It is tempting to drive through Garden City, Utah, too quickly, pausing only at the stop sign where U.S. 89 skitters up to Bear Lake and then curves sharply to avoid it. To tourists in the West, after all, towns are just interruptions along the great, shimmering highway that stretches toward the horizon.
But somehow seduced by the sheer brashness of the town - especially by a 10-foot high plastic milkshake in the center of town advertising the Bear Lake raspberry shake - I decided to spend a day in Garden City last summer. That day I discovered that the West was still a place of incongruous pleasures.Actually not a city at all, Garden City is hardly more than an intersection perched on the edge of a deep blue lake. But the tiny town makes an immodest claim to renown as the birthplace of the "famous" raspberry shake. The shake, a thick mixture of vanilla ice cream and fresh raspberries, is so scrumptious that visitors are likely to overlook the hyperbole.
At first glance, it is not easy to understand the town's gastronomic success, since Garden City, which lies roughly in the middle of nowhere, is a town of few pretensions, culinary or otherwise. Indeed, Garden City, which is about 125 miles northeast of Salt Lake City, has all the charm of a tourist trap; its aggressive self-promotion and its oversize signs are clearly calculated to snare motorists making the long, dusty drive north to Yellowstone National Park.
But like many Western towns, even Garden City, with its corner gas station and tacky souvenir store, cannot obscure the grandeur of its surroundings. At the foot of the town, Bear Lake, 20 miles long and 8 miles wide, glistens almost too intensely in a bowl of barren brown hills. Where the hills and the brilliant tropical blue water meet, sandy beaches ringed by cottonwood trees have formed.
Not much grows in the dry hills, so I was surprised to see so much evidence of fresh raspberries. There were two stands selling fresh berries and jam, and towering advertisements for raspberry shakes.
I was intrigued and started to make some casual inquiries. I quickly learned that the benign-looking berries and the mouthwatering shakes they produced were the cause of some pretty nasty quarrels.
As in "Falcon Crest" on television, the scions of the area's largest berry-farm families were not speaking to each other, I discovered, although they continued to farm side by side. And even a simple question like "Who invented the Bear Lake raspberry shake?" provoked considerable contention in Garden City, where shakes are a serious business.
LaBeau's Drive-In, a squat orange building in the center of town, bills itself as the "home of the famous raspberry shake" and has a 10-foot high shake sign out front to prove it. But Renee LaBeau, who bought the drive-in in 1981, acknowledged that she did not know who invented the shake. She said, though, that she was sure it must have been the stand's previous owners.
But Jeannie Willis, who five years ago opened up the competing Quick 'n' Tasty Drive-In across the street, is unwilling to concede the origin of the shake to LaBeau. Willis, who also acknowledged that she did not know who invented the shake, insisted that "it just came to be."
The only point of agreement seemed to be that the shakes, which sell for $1.80-$2, never would have come to be if the late Theodore Hildt, a German immigrant, has not started planting raspberries in the dusty hills some 70 years ago. Hildt's son, Ivan, who last summer was still tending raspberries, said that his father had settled in Utah because his family had been converted to Mormonism. Growing raspberries, he said, "was the farthest thing from their mind."
But the few rows of raspberries that the elder Hildt started with eventually expanded to cover 80 acres. Summer residents of the area say the berries are considered the finest for hundreds of miles around.
"Berries do very well here for some reason," Hildt said. He shrugged. "It has something to do with the lake." But even on Bear Lake a berry farmer's life is risky. "Berries is a gamble," Hildt said, "just like Las Vegas."
Precisely how the Bear Lake raspberry shake is made is a well-kept secret. Willis and LaBeau would say that the shake contains fresh raspberries and soft ice cream and not much else. Indeed, so intense was the secrecy that LaBeau even went so far as to make the young women who work for her during the summer sign what she called "a paper" that prohibited them from revealing her recipe.
But careful observation of both women revealed that there is not much to the raspberry shake, and that, in fact, its success lies in its simplicity.
First, fresh raspberries are spooned into a large cup. (There is some debate over whether the raspberries should at this point be slightly crushed.) Then, soft ice cream is pumped into the cup, which has a metal sleeve inserted into it so that the mixture doesn't ooze over the top. Finally the mixture is given a short spin with a rotating milkshake mixer. The shake is so thick that when the metal sleeve is removed, the mixture stands up over the edge of the cup like a pink ice cream tower. No straw is provided; the shake must be eaten with a spoon.
Raspberry shakes are a best seller in Garden City, and it is not uncommon to see whole busloads of tourist disembark to taste them. But in a town as committed to shakes as Garden City is, one flavor is clearly not enough. The drive-ins boast dozens of different flavors including strawberry-rhubarb, caramel-banana and gumdrop.
"Every year, I usually come up with four or five new shakes," said LaBeau.
Garden City has turned its back on the waters of Bear Lake, and access to the lake is tough to find. But during my visit I was emboldened by a substantial amount of ice cream, and managed to pick a path between some houses to the lake. The lake was shallow and extraordinarily clear, good for wallowing in when slightly sated. I was told that the lake contained fish that lived nowhere else in the world, but I confess I never found any.
By the time I was ready to leave Garden City, it was almost evening and I feared that if I lingered, I would be tempted to indulge in yet another raspberry shake. Since I was about to embark on a backpacking trip of some strenuousness I though that too many pleasures might violate the spirit of my journey. So I reluctantly got back into the car and drove off toward the sunset over Paris, Idaho, watching in my rear view mirror as the revolving shake retreated.