “It’s fine. I’m happy for you to take it all. Please.”

For two days before we reached Utah, I had been barely tethered to myself. I was increasingly anxious in New Mexico, then I fell under a kind of fog as we crossed into Colorado, unable to see anything but the steps ahead of me. I just needed to get to the cabin. I needed to throw away all the old expired food, to gather up the books, to help the antique dealers load their trailer, to sweep the floors, to meet the realtor. If I didn’t get there, it wouldn’t happen. If I didn’t get there, rain or no rain, it would never end. I couldn’t let myself think of any future past the cabin; nothing past the next ten steps, like a horse in blinders. If I could just get myself in place, make my hands move from one thing to the next thing, then that meant, at some point, it would be over, and I could leave.

Paul has been with me for each of these trips the past year, since my ex-husband died. The trips to deal with the house and with the old building in Kansas, to deal with the archives we needed to move to Utah. For a few days, on each of these trips, he has lived with someone who is unreachable. Not only to him—I try to explain, although it’s impossible to explain. He isn’t the only one pacing back and forth outside the fortress walls. I can’t reach myself either. All I can see from inside my fog is the work to do. One thing, and the next, and the next. I put my hands to something, then another thing, until the day ends and I can collapse. It’s just a way of getting through, of surviving, until I can return to my own life again.

photo by Paul Vlachos

We spent hours taking old paperbacks down off the shelves, pulling old flannel shirts out of drawers. Too many pens, old matchbooks, tchotchkes and expired drugs and boxes of unspent ammunition.

The woman from Moab opened the kindling box by the wood stove. “Oh hey,” she called, “there are a few old newspapers here.”

“Mm,” I agreed. “He used them to start fires.”

She opened one of them on the floor and flipped over a page. “It’s crazy. I know the people in these stories.” She looked up at me as I dragged over a box of books. “He wrote for this newspaper?”

I glanced over at the issue she was holding and nodded. “He was that newspaper.”

“It was his?”

“Mm-hm.”

I walked back to the bookshelf, thinking how he would have liked to hear me say that. He and I had never agreed on what the Zephyr was. I was the publisher for ten years, but I had never really seen what it was to him. I was always trying to bring in more writers, to try out different formats, expand beyond Utah and his nostalgia for a time in Utah that I didn’t know anything about. But I hadn’t understood. I was publishing the paper, but the paper was still him. Entirely him. When we divorced, and I handed over all the passwords and instructions to him, and agreed that I would never touch the Zephyr again, the paper reverted to him so swiftly and seamlessly, it felt like I had never been there at all.

I pointed out the glass lanterns to the man when he returned from a trip to the trailer. I pulled a few old A&W root beer steins from a cabinet for the woman to pack away.

I spoke about his things like I didn’t know them. “Here’s a nice old ashtray to take.” And I handed them over to be boxed up.

I led them through the rooms as if I’d never been there. Never cooked anything in the kitchen, never sat on the couch. As if I hadn’t spent hours out on the porch swing a few summers earlier, reading a book about Yugoslav history, eating cherries and throwing the pits out into the brush.

I watched the man from Moab separate the headboard from the bed. Strange, I thought, how I used to lie there with my ex-husband, watching storms pour down the eastern slope of the Abajos. How we lay beside the big dark window, listening to late night AM radio together.

We slept there, had sex there. I cried myself to sleep in that bed, turning to face the wall. More than once, I lay alone there for hours, staring into the dark, not knowing if he would come to bed.

“Do you want these photos?” The woman from Moab called to me from the other room. I came out of the bedroom and she handed me an old envelope of 4x6 prints.

I leafed through the photos, one after the other. Here was a photo of the sky over a house I didn’t recognize. Here was the sky over a mountain. The sky over a long valley. Was it nearby? Did it matter? There were two dozen photos of clouds in the envelope. Not extraordinary clouds, just normal clouds. An entire roll of film, all clouds. It must have meant something once.

Later, as I was gathering some empty water jugs from a junk pile beneath a tree, the woman walked up holding a plastic travel toilet.

“He has so many portable toilets!” She was laughing. “I just found a fourth one. Did he use them all?”

“He didn’t use any of them,” I told her. “He bought them for different girlfriends who visited over the years, thinking they would prefer them to the outhouse.” I pointed to the green one now sitting on the porch. “That one he bought for me. I never used it.”

This conversation was so odd, I wasn’t sure whether it was funny or not. She didn’t seem sure either, but she laughed anyway.

She looked around the little clearing in the scrub oaks where the water jugs had been.

“How did you meet your ex-husband?” She asked me, a little hesitantly.

