Deseret Magazine - June 2021

M AG A Z I N E

BEST. SUMMER .

EVER .

THE

ROAD TRIP IS

BACK

By Stephen Fried

GREEN JELL-O

SAVES AMERICA

DONNY

OSMOND TAKES LAS VEGAS

By Michael J. Mooney

THE

SURPRISING

HISTORY OF

FAMILY

REUNIONS JUNE 2021

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THE VIEW FROM HERE

FINDING OUR WAY BACK

BY JESSE HYDE

A

year ago, at what felt like the height of the pandemic (but was actually just the beginning), there was only one place I wanted to go: home.

I was home, of course, locked down in my living room and bedroom and sometimes my front porch, in the first months of what would prove to be a quarantine of more than a year. But where I wanted to go was the place that will always be home to me: Fallon, Nevada, where I grew up.

It’s eight hours west of Salt Lake City, across the barren expanse of the Great Basin, a small dot on a map in the empty desert between the last range of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras. Isolated and remote, it seemed the perfect place to wait out the pandemic. My kids could ride four-wheelers and horses with their cousins, help Grandpa feed his chickens and cows, and most importantly, avoid contact with the outside world.

It’s easy to forget what those first months felt like. I remember standing in the grocery store taking pictures of the empty shelves. “The bread’s all gone,” I texted my wife. A mini-forklift was carrying a pallet of toilet paper, beeping its way through a nervous throng of shoppers hovering nearby, all waiting to scoop up as many rolls as possible. I chuckled; it was all so surreal. But if I’m honest, I also felt fear.

My sister called me a few nights later. I was monitoring news reports

8 DESERET MAGAZINE

that showed the virus spreading across the globe. We’d all know someone who died from COVID-19 by the time this was all over, my sister told me. I didn’t believe her. Sadly, she was right; we all lost someone, or know someone who did.

Maybe it’s the impact of being cooped up for over a year or the cancellations of so many things we took for granted — Little League baseball games, rodeos, summer parades — that makes the coming summer feel special, and so needed. Or maybe, with infection rates finally subsiding and the arrival of vaccines, we feel hope for the future, and gratitude we’re still here.

This issue, we hope, captures some of that feeling. It’s an issue dedicated to long road trips and family reunions and letting kids run and roam, untethered from their phones. And for those who want to stay inside, we’ve got plenty of great stuff to read in these pages, including a delightful profile of Donny Osmond, a ray of sunshine if there ever was one.

Like many of you, I’ve been making travel plans I put off last year.

There’s a trip to Germany I hope to make with my oldest son, a concert in Wyoming. But there’s one place I really want to go this summer. It’s eight hours west of Salt Lake City, across the Great Basin Desert, along the banks of the Carson River. I want to go home, to once again be with those who matter most to me.

It will get brighter.

OPTIMISM

CONTENTS

WH EN JIMMER’S AWAY

16

BY F E ND I WA NG

H EA L ING SH ATTERED L IVES

28

BY ETHA N BAU ER

TH E NEW CULTURE WA R BATTL EG ROUND IS YOU

70

18

It’s way more than just a picnic. by lauren steele

BY CA R L R . TRUEMA N

TH E L AST WORD

THE LIFE-AFFIRMING POWER OF THE FAMILY REUNION

THE SUMMER OF THE FREE-RANGE PARENT

20

THE EXPERT OF GOOD IDEAS

Cooped up from COVID, kids need a long leash to roam and explore.

Venture capitalist Ann Miura-Ko on the magic of getting started.

by naomi schaefer riley

by erica evans

22

84

BY LOIS M. C OL L INS

THE GREEN JELL-O AGENDA

24

America’s political leaders can learn from Utah’s highly effective habits.

34

Is our fear of mountain lions unwarranted — or an alarm bell for the changing West?

by gary herbert

by anna callaghan

DONNY OSMOND AND 48 THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMLIFE

TH E R OA D TR I P I S B AC K!

The legendary crooner on all the eras of his life. by michael j. mooney

10 DESERET MAGAZINE

DON’T RUN

THE STORY THAT 40 STARTED WITH A SOUND How one Navajo photographer passed down a history of healing. by mary mcintyre

56

AN UNLIKELY RETIREMENT

78

Take the trail blazed by the inventor of hospitality as we know it.

A millennial ponders leaving social media behind.

by stephen fried

by fendi wang

FRIDAY, JULY 23, 2021

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CONTRIBUTORS

blessings when he photographs places they once walked.

MAGA Z IN E

PRESIDENT & ROBIN RITCH PUBLISHER EDITOR JESSE HYDE CREATIVE DIRECTOR DAVID MEREDITH MANAGING EDITOR ARIANA DAWES DEPUTY EDITOR CHAD NIELSEN EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAL BOYD CONTRIBUTING JAMES R. GARDNER EDITORS LAUREN STEELE

STEPHEN FRIED

YUKAI DU

Stephen Fried is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author who teaches at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.

His books include “Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West — One Meal at a Time” and “RUSH: Revolution, Madness & the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father.” He and his wife, author Diane Ayres, live in Philadelphia.

Yukai Du is a Chinese illustrator and animation director based in London. Yukai’s inspiration for her work lies somewhere in the dichotomy of impressionism, the dash of lines and layering of dots to create a surface, combined with a love for geometric shapes and playful vibrant patterns.

ANNA CALLAGHAN

Anna Callaghan is a writer and filmmaker based in Boulder, Colorado. She has written for GQ, Outside, Alpinist, the Seattle Times and others. Her films have screened at festivals around the country, and she’s currently producing a documentary that will debut in early 2022.

