After driving only fifteen miles it seemed like a different state. Northeastern Arizona is a strange combination of LDS (Latter Day Saints, Mormons) towns, Indian reservations and litho-dendrons, fossilized trees.
I thought of the joke that ended the movie, Raising Arizona. But it was nice to be back in "greater Utah" in some ways. Nobody can lay out a town like Brigham Young (in more ways than one). I chose one of those wide streets and pulled a U-turn, just because I could.
I was soon reminded that "Utah" women are the best looking women in the country. Once I asked several men, who have impeccable taste in such matters, and they concurred. They exude wholesomeness, an underrated quality in a media-soft-porn-saturated society like ours.
There was another wholesomeness that I have long appreciated especially in the context of the non-Mormon Southwest, wherein "history" and museums glorify gunslingers, gamblers and saloon girls. Doc Holliday slept here, Billie the Kid was shot there...
But in Snowflake I saw a Pioneer House. Every LDS town has one. They might be over-restored, but it's nice to see a culture memorialize a builder instead of a derelict.
There was one coffee shop in this close-knit LDS town. It had a wholesome name so that it wouldn't look so depraved. (Caffeinated beverages are not allowed for Mormons.) Maybe someday the LDS movie industry will make their version of Chocolat, with a sensual Juliette Binoche running a coffee shop in a town like this.
Since it was Memorial Day there was a local festival featuring horsey stuff and a pit bull competition. I like just about any dog show in which any breed of dog does anything other than walk around in high heels and a swimsuit, with Bert Parks as the emcee.
This sled-pulling competition was fun. Some of the dogs were as stoic and ritualistic as sumu wrestlers. Some resembled Russian weight lifters. Some showed teeth during the tug. Others focused on their owners who yelled, "Work, work, work."
Why didn't I pay more attention to their names? If one of them had been named "Cupcake" I probably would have noticed it.
The sinew of cyno-muscle strained mightily. I felt sorry for the nylon harness! It was easy to imagine all of that fiber groaning and screeching like the metal hulls of ships or submarines in movies when the ship is about to head to the bottom. It was hard to watch these mighty athletes and not think of Jack London stories about dogs pulling sleds in the North.
And now for one last, heroic tug...arrrrgh...uuuggghh!
The crowd roared, children squealed with delight, women swooned, but the Peripatetic Poodle squirmed. Why was that? He had never had a run-in with a pit bull. Maybe these behemoths were just too muscular and fierce, and something in his breed's DNA recalled the Time of Troubles back during the Triassic age, when Giant Poodles roamed the earth. Anyway, he looked petrified.
