It looks just like any other summer reunion: potluck dishes on the tables, hugs all around, small wide-eyed children wondering why everybody is laughing and crying.
The difference here is that the members of this group, which gathered at North Park in Spanish Fork Saturday, are bound not by blood but by ties made in a tiny town that no longer exists.Thistle, a farming community located south and east of Spanish Fork, was wiped out in 1983 by flood waters caused when a mudslide damned the Spanish Fork River.The devastating event stopped its history as a community but not as a memory.
Eleven families still lived there, but a lot more have called Thistle and the nearby mini-town of Johnsonville home.
They get together every year about this time to renew old friendships, swap stories and just generally focus on keeping the legend of Thistle alive.
"Thistle will rise again," says the writing on Luana Baadsgaard's T-shirt. Her parents met in Thistle. Her grandmother died there in a house fire.
She's busily collecting stories of Thistle to put into a collection for the Utah Historical Society.
Cora Lee Johnson and her sister, Claudia Seeley, were born in Thistle. So were Seeley's two children.
The Johnson home was the only structure left standing after five feet of water buried the town when the mountain literally slid into the Spanish Fork River and diverted the flow into Thistle.
It was a big cobblerock home her parents had built in 1940. "I asked my brother why ours stood when everything else washed away," said Johnson. "He said, `Rocks don't float, Cora."' Frank Edwards lived there 30 years and was there the day before the slide hit. "I worked for the railroad," said Edwards. "I remember the way the road bulged."
"I just couldn't believe it could happen," said Grant Stephensen who lived there with his wife, Jean, until August of 1939. "Those old towns just ought to go on forever. It's kind of unbelievable when something like this happens."
Ray Johnson, 88, considers himself the oldest living resident of Thistle. He had a ranch, two service stations, a dance hall, a motel and a cafe in the town during the years he called it home.
"I couldn't hardly fathom the sliding through those ledges. I didn't think there was any dirt there," said Johnson. "What happened is the mountain just slid into the river. It covered all of my property with five feet of water."
Johnson said he didn't still live in Thistle at the time, but he knew everyone there and was still operating his motel and cafe.
"I had an opportunity to sell it all for $750," said Johnson. "And I took it. It wasn't worth anything anymore. It's all buried."
Johnson said he loves to get together with family and friends from the community, but when he has to drive by Thistle, "I look the other way."