CORRESPONDENT MICHAEL J. MOONEY STAFF WRITERS ETHAN BAUER ERICA EVANS SOFIA JEREMIAS CONTRIBUTING LOIS M. COLLINS WRITERS KELSEY DALLAS JENNIFER GRAHAM MYA JARADAT FENDI WANG ART DIRECTOR PIERCE THIOT DESIGNERS KEVIN CANTRELL MIA MEREDITH ALEC FRANCIS DESIGN INTERN S.M. KNOERNSCHILD COPY CHIEF TODD CURTIS COPY EDITORS CHRIS MILLER WHITNEY WILDE RESEARCH FENDI WANG CONTRIBUTING WESTON COLTON ARTISTS BRIAN CRONIN HANNAH DECKER YUKAI DU MATT GALLAND NICOLE HILL GERULAT RANDY GLASS JOSH GOSFIELD SPENSER HEAPS BRAD HOLLAND MARC PISCOTTY EUGENE TAPAHE DARIN WARREN HEAD OF SALES SALLY STEED

CARL R. TRUEMAN

EUGENE TAPAHE

HANNAH DECKER

Eugene Tapahe, Navajo, is a designer, artist and photographer, who specializes in capturing the beautiful landscape and people of the Southwest. He receives inspiration from his family and culture. When he is on a photo shoot, he feels his ancestors’ presence with him. He feels their love and

Hannah Decker is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Utah. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s in fine arts in design and has spent the last few years living and working in New York with her husband and two fat cats. They welcomed home a sweet baby girl last September.

14 DESERET MAGAZINE

Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Before joining the faculty there, he was a visiting fellow at Princeton University.

He is married with two adult sons and is also an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.”

Deseret Magazine is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in January/February and July/August.

The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Suite 500, Salt Lake City, Utah.

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MODERN FAMILY

WHEN JIMMER’S AWAY WHITNEY FREDETTE ON GETTING THROUGH LONG MONTHS OF COVID-19 APART FROM HER BASKETBALL STAR HUSBAND

BY FEN DI WA N G

S

ince meeting jimmer her freshman year at BYU, Whitney Fredette has supported her husband through an extraordinary professional basketball career for over a decade. She has watched his wins, losses and — above all — ability to adapt. In 2016, Jimmer signed with the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association, placing him in China for a portion of every year and introducing an unconventional challenge for her and their two young children.

At the time of interview, Whitney had not seen Jimmer in over six months due to travel restrictions related to the pandemic; they usually spend no more than six to eight weeks apart. Fortunately, the family reunited in their Colorado home in mid-April.

Here’s what she’s learned through it all.

Being in the spotlight I’ll admit, in the beginning, during the peak of Jimmer’s popularity when he first got drafted into the NBA, it was obnoxious. We couldn’t go places, we couldn’t do anything. I remember thinking I didn’t want to deal with this for the rest of my life. As time went on, it’s become better. Now the people who want to talk to him and shake his hand are genuine fans. We live in Colorado where there is less of a Latter-day Saint community than in Utah, so I think people recognize his name but may not know more than that.

Dealing with distance It’s very difficult. I like to keep my plate filled so the days cruise on by, but the kids and I miss him a lot. We FaceTime every day. We support him because it is a great career, a way for him to support our family, and he’s a talented basketball player who loves what he does. Knowing there are six months offseason when Jimmer is home with us every single day, all day, makes the times he’s gone a little easier.

We have an end in sight, and it’s not like this is forever.

Motherhood Raising our children without Jimmer half of the time has been difficult because everything falls on my shoulders. I have to be the 16 DESERET MAGAZINE

disciplinarian, put them to bed, clean up breakfast, do the laundry. All of these little tasks add up. My biggest priority is making sure my children get one-on-one time with me. As easy as it is to plop them in front of the TV, which I do sometimes, I make sure to carve out intentional time to do things that are fun for them, like riding a bike or a scooter. It’s such a quick and fleeting time that your kids are home and little.

Experiencing a new country The Chinese culture is phenomenal and the people are amazing. Something I love and admire is how important family is to them. There are obstacles like language barriers, but it’s all worth it. I love giving our kids the opportunity to immerse themselves in a different language, different food, something other than what they see every day in Colorado. It sounds cliche, but it provides such a wonderful perspective on how lucky we are as a family.

The importance of self-care In order to be a great parent you need to focus on yourself, too. I’m a better mom if I’ve had an hour to myself to go to the gym or grocery shopping or walk my dog and enjoy some peace and quiet. “Me” time is just as important as time with your kids, if not more important. That’s where my mom steps in. I’m fortunate to live 15 minutes away from my parents. I don’t think I could do it if I didn’t have her.

Faith as a guide The concept of the eternal perspective is always in the back of my mind, especially when Jimmer is gone for long weeks and months. He and I do get to be together forever, and time apart is such a small little blip on the radar. Prayer is huge for us, too.

What the future holds As our children grow older, Jimmer will close out his basketball career so he can spend more time with the family. We’re fortunate that he has business opportunities lined up, so it’ll be a pretty seamless transition. It’s weird to think about that chapter coming to an end because basketball has been in his life for as long as I’ve known him, but it’s in the future — the soon future.

P HOTO GRA P HY BY DAR I N WAR R EN

w h itney f r ed ette w i t h h e r d au g h t e r s, l i t t l eto n, c o lo r a d o, may 11, 2 0 2 1

JUNE 2021 17

MODERN FAMILY

THE LIFE-AFFIRMING POWER OF THE FAMILY REUNION IT’S MORE THAN ASSORTED SALADS AND GAMES — IT’S ABOUT BUILDING STRONGER BONDS

BY LAUREN ST EELE

S

uzanne vargus holloman attended her first family reunion in 1980, when she was in her mid-20s. She didn’t play hideand-seek with her cousins in the grassy fields and old growth forests of Pennsylvania where she grew up, or get a special toy for winning a wheelbarrow race. But she did see an uplifting change in the family.

“At our first family reunion I saw the impact it had on the young men,” Holloman, codirector of the Family Reunion Institute, recalls.

She says that the men were affirmed by the extended family in ways they hadn’t been before.

Feelings that they weren’t living up to the family’s expectations or didn’t have the support they needed were replaced with assurance and love. “The way they carried themselves and the self-confidence they had when they left that reunion — you could see it.”

