I was in Skull Valley, hiking with Clint Thomsen, author of the Transcript-Bulletin’s popular “Outdoor Adventure” column. A few weeks ago, Clint had written about his 10-year search for a place called Story Rock (“Search for Hawaiian petroglyphs in Skull Valley ends in discovery,” July 31), an area where turn-of-the-century Polynesian settlers of the ill-fated town of Iosepa had carved petroglyphs. I had found Clint’s column remarkably eloquent, yet sad. I asked him if he would mind guiding me to Story Rock on the condition that I would not give away its location — a secret he had also kept in his column.
As we hiked we talked about Iosepa, a place we’d both been drawn to for years. In the long history of the diaspora of peoples from their native lands, few migrations seem more dislocating than the journey these Hawaiians undertook from their happy emerald isles to desolate Skull Valley. It was certainly a leap of faith, made during a brief window in LDS Church history when saints were being called unto a physical Zion, which was Salt Lake City.
But the Hawaiian pioneers had been relocated to Skull Valley, where they sang their traditional songs into a silent desert and faced a series of trials right out of the Old Testament — pestilence, famine, locusts, drought and hail — for 28 years before returning to Hawaii. Unlike most ghost towns of the West, Iosepa was not founded on an economic boom that went bust. It was simply a place where people lived and died, dreaming of home.
Clint and I reached Story Rock, took off our daypacks, and looked over the valley. The sun was lingering above the distant edge of the Cedar Mountains, and the petroglyphs were either touched with amber or deep in shadow. There was a shark, often regarded by Native Hawaiians as an ‘aumakua, an ancestral guardian spirit; a circle of people depicting the concept of ‘ohana, which includes family both living and dead; and several sea turtles, a symbol of longevity and patience.
Running my fingers over one turtle, I imagined its creator — a Hawaiian dressed in frontier clothing, scratching into the hard rock like a prisoner scratching into the walls of his cell. Squinting westward, he would have been looking over the Cedar Range, the salt flats, the Sierra Nevadas and the vast plain of the Pacific Ocean. He might have been dreaming of taro fields or fishponds, or he might have been thinking, as I was now, about how the sun fell into the sea all at once in Hawaii while here it took hours to set.
I was creating this bygone petroglyph carver out of my own experiences, of course. Though I grew up partly in Grantsville, I didn’t know Iosepa existed until sometime after I moved to Hawaii in 1990. The place isn’t even well known to Native Hawaiians. I read about it in an obscure book, and first saw it on a visit back to Utah, when I stood in the middle of its dirt cemetery and thought I’d arrived at the most godforsaken spot on the planet.
Part of that impression, of course, had to do with having just come from Hawaii. The islands are not something you forget easily. Mark Twain, writing during the time of Iosepa, once said of Hawaii, “For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished 20 years ago.”
I know whereof Twain speaks. I once had a white plumeria tree outside my front door that I can still smell today.
There was a time — as a young man who had already seen Hawaii — when the entire West seemed a prison to me. So I left. I swam with sea turtles, drowsed beneath the drowsy palms, and climbed the garlanded crags.
Now I was happy to be back. I pitied my devout Hawaiian pioneer scratching his dreams of home into Story Rock a century ago, but my situation was not his. True, I too had made a leap of faith in moving to Utah from Hawaii. But I had come back to my family, and I lived in an age of jet airplanes and wide possibilities yet to come.
Clint and I made our way down the mountain in the twilight, with the valley closing down for the night and the season. We talked about travel and writing, enjoying the hike back. For me, choosing to be somewhere, anywhere, makes all the difference in how you feel about the place. Perhaps I was wrong about the petroglyph carver. Perhaps he had been happy. It didn’t matter now. The sadness I had attached to Story Rock was behind us. And home was close at hand.
Jeff Barrus: jbarrus@tooeletranscript.com
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