Teasdale – Ken Rodgers

July 19, 2020

Speak My Name

We stood in the middle of the street in Teasdale, Utah and said, “Gail Larrick, Gail Larrick,” and Betty filmed it and later Gail wrote me in an email, “That corner is where I used to live,” even though there was nothing on that corner.

Betty and I were in the early days of a long journey back east that went through Utah and Colorado and Texas and Arkansas and Memphis and Chattanooga and Washington DC. From there we went to Boston and since Betty had never been to Nova Scotia, we went via Maine to Halifax and north to Cape Breton.

From there we drove to Quebec City. Then on to Thunder Bay over one of the northern-most paved roads in Ontario, and then to Jasper in the Canadian Rockies before hitting the front door of our digs in Boise.

As we traveled south on the first leg of our trek, we posted copious photos on Instagram and Facebook and we shared our travel via texts and e-mails and many of our friends traveled with us, vicariously, of course, and one of them was our good pal, Gail.

We told everyone we would begin our journey by stopping in Torrey, Utah, and spending a few days at Capitol Reef National Park.
When Gail saw where we were headed, she sent an e-mail telling me to go to Teasdale and to please speak her name in that town.

Ken Rodgers Photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers

On our third day, we’d had enough of the park, so we headed to Teasdale, a small, insular place peopled mostly by Mormon folk, or that’s what Gail had told us. And there we spoke her name. When I said “Gail Larrick, Gail Larrick,” Betty took a video of me and the surrounding location.

It was quiet and no cars or trucks buzzed and pushed and passed; no middle fingers flipped at us even though we weren’t from there.

When we stood in the street and spoke her name, I felt exposed and kind of stupid and it was one of those moments when you think everybody’s looking at you and smirking and giggling with their hands over their mouths.

But when I stopped speaking her name and turned in a three hundred sixty-degree circle, I didn’t see anyone except Betty.

But I still felt dumb, like what I had done was…was…fake? Or false? Or….

The Apaches have, or had, a tradition of “speaking with names” that, as far as I know, relied on the use of a place in the landscape to explain things they wanted their people to understand. By saying the name of a place where something significant had happened, issues of a social nature or some other kind of quandary could be recognized, acknowledged, and possibly understood. In that context, I think saying the name carried a spiritual power.

So maybe the fact that we spoke Gail Larrick’s name standing in the middle of the Street in Teasdale, Utah, toted some kind of spiritual weight.

Speaking names might also help us recognize our place in a family, a community, a connection, and maybe Gail watching a video of me saying her name somehow tied her into her past, her friends in Teasdale.

Some spiritual folks believe that there are things that own power that don’t necessarily jibe with science, and that the speaking of a name, whether a place or a given name like Gail Larrick, or maybe a flower like a Sego Lily, or a mountain like Mt. Shasta, may have power or may convey power.

Me not being particularly spiritual, I might scoff at the notion that a word or two has power. But then again, I write, which is a verbal form of art, of communication that carries a lot of gravitas: speaking and understanding language being perhaps the most powerful and unusual quality we humans possess.

Gail passed away a few years ago and I am glad we spoke her name in Teasdale, Utah. I think she got a big kick out of us standing out there, saying “Gail Larrick” again and again and again.

Gail was an extremely intelligent woman who had a background in editing, photography and writing. She’d lived in the wilds of Utah and in the wilds of San Francisco and when we knew her, as a writer, she lived in Sonoma County, California.

Once she shared a powerful essay with me. It was about her time in Teasdale and how she and her fellow female roommates lived there among the Mormon folk. Evidently Gail and her roommates got along famously with the local women.

I don’t know about the men, she didn’t say too much about them, but she suspected, with all the truth that swelled in her heart, that it was men who burned her and her friends out.

I met Gail sometime around 2006. I was teaching online writing classes and she signed up for several sessions. Later, but not much later, Betty and I traveled to Sonoma County, and one night we had a get-together where I grilled carne asada for friends and acquaintances.
Early in the evening, one of my compadres came into the house where we were meeting and said, “There’s a lady outside who’s looking for you. She said you saved her life.”

I remember feeling mildly shocked by that notion. When I think back on my life, I can’t really identify any specific moment where I saved anyone’s life except for an event at the siege of Khe Sanh where I dashed after a squad of Marines who were mistakenly veering into a barrage of friendly incoming that would soon make those men friendly WIAs and KIAs.

I am not sure what I did to save Gail’s life—she never told me and I never asked, but as the years moved on, we grew close in a friendship unlike any other I’ve had.

When she passed, it shocked me, and it felt like there was too much about life that we still needed to investigate together.

Maybe now, almost eight years gone, the name we spoke there at the intersection, “Gail Larrick, Gail Larrick,” remains floating in the ether, draped over the tops of the trees and along the eaves of the old homes in Teasdale. Haunting, like a spirit, or a ghost, and not a nasty one because Gail was a woman of sublime attitude. And when the wind gets up, or a zephyr sneaks around the corner of a house, they also speak the name we left there.

And what would be even better is if she—wherever and if she still exists as a persona—hears that name on the wind still speaking to Teasdale and maybe to me, here and now. I think she’d like that and maybe that’s why, at the oddest times of day or night, when I am kvetching or griping or just hanging out, I think of her and smile.

April 26, 2013

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.

August 6, 2012August 6, 2012

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.

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.

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.

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!