After that experience, Holloman and her mother, Dr. Ione Vargus, had questions. Namely, “is this phenomenon just my family reunion or are all family reunions like this?” That question inspired Dr. Vargus, dean emerita of the Temple University School of Social Work, to dedicate herself to researching African American family reunions. She interviewed families from the eastern, northern and southern parts of the United States, diving in to discover the reasons families hold reunions and the benefits reunions have for individuals. What she found is that the experience that she and her daughter, Holloman, had at their reunion was not unique in the slightest. Many families around the country were using reunions for goal-specific reasons, like building up future generations and building a strong foundation of extended support. So, in 1990, Dr. Vargus founded the Family Reunion Institute, an organization that boasts being the only one of its kind in America to focus exclusively on strengthening extended families. And while she maintains that any type of family gathering — whether it’s Sunday dinner or a barbecue — is important for passing 18 DESERET MAGAZINE

down values, building strong bonds and passing along history, family reunions have a distinction: “Reunions are mission-centric,” she says.

“It’s more than a picnic.”

Across the country, families of all backgrounds and in all regions — from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest — hold annual reunions. More often than not, there are special T-shirts that are made and planning committees that determine the location and date of the event. Some reunions last a day, some last a weekend and some last longer. Family recipes of salads that mysteriously contain no veggies are happily (or sometimes, warily) consumed and games are played. Stories old and new are told, and family elders dote on youngsters. And while many family reunions hold space for family history to be passed down and retold, many don’t know the history of family reunions themselves.

Family reunions started after the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, Holloman says. “While people were enslaved it was very hard to keep family connections. The very system of slavery was meant to break up families. After emancipation, African American families finally gathered.” After generations of being torn apart, Black families began to put themselves back together. William Still, a wellknown abolitionist and author of “The Underground Railroad,” founded the Still Family Reunion to bring descendants of the family back together, and to pass down stories of horrors survived and freedom found. “He called them to gather on a regular basis,” Holloman says. Today, the Still Family Reunion is more than 150 years old and hosts more than 500 participants. “What has happened in general with reunions is that they’ve become a part of our cultural heritage,” Holloman says. “They contribute to the survival and progress of families with very specific goals.”

One of those goals is to impart values, which families identify and weave into the

reunion’s activities. Some families place an emphasis on education, collecting donations to create scholarships that assist the kids going to college in the family. Other families have nonprofits and create chapters to raise money for charitable causes that are important to the family. Some families that Holloman and Dr. Vargus have worked with create venture capital funds to gift to family members who want to start businesses. There are even organized workshops around various topics such as retirement saving, building wealth, charitable giving and business that are held at some family reunions.

“We’ve seen reunions take shape as highly organized events and that impart values and love through growth,” Holloman says. “They are very specifically planned to help the family progress and to empower the family. And sure, they are still lots of fun, too.”

Dr. Vargus and Holloman both say that family reunions in general are something that every family can benefit from. “It’s an opportunity of families of all backgrounds and all definitions to come together and have that time of imparting love and concern and supporting each other,” Dr. Vargus says. And this summer, as families reunite for the first time — in some cases — since 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, having time to spend together, to tell stories, to hug and to have intergenerational interaction will bring a much more literal meaning to “reunion” than it has in generations.

Dr. Vargus and Holloman both anticipate seeing more and larger family reunions this year and next year. “We have gotten back to basics and the importance of family,” Holloman says. “And while technology has helped us stay connected, there’s nothing like the face-to-face contact.” It, just like those family stories and lessons from our elders passed down, helps us to feel affirmed and for us to know better who we are.

TAMEKIA McMAHON AND HER DAUGHTER, IFE SHANGO, AT THE BLACK FAMILY REUNION CELEBRATION, AN EVENT HELD ANNUALLY. MANY FAMILIES AROUND THE COUNTRY USE REUNIONS FOR GOAL-SPECIFIC REASONS, LIKE BUILDING UP FUTURE GENERATIONS.

JUNE 2021 19

MODERN FAMILY

THE SUMMER OF THE FREE-RANGE PARENT COOPED UP FROM COVID, KIDS NEED A LONG LEASH TO ROAM AND EXPLORE

BY N AO MI SCHA EFER RILEY

W

hen scott sampson was about 4 or 5, his mother took him to a frog pond. He scooped up several tadpoles, with their “bloblike bodies, and long, slimy, transparent tails,” he writes in his book “How to Raise a Wild Child: The Art and Science of Falling in Love With Nature.” Captivated by these creatures, he recalls, he waded farther into the water until it went over the tops of his boots. Sampson, who is now a paleontologist and author, says that “many years later, my mother told me that she started to object but thought better of it.” This summer, parents need to be more like Scott Sampson’s mother.

It is time to silence our concerns about kids getting messy, stop following kids around with bottles of hand sanitizer and extra masks, and start letting them explore the world on their own. It’s time to embrace our inner free-range parent.

The past 16 months have been hard on children. It is not just the learning loss, though the fact that 2 million kids were missing from school this year does not bode well for future academic success. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 31% increase in mental health-related doctor’s visits for kids in 2020 compared to 2019. In an article published in February, NPR found after conducting interviews with providers in seven states that “more suicidal children are coming to their hospitals.” Dr. Vera Feuer, director of pediatric emergency psychiatry at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of Northwell Health in New York, has seen a slight increase in 10- to 11-year-olds attempting, but the majority are

20 DESERET MAGAZINE

teenagers. The number has doubled from the fall of 2019 to the fall of 2020 at the emergency room at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, in California, says psychologist Marisol Cruz Romero. Kids have suffered from the isolation of the lockdowns — and many are looking forward to going back into the world — but a year of being at home has also instigated or

IT IS TIME TO SILENCE OUR CONCERNS ABOUT KIDS GETTING MESSY, STOP FOLLOWING KIDS AROUND AND START LETTING THEM EXPLORE THE WORLD ON THEIR OWN.

exacerbated anxiety about social situations for many children.

