Notes from Westwater

Ned Smith and Ted Palmer hard at work on the washed-out road from Piute Pass into Red Canyon. Merry Palmer photo

Washed out at Piute Pass

I could hear the clank of shovels hitting buried rocks and the men panting from exertion, but they didn’t talk much as they dug dirt from the side of the road to fill the crevices of the washed-out road from Piute Pass into Red Canyon. Ned Smith, Ted, and I had started from Blanding with our ATVs...

Water is flowing in Westwater Canyon after recent rains. Courtesy photo

A new way of seeing

Using a drawing pencil and pad, I traced the space around the table in my mom’s hospital room. The switch in my brain felt painful. I’d never noticed the negative or white space before, but Betty Edwards, Ph.D. had developed a series of exercises in her book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain...

Horned lizards symbolize health, strength, transformation, and, in some cultures, even God’s messengers. Ted Palmer photo

Downloading love, walking Omicron

“When you love you should not say, God is in my heart, but rather, I am in the heart of God.” ~ Kahlil Gibran As a high school freshman, I contracted a serious illness, ran a high temperature, and stayed in bed for two weeks. We were living in my great-grandparents’ old farmhouse at the time. My...

Gold Feathers

The lesser goldfinches in our yard often perch upside down on the sunflowers, busily plucking seeds from the mature heads. Holding on with their tiny feet, they ride the flowers like miniature ships as they sway in the breeze. The males with their gold breasts, black caps, and black-and-white...

Haunted Lantern Tour

Dustin, our guide, handed us each a long-burning candle inserted into the bottom of a bucket. We stood just inside the mouth of the cave where enough outside light illuminated an iron gate. “Iron,” Dustin intoned, “repels spirits and keeps them from leaving the cave. Once we pass that gate, our...

Hardworking ants can carry impressive loads – ten to 50 times their own weight. Merry Palmer photo

The true story of ants

Clumsy and plump, Steven Pfenniger cried easily, which didn’t earn him any respect from the pack of kids running our neighborhood in Hutchinson, KS. His dad owned a shop just off Fourth Street and repaired TVs, but we didn’t know much more about him or his family — which was unusual in our...

Courage through adversity at Cooper’s Rock

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin Nine years ago, having heard about the mystical waterfalls in Havasupai near the Grand Canyon, we decided to backpack into the area. Because I’d been struggling with bronchitis, I sat up coughing the night before we hiked in, but...

Soldiers carry the colors during the Blanding Fourth of July celebration. Annually, the Blanding celebration offers the small-town American feel of yesteryear, a breath of fresh air in these modern times that can sometimes feel complicated. Ted Palmer photo

The Fourth of July, Blanding style

I first met Blanding on the Fourth of July many years ago when my family and I visited my brother Tom. After some rough experiences including war, Tom, a police officer, decided he wanted to raise his young family in a small religious town so he looked on a Utah map, prayed, and chose two...

Wild Burros

As I was walking between the Quonset hut and the old chicken coop, I heard my cousin scream. I peered around the door of the old coop where my cousin Linda cowered on the roost. Two Shetland ponies had chased her there and were not about to let her down. Linda and I were ten years old. “Merry, go...

Preparing for a miracle

Joshua means, “God is deliverance,” an unlikely name for the largest yucca plants in the world, but according to Katie Noonan, when settlers sent out by Brigham Young first saw the trees southwest of St. George, they thought they resembled Joshua from the Bible. Not all early explorers thought the...