It had been a while since anyone had asked me that. I thought for a moment. “It was in 2009. At a literary conference.”

“Here?”

“No. In South Dakota. I’m from South Dakota originally.”

“Ah,” she nodded. I could see her thinking that this explained something about me. “And then you got married?”

“We got married in 2011.” When I don’t feel like telling a story, I tend to provide a list of facts. “I left him in 2021,” I continued. “We were divorced two years before he died.”

“But he still left you this land.” She smiled encouragingly. I could hear her next sentence, though she didn’t say it.

He must have really loved you.

“Mm,” I said.

I looked out to the south, toward Monument Valley.

On a clear day, I’d told the realtor, you can see Monument Valley from the cabin. You can see Arizona. But this wasn’t a clear day.

photo by Tonya Morton

After six hours of work, the cabin was nearly empty. The rooms felt twice as big as they had that morning. Paul was walking around clearing cobwebs from the windows with a big broom.

“You sure you want to sell this place?” He asked me, passing through the kitchen. “It’s almost starting to look good to me now.”

I balled up the clorox wipe I’d been using to clean the kitchen counter. “I’m sure,” I said, and threw the wipe into the nearest trash bag. My voice was hoarse from breathing dust, even with the mask on. My hands were painful after lifting so many bags. I couldn’t make a fist with my right hand anymore.

I had been cleaning the kitchen and remembering how I was standing in this exact spot, next to the counter, fifteen years earlier, when my ex-husband realized I hadn’t latched one of the windows correctly in the living room. It had blown open in a wind storm and let in dust everywhere. This was so early in our relationship. Maybe a month in? I felt one of the earliest flushes of fear that day, hearing him swear in the other room. Hearing him come to find me.

What did he call me then, as I backed against the kitchen counter? A child. An idiot. Careless. Unthinking.

I had begun to list all the words I had heard in this room. I came back again and again to the word “child.” This cabin still made me feel like a child.

Years later, on a hot, dry summer day, my ex-husband sat at the dining table—I glanced now at the empty space beside the large north-facing window where the dining table used to be. He’d turned to me that day and said, “Sometimes I can’t believe how stupid you are. You think these guys want to be your friends?”

He was angry. I had told one of our writers in Utah that we were nearby.

“You better not have told him to come here.”

“I just told him where we were. I didn’t say–”

“You think, what, he just wants to talk to you? You think all these men who write for you are your friends? And you want me to just sit here while they swing by and flirt with you. Like I don’t know they’re all just waiting for me to drop dead.”

“They’re your friends. They were your friends first.”

“Bullshit. That’s bullshit. They wouldn’t spend a second with me if you weren’t here, and you know it.” He stood and went to the cabinet where he kept the pills. “You better write him back,” he said to me. “Whatever you said to him, he isn’t coming.”

He took his pills from the cabinet and went into the bedroom, and we didn’t speak again until that evening. I wrote an apologetic email to the writer in Utah. I went back outside to the porch swing alone. I ate cherries alone, and watched the skies alone, and read my book about Yugoslavia for hours, until I had no sunlight left to see the pages.

There were too many words in that place. My own words were the hardest to remember. I could still hear myself saying “I’m sorry” in that kitchen. I could still hear myself saying, “It’s okay. You were tired,” the morning after he’d said something unforgivable.

“I shouldn’t have kept talking after you told me to stop.”

“I should’ve known better.”

“I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

I stood at the edge of the counter and remembered how he’d said, more than once, that I should burn the place down when he died.

You know, I could almost do it.

As the couple from Moab finished loading their trailer outside, I walked through the cabin a last time. I was looking for anything they’d accidentally left. Any last garbage to throw into the final garbage bag.

With everything gone, the wooden walls were unrecognizable. The rough-cut shelves were a honey color I’d never noticed before. Even the floors looked better, though I still needed to sweep them the next day before the realtor came. Some of the difference was just sunlight. The clouds had finally passed. But mostly, it was the sudden emptiness of the place.

I had only known my ex-husband with all his things. He held on to everything, all kinds of treasures and great bargains and might-need-someday things, tucked in drawers and on shelves and piled into chests and into closets. Collections of old mugs and dusty mementos in overcrowded rooms. That morning, when we’d arrived, the cabin had felt exactly as I remembered it, heavy with the presence of the man I’d married. But now, it was odd. I could imagine someone else here.

I walked from the bedroom into the kitchen into the living room, and I could see how it was when he first built it. When he was still young, still hopeful, with his hammer in one hand, a nail in the other, piecing wood together. You couldn’t build such a thing, over years, without some kind of hope. Without a belief that the past could somehow be put behind.