As parents, we need to use this summer to get things back to normal, says Lenore Skenazy, but not just pre-COVID-19 normal, pre-helicopter parenting normal. Skenazy, the founder of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, says that she doesn’t blame parents for their hovering, especially not this year. “It’s the culture that does this.”

A recent study in England, for instance, found that over the course of one generation the age at which parents think it’s OK to let kids play outside by themselves has increased from 9 to 11. “Eleven? That’s a year younger than Juliet when she married Romeo,” Skenazy jokes. As Anita Grant, chair of a group called Play England, told the Guardian: “Adults’ protective instincts are not helpful when they restrict and control exploration, creativity and a child’s natural instinct to engage with their environment freely.”

Even before the pandemic many parents were searching for perfect safety for their children. Accepting even the smallest risk became intolerable and COVID-19 made that worse. It’s nothing short of a miracle that this disease has not affected children very much at all. Kids ages 1 to 17 are more likely to die from — among other things — cancer, the flu and heart disease. How much effort do you devote to preventing your kids from contracting these other illnesses? Never mind. Don’t start thinking about it now.

It’s time we started to weigh all the risks to kids instead of just the ones in the headlines.

The risk to kids from obesity, depression, anxiety that have come from keeping them home, in front of screens and 3 feet from the refrigerator far outweighs the risks of sending them to play with their friends outside.

And Skenazy says: “If we’re worried about social emotional growth for kids after this year, nothing turns the key in the ignition better than independence.” So have your kids climb a tree, play outside with friends or go to ILLUST RAT IO N BY HANNAH DECKER

a store alone. Tell them to come home when the streetlights come on — or if they really have to use the bathroom.

Or send them to camp. “Kids really need badly what most camps have to offer right now,” says Audrey Monke, author of “Happy Campers: 9 Summer Camp Secrets for Raising Kids Who Become Thriving Adults.” Getting kids outdoors and ensuring they have lots of face-to-face contact with other kids and young counselors is really important for putting them back on track to physical and emotional health.

Monke is a big fan of sleepaway camp and has been running one for 35 years. She says that being away from parents for a few weeks allows kids to “form their own relationships, speak for themselves and make their own decisions.” Even something as simple as deciding whether they want vanilla yogurt or strawberry or whether they want to make a friendship bracelet or try ceramics is important. “Parents in the rush of life these days make all those choices for kids,” says Monke. This need for efficiency — “Just eat the flipping yogurt al-

ready!” — may sound familiar to anyone trying to juggle home-schooling with a job this past year.

Along those lines, Monke says there is another reason that kids should go away to camp this year. “Parents are fried and they need a break.” Maybe it sounds selfish, but Monke says, “Breaks are important to a parent-child relationship. You miss each other. You realize you can do some things on your own.” And then after a few weeks “you can be refreshed and ready for more family time.”

JUNE 2021 21

LEADERSHIP

THE EXPERT OF GOOD IDEAS VENTURE CAPITALIST ANN MIURA-KO ON BUSINESS, BOOKS AND THE MAGIC OF GETTING STARTED

BY ER ICA EVA N S

A

seen. My vision of the impact I could have opened up to me. I remember nn miura-ko has been called “the most powerful woman seeing a picture from that externship where I was sitting exactly where in startups” due to her early buy-in on companies like Lyft, Bill Gates had sat, and I thought to myself: Oh, my dreams are so myopic!

Twitter, Twitch and Refinery29. But when you ask the 43-year-old They’re so focused on things that I know, rather than the unknown. all-star investor about taglines like this from business profiles past, she laughs. She’s just glad to see that the investment space is no longer What’s it like being an Asian American woman at the executive level? as lacking in women leaders as it was when she was starting out. After Being Asian American in venture capital or tech is not unusual. What’s graduating from Yale in 1998, she asked her boss at McKinsey and Co. unusual is getting to a leadership position. The representation of Asians if he knew any female partners. He didn’t. Now, after forging her own at the executive staff level is sorely missing relative way as co-founder of the approximately $401 milto how many people come into the industry. I think lion Floodgate Fund, which focuses on companies Favorite company you’ve that has to do with the often-false perception of in the earliest of stages (when they’re little more invested in Asians as quiet and maybe not forceful or charisthan PowerPoint presentations), Miura-Ko acts It’s like my children, I can’t choose. matic. I think being a woman is different because as a mentor to rising business leaders. During this there aren’t as many women in the tech and finance interview with Deseret, she sits in front of a colorBiggest companies you sectors to begin with. That’s why I co-founded All ful bookcase in the Palo Alto, California, home she said no to Raise — to try and increase the number of diverse shares with her husband and three kids. Right now, Airbnb, Pinterest, GitHub. founders and funders, because I’ve seen what differshe’s reading “The Four Winds,” a novel by Kristin ent voices can do to improve decision-making.

Hannah, but with a bachelor’s degree in engineerFavorite place to go relax ing and a doctorate in mathematics and cybersecuStanford campus.

Why is it important to be a mentor? rity from Stanford, Miura-Ko has more than a few Putting your belief in someone who has nothing technical books on the shelf as well. Through all her The best part of your proven is really the essence of venture capital. It’s education and experience she’s become an expert in daily routine about believing before the rest of the world believes. good ideas.

6 a.m. walks with my husband This interview has been edited for length and clarity. before the kids wake up.

How do you recognize a good idea?

The reason we invested in Lyft, which was called What’s the root of success?

One thing Zimride at the time, was the storyline. In 2010, I really do like being a little bit different. I was never you can’t live without there really weren’t many startups in the transpor100% focused on “What do other people think?” and My family. tation space. The founders said, “Look, transporta“How am I doing compared to everyone else’s time tion is about to change, and it’s going to be driven by scale?” My mom always described me as a weird kid.

