One summer in the early 1980s, Karl Momen decided that instead of flying, he would rent a car and drive from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. He wanted to see America firsthand, and this was a good way to do it.
Not that he hadn't seen a lot of the world already.Momen was born in Iran 57 years ago. His father was 80 years old at the time. He was a prosperous carpet manufacturer in the city of Mashhad near the Soviet border.
Karl's Iranian name was Karim. He remembers World War II and the allied soldiers atop the huge tanks throwing cigarettes and candy bars. He remembers the horse that ran away with him, across the river into Soviet territory, and how, after much wrangling, he was finally exchanged on a bridge for a few sheep, like a scene out of a spy movie.
He became an artist and could whip out a 30-foot image of the Shah in no time at all. He went to Germany and studied architecture, becoming familiar with many important figures, like the composer Stravinsky, who was a close friend of his brother, and several of the Soviet artists who took exile in Western Europe as their own homeland sunk deeper into the clutches of communism.
He moved to Stockholm, where he still maintains a home. It was there that Karim became Karl, where he became a prominent architect and painter, and where he began a decade ago to work with sculpture, as well.
So there he is, more than halfway across America, driving through Utah, across the salt flats between Salt Lake City and Wendover, when he stopped to rest his legs a bit.
Standing by his car, eating a tomato and looking out over the marvelous pure whiteness of it all, he realized that before him was a canvas of pure, profoundly white landscape. In that moment he visualized a tree in the desert - not a tree that would grow from roots. No, it would be a symbolic tree of celebration - a metaphor - planted in roots of concrete and steel, a tree with clusters of leaves that floated above the desert like colorful orbs, like planets almost.
So Momen, one of the most determined people I have ever met, began immediately to bring his vision of a tree in the desert to fruition. Working with Don Reimann, a local contractor, over several months and at a personalcost of over a million dollars, Momen planted his tree, much to the curiosity of passing truckers, who now use it as a landmark in their long drive over the desert, and also to the frustration of some environmentalists, who see it as a blemish on the pure desert landscape.
Personally, as I grew to know and respect Karl Momen over those difficult years of creation of his "Tree of Utah," I found it to be much more than an oddity. While building it, he often referred to it as a "symbol of life."
"When you put something," he would say, "in the most unpleasant landscape for any sort of life, you put a symbol of life there."
At the tree's dedication in 1986, Momen wrote in the program the following: "With this sculpture I want to give a hymn to our universe, whose glory and dimension is beyond all myth and imagination."
There are many miles of pristine salt along Interstate 80 before Momen's tree ever comes into view. And though many local people see it as an oddity, it has become a familiar image to people in other parts of the world. Many Europeans go out of their way when they visit the Western states, just to see Karl Momen's tree in the Utah desert.
Momen has not been the opportunist that many claimed him to be, using "our" desert as a gimmick location for a crazy publicity stunt. He continues to come to Utah, working with Neil Hadlock and also with Kevin Maag at Metal Letters in Lehi to create many of his sculptures, which go to major exhibitions throughout the world.
Last week he was in Utah again.
When we picked him up at his hotel room at Little America and were driving through downtown on our way to dinner, he looked out the window and said, "I always look forward to coming back to Utah. It is like coming home."
Regardless of the ambivalence with which we in Utah have cautiously warmed to his "Tree of Utah" over the past six years, his sense of feeling at home here has been very special to me, for I have come to value him as a dear friend, and would love for no more than to help others see through his very multifaceted nature into the heart of the man, which is much more simple than even he would admit.