I never knew him with hope like that.

I have grown so tired of carrying him around, my ex-husband. He is endless. All his things. All his words. It’s been over three years now since we were divorced, but I still haven’t been released from my marriage to him. As I arrived at the cabin that day, I thought to myself, well, here I am again. Back in this place of his, cleaning up after him again. Hearing his voice in my head. Another day of being his wife again, when all I’ve wanted for years is to be something else.

I shook my head until the thoughts cleared. I have a life now, I reminded myself, and this is not it. This is not my life. I have made a mantra of those words since he died—not my life, not my life. I left this man once. Soon, I would leave this place and drive away from him again. Soon, I would set him down again and keep walking. This marriage will end. This marriage is ending. Someday, this marriage will have ended a long time ago.

There were a few people in town I had been planning to call. In my pre-trip insanity, I had thought I might be in good enough shape to stop by and say hello after a day of work. But I just couldn’t. Not that night. We left the cabin for the evening, went to our motel room, showered and slept.

The next morning, Paul and I drove to the cabin early in order to clean before the realtor arrived. We were both still battered from the previous day’s work. I struggled to grip the broom with my painful right hand. He moved gingerly to save his back. We went from room to room, sweeping the floors. We threw mouse droppings out into the brush. When we were done, we lit sage and walked through the rooms for the last time.

“Someone new will come to this place,” I said to myself. I spoke my hopes in lieu of a prayer. “New things will happen here.” In the sunlight, it felt possible. Even likely. We filled the rooms with smoke, and blew it out the doors and windows along with the ghosts.

And, within a half hour of the realtor’s arrival, after weeks of worrying whether I would be able to pull it off, the task was done. She would handle the rest. We weren’t needed here anymore. We waved a last time, then got into the car.

I drove us to the highway, then south, toward the warmth. I turned for the first time in years onto Highway 95.

photo by Tonya Morton

At first, the road was just memories. My ex-husband and I had driven this way so many times, on the way to Hanksville or the Henry Mountains or some hike in between here and there. I remembered that, once, I was playing Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock on the stereo as we turned the corner and began the grand descent into Comb Wash. I remembered turning off on the dirt road to go hiking at the Bears Ears. And, another hot summer day, stopping to see the old shuttered restaurant at Fry Canyon.

As I drove, Paul fell asleep in the passenger seat. And I began to consider what it would’ve been like if I had come to Utah in a different way. This corner of Utah, in particular. If I had first come here on my own, without knowing anything about my ex-husband. How would it look to me without his imprint on everything? Even those towns, the ones I flee from so quickly—Monticello and Blanding and Moab— how would they seem to me if I hadn’t arrived to them knowing all his history there, all the enemies he’d made and everything he had grown to resent?

When I showed up in Utah fifteen years ago, I was the pretty, young girlfriend of the local Don Quixote. He was such a name there. Hated by some, loved by some. I was neither loved nor hated, but I was known. I was a curiosity, and that feeling colored everything for me. All I knew of this place were watchful eyes and his unhappy memories. I was never overwhelmed by the landscape the way everyone else was. I didn’t see the beauty, though I knew it was a beautiful place. I was too swept up in all his stories. Too confused by my lack of place in them. Everywhere we went in the Canyon Country, he had already been.

What would the rocks look like to me now, if they hadn’t been his rocks? He’s gone. There’s no reason for me to keep feeling how he felt here. I’m not obliged to carry a single thing he gave me, and especially not his anger. Not his bitterness.

As I drove, I tried to give myself new eyes for this place. I made the rocks into strangers. I made myself into a stranger, following the curves of the road between the red rock towers and over the sharp cut river washes. I split myself from everything I knew of the journey, and tried to set aside anything I remembered from before.

Yes, it was beautiful. Not comforting. Not home-like—this place could never be a home for me. But I could begin to see. It’s beautiful, yes, on its own merits.

I didn’t need to make this place my own. It was never mine. More importantly, it was never his. Not the bleached and winding oxbows of White Canyon. Not the hennaed soil or, after the rain, the surprise of yellow roadside flowers. Not the shadow of Mt. Ellen over the scrubby landscape.

That great desert highway was only ever just a road. A trail on the rock. Without everything that had ever happened, without all the memories, I could see myself loving it simply for being a road, ribboning across such treacherous country. It exists in a place no road should exist, that highway. Across rivers, along overlooks and trailheads. I could love it simply for its many branches, dirt roads winding up into the mountains, and out into the canyons. Or for the way it ends at Hanksville, like a story, as another road continues.

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Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.

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