The best advice social networks. It’s important because with every Ambition was part of that. When I was 2 years old, I you’ve ever received transition, from canals to railways to highways, the was jealous that my older brother played the violin, “Be world-class.” fabric of the country has changed, including where and I begged for lessons. As a fifth grader, I was docities are built.” ing a kids summer program at a local community colTheir first take was a platform sold to univerlege. My mom told me I had to take one math class, sities to empower people to have carpools. That was all right, but we but I could choose another. When I came home, she realized I’d signed up were really in love with this bigger transportation story. Co-founders for an adult class on negotiations.

Logan Green and John Zimmer had been pitching up and down Sand Hill Road, and they couldn’t find any takers. I was just getting startWhat inspired you early on? ed with my venture career; I didn’t even have an office at the time.

When I was a junior at Yale, I met the CEO of Hewlett-Packard and got We were sneaking into the Stanford law school dorms for meetings. We to shadow Ann Livermore, who was the first female executive I had ever 22 DESERET MAGAZINE

P HOTO GRA P HY BY SPENSER HEAPS

ann m iur a- ko, sta n f o r d, c a l i fo r n i a , may 1 0 , 2 0 2 1

were all at the inception of our careers, and it was a bet on each other.

What do you look for in startups?

You don’t become a better investor by figuring out all the ways something can go wrong. You become a better investor by figuring out how something can go right. The downside risk in investing is one times your capital. Whatever you put in, that’s all you can lose. But what you can gain if you’re right is thousands of times that.

What advice do you give to others?

Think about decision-making. You can actually become better at making decisions by studying how and why you make certain choices, and then writing your answers in a journal. You can apply the method to everything from cooking to business, to education, to parenting. You’ll become a better decision-maker through exposure to different ideas, too.

In every decision we make at Floodgate, I’m always trying to think about the opposite side of an argument. I try to live that.

JUNE 2021 23

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE GREEN JELL-O AGENDA AMERICA’S POLITICAL LEADERS CAN LEARN FROM UTAH’S HIGHLY EFFECTIVE HABITS

BY GA RY HERB ERT

J

ell-o is not exactly in vogue. It’s not avocado toast or a green smoothie. Its sales have fallen sharply in recent years (by nearly $400 million between 2009 and 2018, according to one estimate). But there’s at least one region in the United States still affectionately known as the Jell-O belt.

In homes along Utah’s Wasatch corridor and sections of neighboring states, the otherworldly confection still fills pantries and cupboards. On any given Saturday (at least prior to COVID-19) you could drive by a block party or church potluck and spot a half-eaten Jell-O salad alongside some funeral potatoes.

Jell-O’s midcentury appeal, and its recent decline, may have something to do with what New York Times columnist David Brooks calls America’s contemporary “crisis of meaning.” Unmoored from the social ties we used to find in kin and community — the kind of people who eat Jell-O together — we search for fulfillment in other sources.

In the United States in the 1950s, the total, completed fertility rate per woman was around 3.5 births; today it’s 1.6 births — below the rate of population replacement. Jell-O is a family and group confection. The brand was promoted

by Norman Rockwell-style paintings and irritatingly catchy jingles aimed at kids featuring Alvin and the Chipmunks.

The pitch was to families — full stop. You can create lots of servings at a low cost — think gatherings. Its tactile form makes it fun to eat — think children.

Jell-O did well in Utah because the state has plenty of both. To mark Jell-O’s 100-year anniversary in 1997, Kraft disclosed sales figures showing that “Utah consumes more lime Jell-O per capita than any other place in the world.”

Our state embraced this news. “NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED,” read a bill

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passed by the state Legislature in 2001 recognizing “Jell-O as a favorite snack food of Utah.”

In an era in which even Doritos touts an organic version, Jell-O — with its neon color — seems conspicuously inorganic. But in Utah, Jell-O continues to be a symbol of the state’s peculiar exceptionalism: family, faith and social cohesion. It’s a talisman of the granular norms that provide people with purpose, that make life better.

JELL-O CONTINUES TO BE A SYMBOL OF THE STATE’S PECULIAR EXCEPTIONALISM: FAMILY, FAITH AND SOCIAL COHESION.

Every Wednesday afternoon in the Russell Senate Office Building, Utah Sen. Mike Lee hosts his staff ’s weekly “Jell-O Wednesdays” for visitors. It’s good politics, but it’s also fitting for an elected official who launched the social capital project at the United States Joint Economic Committee. Much of the work of the committee underscores the overlooked interplay between economic well-being and social well-being.

When looking at Utah’s recent success it’s hard not to see the two as interwoven. And for Republicans who care about the former, turning a blind eye to the impact of social well-being is political negligence. The path forward for a na-

tion beset by challenges will require a renewed focus on the habits and life scripts that lead to family, community and a better life.

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Dial up Utah’s vital signs from before the world caught COVID-19 and the numbers speak for themselves.

For 13 years running, the American Legislative Exchange Council has ranked Utah No. 1 in terms of economic prospects. U.S. News & World Report puts Utah’s economy at No. 1. And happiness? Utah has the lowest divorce rate, highest rate of volunteerism and lowest number of hours in the office. And one study puts Utah behind only Hawaii as the happiest state in the union. Utah’s fundamentals — its youngest-in-the-nation demographics, diverse economy, and sizable governmental and nongovernmental rainy-day funds — positioned the state to recover quicker from COVID-19’s economic effects just as the state did after the 2008 recession.

According to a recent analysis by The Wall Street Journal, “As the pandemic raged through the U.S. in 2020, no metropolitan area in the country expanded the size of its labor force more on a percentage basis than Utah’s capital.”

Several years ago, the Harvard economist Raj Chetty and a team of researchers culled through national census data to gauge how different regions within the United States perform in terms of economic mobility. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Salt Lake City and its environs did remarkably well. Strong families and social cohesion make a difference, they explained. But this only begs the question: Why does Utah have stronger families or more social cohesion?

ILLUST RAT ION BY BR I AN CR ONI N

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•

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Mom and dad divorced when I was 4. About two years after the split we were together — just Mom and me — in our tiny apartment.

She asked me to look at some pictures of her potential suitors.

“Gary, who do you think I should marry?”

