"The thing about Los Angeles," a foreign tourist says, "is there's no there, there."
The tourist might have been talking about the places on this page: Clear Creek, Rosette, Standrod, Etna, Lynn, Park Valley, Grouse Creek - not "far away places with strange sounding names," places close-to-home with strange sounding names.The towns form a little pocket of communities in the northwest corner of the state. And no one seems to know how many there are. The community of Kelton, for instance, doesn't appear on many maps, yet it's vital and alive. Strevell, on the other hand, shows up on maps but is little more than a bombed out ghost village.
And if you follow the signs directing you to Cedar Creek, you'll travel 10 miles of bad road, ruin a pair of shock absorbers, and end up where you started.
In short, these are towns that time - and most everyone else - seems to have forgotten.
"We don't mind at all if people forget us," says Norma Clark of Brigham City, one of the "Grouse Creek Tanners" for 16 years. "But then not everyone forgets. The people raised in those towns always remember. On the Fourth of July and other holidays you find brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren all going back to celebrate. There was a humongous group of people in Grouse Creek over Easter weekend.
"People who have never been to Grouse Creek can't see anything. Only people with roots in the area can see it."
And what about the notion that those little communities march to their own drummer?
"The clock isn't a big deal in Grouse Creek," she says. "It's still relaxed. Everybody still knows everybody and there's still a sense of caring, and a need to make your own recreation and fun."
Says Lynn Palmer, who runs the Palmer Twins Country Store in Park Valley, "There's a real kinship - often literally. In Park Valley we have 35 families, and a lot of kids have `double cousins' because sets of sisters married sets of brothers."
Since kids have chores in the mornings and evenings, Palmer says, they don't have time to get into trouble. On the other hand, they have to be sent away to finish their last two years of high school, which isn't always easy on the parents or the children.
"Still," he says, "it's a good place to live. That's why I'm here."
Indeed, the drive out Highway 30 does leave a "Home on the Range" impression - uncloudy skies and no discouraging words. And in many ways the people seem to have grown right out of the landscape - they're dry, resilient, lovely in their own stark way.
It's hard to look out across the rangeland and not hear the strains of a big-vista Western movie - the theme from "The Magnificent Seven." Yet it's hard to meet the people one on one without hearing easygoing folk tunes and simple cowboy songs.
People here - to a person, it seems - never forget their heritage or their manners. They make their own rules. State borders blur, for instance. This area of the state feels a strong kinship with the Idaho towns. Some students, in fact, are even bused across the border to attend school in Idaho.
Yet if the personal histories and attitudes are often similar, the town histories are even more so. Most of the villages were first scouted out by trappers and hunters. Then Brigham Young, the great colonizer, sent a few families out to settle the area. With the railroad in 1869, livestock became an important ingredient in the local mix. Today, dry farming and ranching are the main occupations.
It's also interesting to note dozens of foreign tourists end up in west Box Elder County. They decide to circle the Great Salt Lake, start out for Wendover, and return through Park Valley. People in Rosette probably see more foreigners in a year than half the population of Salt Lake County.
There's also an interesting interplay among the little towns. Shared rangelands and medical help make the towns peas in a pod. But when one town's basketball team takes on another, local pride comes out. After the game, however, the teams are scrambled for another game, with players from each town playing together.
For the casual visitor, in fact, it takes awhile to see beneath the surface and find the distinctions. But you quickly learn that the Grouse Creek cemetery - like the Grouse Creek phone book - is full of Kimbers and Tanners; that some areas - like Park Valley - have an old ghost town hovering under things like a skull beneath the skin. Gap-tooth, jack-o'-lantern houses hold on for decades there, a pioneer cemetery sits hidden amid the sagebrush. Even the post office has the look of an old Pony Express stop.
And in the end, what you see is all a matter of personal perspective. Where city dwellers may feel an area's haunted, locals see it as hallowed. One person's loneliness becomes another soul's freedom.
When asked to name his biggest frustration, for example, Lynn Palmer doesn't mention the isolation, the chilling winters or the scorching summers.
"What gets me," he says, "is we see ads for items on sale in Burley and Tremonton, and by the time we can get there the sale's off or the thing's sold out."
Even at the Tremonton supermarket, it seems, people tend to forget Park Valley.