In Memory of Gail Larrick

The red in the rocks to the north of where we stood bled like rusty paint into the juniper-piñon green. To the south and west, the chalky white buttes and ridges jutted and alternately reminded me of the ends of white spuds and crumbling teeth from a shark’s jaw fossil.

The streets in the little Mormon town looked almost as old as the surrounding rock. Squatting in the middle of large lawns were century-old two-story homes with sleeping-porches and dormer windows in each side of the upper floor. Oak and elm and ash trees shaded the yards with their peeled picket fences and trikes and bikes that littered the mown grass.

Betty and I stood in the street and said her name, as she had asked. “Gail Larrick. Gail Larrick.” We filmed it on a cell phone and sent her a video. She e-mailed back that we were standing close to where her home had been in Teasdale, Utah. Many years before she had lived in the village. She loved it in Teasdale. That was obvious from what she said about the red rock country and how she knew all about the Henry Mountains and Hanksville and Caineville and Goblin Valley and Capitol Reef and Escalante and Torrey and the Fremont River and the bomb…yes that bomb…and government poison gas tests that eliminated bands of sheep; and Delta, Utah, and Dugway, Utah, and many more places in that glorious combination of mountain and desert and red rock and salt flat and snowy peak and rolling hills we call Utah.

But she knew a lot about a lot of places in this special country and I suppose we could travel all over these United States and speak her name, Gail Larrick, and these places would know her in some form that non-spiritual folks like me would not understand. Some communication occurring between the rock and tree of a particular place and the spirit of a seeker like Gail. Palouse Falls, Ulm Pishkun Buffalo Jump, Pine Ridge, Tubac, Aravaipa Canyon, La Luz Canyon, Pawnee Grasslands, and the list could journey on, a litany of all the places that she communed with and that in some way communed back. The conversations private, in a language that only Gail understood.

Sometimes that voice came through to me in her writing, because that’s how I first knew her. She took my internet writing classes, first in poetry, then in lyric essay, those short little sticks of dynamite that ignite the space behind the eyes of those who choose to read them.

It is there I learned about her passion for red rock of Utah, and the gangly arms of Saguaro cacti, the crash of waves on the Mendocino Coast, her connection with the ceremonies of Native Americans. Her passion for photography. Her writing communed with me.

Through her writing I knew her as one who lived alone, but she did not fear that; she had chosen to live so, and I would fear that loneliness to no end, but she didn’t. She embraced her loneliness and made it her friend. And so she wrote.
Not to say she did not have family and a large circle of close friends, because I think she did although I was not well acquainted with that part of her world.

Once Betty and I went from Boise to Sonoma County where I taught a class with my friend Guy Biederman. Gail signed up. I would finally meet her in person.

At the time, Gail had been sending me intricately-described short pieces about her travels and her life, both past and present; things about her dad and mom, her former life in Seattle and San Francisco, her time in Arizona, and most gloriously, her pieces about—yes I will say this—about her glorious southern Utah. Not my Utah, or your Utah, but Gail Larrick’s Utah and her encounters with the buffalo in the Henrys and the Mormon women of Teasdale and the sweeping glide of the monster red-rock cliffs of the southern part of that state, her trips to Escalante and beyond.

When she wrote these pieces, there was a hint of the mystical in her words, in her imagery that made me wonder how I would feel about her. And when I met her, I was surprised. She was frank and straightforward, her mystical belonging only to her.

After that, we planned to write books together. Which we did not do. And I am sad about that, that she is now gone and I cannot share that experience with her. I suppose I am selfish in this regard; there was much I stood to gain from working with and being around Gail Larrick.

But one thing I know, I will be speaking her name in French Glen and Sonora and Lee’s Ferry and places between and beyond because I will know she has been there and in her spiritual world, may be there still, to hear me speak her name.

Capitol Reef and Graffiti

Wayne County, Utah, at 6:00 AM, and the morning breezes crowded around the willow leaves and brought the mosquitoes. First light spread over the red land. With all the Mars hubbub in the news, it made me wonder. We live on a red planet, too. And yellow and travertine green and gray and blue and the purple rock that the geologists tell me cannot be purple, but my artist’s metaphor mind screams, “That’s purple.” The sunlight scudded above the herringbone clouds. The Fremont River running rusty from the push of mountain rains.

Capitol Reeg

My first foray into Capitol Reef, AKA the Sleeping Rainbow and the Water Pocket Fold. Over a hundred miles long, north to south, a crooked, twisted sandstone dragon of exposed remnants of primordial volcanic ash, hot monsoon forests, magma runoff from eastern volcanoes, Sahara desert-like dunes, all leveled one on top of the other, a loaf of multicolored sandstone with names like Chinle and Kayenta and Navojo Sandstone with arches and bridges and hoodoos that look like chairs and tables and goblins and rabbits and many other things the imagination of man and woman can dredge up.

Betty and I dove into the depths of the reef, first the Gifford House and the fruit orchards of Fruita that belie the geologic chaos just beyond. Into Capitol Gorge and the petroglyph narrows where we stopped and spoke the name of friend, mentor, and long-time resident of Wayne County, Gail Larrick. We spoke it softly, then I bellowed it and the echoes rambled up the red walls that loomed above us with their black water stains. Rambled, then bumped and jumped and floated back to us like the voices of the long-ago etchers of the figures in the red rock. Farther in, the Pioneer Registry, signatures of the pioneers who used the gorge as a passageway from east to west. And newer namings, too, unwanted names of kids from LA and Phoenix and Salt Lake. Graffiti we call it. The oldest stuff on these walls are petroglyphs; the earliest Anglo names we call a registry, the newest stuff a blight. But wait, what is now petroglyphs might once have been graffiti and what is now graffiti might one day, one thousand years hence, be a thing revered. Our descendents might call it a registry or…petroglyphs.

At Petroglyph Narrows

Out of the canyon and out to Teasdale, old home of Gail Larrick and then on to Boulder Mountain and a gut-punching view of the reef, the Henry Mountains beyond and if not for thunderstorms, the mountains of western Colorado.

Gifford House

We traveled farther east; at Caineville and Hanksville, a land that reminded us of another planet that we had seen in some science fiction movie. Dead trees, tumbled-down gray and tan rock. Buttes that stood out like monuments built by ancient Native Americans, but with Anglo names like Factory Butte. A wild and windy place, sand in the gaps between the teeth, uranium mines, gold mines, turf so tough the cattle showed in ones and twos, miles and miles apart. Rain storms boomed in the surrounding peaks.

I am a native of the southwest. My people came in the 1840s. I thought I knew the red rock country. But Capitol Reef and points east…Vavoom!