To me, mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. So, I thought, her husband had to be handsome. I scanned the photos of eight or so men and searched for a guy with a good-looking mug.

The man in the photo I picked, Duane Barlow Herbert, married my mom. And for years I thought I was the reason. Duane adopted me as his son when I was 12. My name was changed to Herbert. I loved both my fathers, but in those years I wasn’t always exactly interested in taking orders from a man who didn’t share my DNA. Dad was a hard worker who started at Geneva Steel and finished as the owner of his own construction company. My mom managed the chaos of a house bursting with seven kids. We went to church. Mom was dedicated to the choir. Growing up we just assumed services were supposed to continue with choir after everyone else went home.

Like most families, we butted heads now and again. We had strong wills. Together we worked; together we sacrificed. We succeeded not in accumulating immense wealth, but rather in cultivating the habits that make for a good life: family, faith and honest work.

None of it shielded us entirely from life’s messiness, but our upbringing gave my siblings and me sturdy spines. I had a front-row seat to our family’s financial struggles and modest triumphs. I saw my mom divorce and remarry.

I saw the joys and struggles that came with a long enough leash that allowed me to fail, but also one solidly tied to principles designed to bring happiness and success.

I learned that the rhythms of family were the primary means by which essential life skills and norms were forged and passed down from one generation to the next. I came to appreciate from my own experience that family — even an imperfect family like mine — contained the seeds not only for life’s success, but also the success of our community and state.

This isn’t just homespun philosophy from 26 DESERET MAGAZINE

Orem, Utah (Family City, USA); it’s the collective wisdom of social science.

The Brookings Institution calls it the “success sequence.” And, although it has critics, the research is hard to dismiss. Harvard’s Arthur Brooks summarizes “thousands of academic studies” when he states that “enduring happiness comes from human relationships, productive work, and the transcendental elements of life.” To put it more succinctly, healthy habits equals faith, family, friends and work.

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When the early Latter-day Saint pioneers first arrived in the arid Mountain West, cooperation was a matter of life or death. To survive, they stuck together.

It’s little wonder that the beehive — a symbol of communal burden-sharing — became the state emblem. It’s the closest thing Utah has to a logo. It adorns everything from highway signs to our state flag.

Brigham Young, the leader of the pioneers, first proposed calling the territory “Deseret,” a word from the Book of Mormon that means “honeybee” and symbolizes industry and cooperation. The federal government decided on “Utah” for the state’s name, but the symbol of the beehive has endured.

Young and early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints weren’t alone in drawing inspiration from the honeybee.

In Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” the archbishop of Canterbury praises the “order” of the beehive “kingdom.” Bees have leaders and officers, merchants and soldiers — they have masons “building roofs of gold” and citizens “kneading” honey. Bees offer a portrait in miniature of nature’s constitution, the Bard tells us. They depend on one another for survival and for success.

What one does impacts the whole hive.

They’re all connected. Yet another of nature’s sermons is the starling. It’s no secret that Utah — and many other states — view starlings as pests. We have too many of them; but, in terms of survival, they’re successful. As one bird expert put it to The Associated Press, they’re “quite the biological machine.”

Just look up long enough at the sky and you’ll spot them. Like a fluid cloud, starlings congregate in the air, swaying together in unpredict-

able and ever more imaginative directions. For years, the phenomenon remained largely a mystery. Recently, however, technology has aided scientists in dissecting the processes that actually produce their collective motions.

Inside these bird clouds, a sudden movement of just one starling triggers reactions throughout the flock. A bird moving at the sight of a potential threat influences surrounding birds.

This spreads with each movement until all fly together in what looks to the observer like a single wave rolling across the sky.

This isn’t a typical lesson on “the birds and the bees.” Observing hives and starling murmurations teaches us that communities are connected. Individuals shape collective norms and habits. In turn, those norms become policies and community actions that circle back and shape us. In other words, we influence each other. The flight patterns we choose affect the destinations of those around us.

Culture impacts what we buy, who we follow and our life choices. No wonder so many take up arms in the so-called “culture wars.”

It holds the power to nudge us toward wise choices and better outcomes, or toward turbulence and dangerous outcomes.

Institutions, like political parties, clubs and churches, play a role. Thinker Yuval Levin has called institutions “the durable forms of our common life,” giving shape, structure and roles to our aims and individual actions.

Institutionalizing our shared goals is natural.

It aligns with our yearning to fit in and pitch in. This kind of prosocial peer pressure can inspire heroic lives of moral virtue. Not unlike the starlings, those who do good induce others around their orbit to fly in a similar direction.

But what of independence or individuality? Doesn’t all this talk about the common good or burden-sharing inevitably lead to thorny questions about infringing on sacred individual rights?

These ideas are actually not contradictory, but complementary. The more that institutions such as families and faith groups are given the liberty and support to grow and succeed, they can help mold us together for the common good — not unlike the way Jell-O salads still bring neighbors, kin and co-religionists together all along Utah’s Wasatch Front.

Gary Herbert is the former governor of Utah.

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HEALING SHATTERED LIVES HOW SURVIVORS OF MASS SHOOTINGS ARE HELPING A NEW GENERATION

BY ETHA N B AUER

F

daughter or nephew made it out alive. “That leaves you standing there or missy mendo, the news of March 22 came in a text message. It thinking, ‘Well, I guess God didn’t bless me,’” Mauser says. always does. “I love you, are you OK?” A flurry of similar messages Mauser scrambled to pick up the pieces of his life and assemble them followed. Mendo, 36, usually tries to shut out news of mass shootings and into something purposeful once more. To do so, he didn’t need encouravoid the internet to keep her memories and emotions bottled up. But this agement to overcome. He didn’t need dismissiveness or exhaustion from time, the fact that the shooting unfolded just 45 minutes from her home in people who hadn’t known his pain. But he didn’t know what he needed Boulder, Colorado, at her preferred grocery store chain, made the horror either. “You’re just kind of wandering aimlessly,” he admits. harder to avoid.

About a month after the shooting, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to Mendo was 14, a freshman in math class, when two students attacked meet other parents who’d lost their children to gun violence. They told Columbine High School in suburban Denver. She heard the pop of gunhim he would never get over what happened, and he fire, then a strange rumble, like students were bangshouldn’t expect to. But with time the intensity of ing on lockers. She peered into the hallway and saw his pain should ebb. Finally, someone had answers. a stream of teens sprinting toward the exit. Finally, And he found more understanding among others someone yelled a warning: “They have guns, they who lost kids at Columbine. “Nobody knew what have bombs, get out of here.” you were going through like these other parents,” he At home, a red light blinked on her answering “A HUG FROM explains. “We were going through this together.” machine. In message after message, parents asked if ANOTHER SURVIVOR IS DIFFERENT Research backs up Mauser’s observations. In a Mendo had seen their missing kids. That night she FROM SOMEONE 2019 paper published in the journal Victims & Ofslept between her parents, in her tennis shoes, doing WHO IS TRYING fenders, Jaclyn Schildkraut, a professor of crimipainful arithmetic to figure out which of her classTO CONSOLE YOU,” nal justice at the State University of New York at mates might be dead. Sleepless, she wondered why MENDO SAYS. Oswego, and an expert on mass shootings, wrote she had been spared, why others had not, why this about interviews with 16 Columbine survivors and school, why these parents, why, why, why? For weeks concluded, “the need to provide social support and and months, she found no answers, and no one who cultivate solidarity among survivors is crucial to pavunderstood her pain. This was 22 years ago, before ing the way to a healthy recovery.” She also found mass shootings had become endemic to American that the most effective support came from “similar society. Help was hard to find. others,” or people who had experienced the tragedy in a similar way.

Today, that has changed. Mendo and others like her are passing on The more similar, the better. After the Sandy Hook shooting in 2014, what they’ve learned as survivors to new generations. They’ve been for example, Mauser was invited to Newtown, Connecticut. He figured brought together not by choice, but by circumstance and a shared histohe’d have nothing to offer to the parents of murdered first graders. “I ry and experience few can understand. For many, these groups become thought I had it bad, but I had it nothing like what these people were a second family, a place where they feel safe. “A hug from another surgoing through,” he says. “But they wanted us there.” They asked almost vivor,” Mendo likes to say, “is different from someone who is trying to the same questions Mauser had all those years ago, so he passed along console you.” what he’d learned.

Just ask Tom Mauser. After his 15-year-old son, Daniel, died at That simple idea — that survivors are not alone — drives the support Columbine, he had nowhere to turn for answers, for relief. People with groups that have emerged across the U.S. Mendo works for one called The good intentions would approach him at the grocery store to tell him Rebels Project, based in Colorado, founded by Columbine survivors after how sorry they were — but also how blessed they were that their own

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ILLUST RAT IO N BY BR AD HOLLAND

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s urvivor s need f r ien ds to ac kn ow l e d g e w h at t h ey ’ r e g o i n g t h r o u g h , s ay s t o m m au s e r . h i s 1 5 - y e a r- o l d s o n d i e d i n t h e c o lu m b i n e s h o o t i n g

the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting. Today, Mendo says, the group works with survivors of over 100 “mass tragedies,” from shootings to bombings to stabbings, in the U.S. and the world.

Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group in New York, counts 251 mass shootings since 2009, with almost 1,500 killed and nearly 1,000 injured. But “there is a dark figure of survivors,” says Schildkraut — people affected by mass shootings in ways that are impossible to count.

In his recent book about how gun violence affects American children, Washington Post reporter John Woodrow Cox argues that beyond those who experience it directly, violence also impacts kids who go into lockdown and think they might die, while their parents frantically text them thinking the same thing. Which is why Mendo tells newcomers that whatever kind of support they’re looking for, they’ll probably find it. “It’s the most messed-up club to be a part of,” she says, “but you just love and understand all your members.”

Some survivors from the Boulder shooting have already started reach30 DESERET MAGAZINE

ing out for help. Mendo expects their numbers to rise over time, as their immediate resources begin drying up. Like survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting that killed 17 in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, 2018. That summer, about a hundred of them visited Denver to meet with survivors of Columbine, Mendo among them, with the same questions that once kept her up at night. One kid had lost his best friend; with prom and graduation and all the other rites of passage looming larger than ever, he asked how to cope knowing his friend wouldn’t be there.

Mendo, who’d recently become a mother, had been asking herself that same question, thinking about all the kids who died at Columbine whose parents would never know grandchildren, about classmates who never had the opportunity to live as she was living. She didn’t have an easy answer, because easy answers don’t exist. So she just told him what she and Mauser and others like them had learned from decades of bitter experience.

“You’re gonna think about those things a lot,” she said, “and you’re not alone.”

P HOTO GRA P HY BY MAR C PI SCOTTY

f or 1 2 y ear s af ter g r a d uat i o n, c o lu mbi n e s u rv i v o r mi s sy me n d o av o i d e d c olum b ine. b ut now s h e s ays i t ’s wo rt h r ev i s i t i n g t h e t r au ma to h e l p ot h e r s

JUNE 2021 31

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DON’T RUN IS OUR FEAR OF MOUNTAIN LIONS UNWARRANTED — OR AN ALARM BELL FOR THE CHANGING WEST?

BY A N N A CA LLAGHA N

O

n may 19, 2018, two mountain bikers in their early 30s were riding on a logging road some 30 miles from Seattle and just outside of North Bend, Washington, a small town in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. As they rode, they noticed a mountain lion. It appeared to be stalking them.

They stopped, yelled and stood their ground until the 100-pound male ran away. By the books, it was the right thing to do. But then the lion did something unusual. It returned and pounced on one of the bikers, 31-year-old Isaac Sederbaum. It latched on Sederbaum’s skull with its mouth, shaking him back and forth. This predatory move is intended to snap the neck of prey. Seeing this, the other biker, S.J. Brooks, 32, fled on foot. When Brooks ran, the lion released Sederbaum and pursued Brooks instead.

For Sederbaum, bleeding from wounds on his head and neck, the attack had stopped. But it wasn’t over yet. He saw the lion dragging Brooks into the woods. Grabbing his bike, he knew he had to find cell service. By the time he reached the 911 dispatch officer, it was too late. Officials later found the lion standing over Brooks’ body amongst the brush and trees.

This death was pivotal. A renewed and widespread fear of mountain lions swept through Washington, triggering a new lack of tolerance for mountain lions in the wild in a state that, up until that point, was interested in heeding scientific data on how best to manage the animal. Politicians introduced new legislation, and in defiance of the recommendations of state biologists, Fish and Wildlife commissioners voted to increase hunting limits. It’s a course of events that has repeated itself across

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the West after someone is killed or attacked by a lion: States react swiftly and definitively against the lions.

So, what’s to come in the western United States, where human-mountain lion interactions — fueled by these shrinking boundaries between human habitat and lion habitat — are certain to rise?

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Since the arrival of European settlers in North America, humans and mountain lions have had a contentious relationship. While lions roamed

IN THE UNITED STATES, UNDEVELOPED LAND IN LION COUNTRY IS BEING DEVELOPED — FURTHER BLURRING THE BUFFER BETWEEN HUMAN AND LION HABITAT.

the country among the Native American population, the colonists arrived with both the tools (steel traps, dogs and guns) and the desire to kill them, which they did after their livestock kept turning up dead.

Early mountain lion policy in the U.S. was ostensibly zero tolerance. Connecticut was the

first state to issue a bounty on mountain lions in 1684. Soon, other states followed suit. In 1888, the Utah Territorial Legislature established its own bounty and classified the mountain lion as an “obnoxious animal.” For the next 71 years, hunters in Utah could trade kills for cash. Over the course of Arizona’s 51-year bounty program, the state paid out a sum of $386,150 to hunters who brought in dead mountain lions. In 1901, Teddy Roosevelt took a vacation to Colorado between the end of his governorship of New York and taking office as vice president. A report in the Meeker Herald stated, “Mr. Roosevelt, wanting a little recreation, has chosen to hunt mountain lion for a pastime.” He killed 14 during his monthlong trip. By the early 1900s many states had succeeded in killing off their entire population of mountain lions. And while the cats remained in pockets throughout the West, they were mostly eradicated from states east of the Mississippi.

A few decades later — once the mountain lions were either dead or good as dead — America’s attitude toward them shifted dramatically. During the zeitgeist of the late 1960s cultural revolution, both perceptions and policy started to shift. Acceptance of the animals ended bounty programs across the country, and many states moved to reclassify them as game animals. Now, instead of states paying for a dead lion, they charged hunters for the chance to kill one. In Utah today, the going price for a lion tag is $58.

Mountain lions became a conservation success story, and researchers were finally able to study them in earnest. As their population began to rebound, they started to return to their historic ranges, eventually showing up P HOTO GRA P HY BY MATT GALLAND

a young mountain lion finds cover in the north-facing forest of mount timpanogos in utah’s wasatch range

f r es h mo u n ta i n l i o n t r ac ks d e s c e n d to t h e p r o v o c a n yo n, w h e r e d e e r a r e a bu n d a n t

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c ats th at f eel t h r e at e n e d by p e o p l e o r p ets w i l l u s ua l ly r etr eat into h i g h e r c o u n t ry, st e e p t e r r a i n o r t r e e s

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in states from South Dakota to Connecticut.

At the same time, the human population was growing, and metro areas and mountain towns such as Salt Lake City and Boulder, Colorado, began to sprawl. In the 1990s, mountain lion attacks — and deaths — peaked, with four fatalities, a number not seen since. The stories gripped the public.

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The town of Idaho Springs, Colorado, is 2 miles long and three blocks wide, give or take. It hugs the edge of Interstate 70 and is hemmed in by the Rocky Mountains. Colorful Victorian-era homes line the streets, holdovers from the town’s founding in 1859 when gold was discovered. It was once rambunctious and bustling — home to 12,000 people during its peak — but by 1990 it had long been quiet, and the population had settled to under 2,000.

In 1991, 18-year-old Scott Lancaster was in the middle of his senior year at Clear Creek High. He had an easygoing nature, an affinity for tie-dye and Birkenstocks, and was professedly in love with his girlfriend, Heather.

He’d recently let his grades slip so low that he wasn’t able to compete for the Nordic ski team, of which he was the star. It didn’t matter — he was far more interested in biking and had his eyes set on a pro cycling career.

Lancaster had a free period in the afternoon and often used that time to run a few laps in the hills above the high school for training. On the 14th of January, Lancaster grabbed pepperoni pizza from 7-Eleven for lunch and headed out on his run. At some point during his second lap, Lancaster was attacked by a mountain lion and dragged uphill. Despite being within view of both the high school and the freeway — and it being the middle of the day — no one saw him. Or heard him scream.

The mountain lion killed and ate the boy, and his body — “hollowed out like a pumpkin” — wasn’t found until two days later, recounts David Baron in the book “Beast in the Garden.” On that January day, Lancaster became the first human killed by a mountain lion in Colorado’s history.

Big biological questions arose. Were mountain lions losing their fear of humans, and

more importantly, once again looking at us as prey? The answer to the cause of this horrifying death, Baron says, can be found in the landscape, society’s changing relationship with wilderness and mountain lions’ increasing adaptability to suburbia.

“This is what our nation is becoming: a country where people build new homes on undeveloped land, pay to preserve the open space beside it, attract animals into their yard, and — by embracing wilderness and wildlife — alter the very nature of what they presume Nature to be,” Baron writes. “The future of America looks a lot like a place in Colorado where, on a mild winter’s day in 1991, a large cat killed a young man and ate his heart.”

“THERE ARE CATS ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF TOWNS ALL THE TIME IN THE WEST, IN PEOPLE’S YARDS, LIVING IN BETWEEN US ALL THE TIME.”

Is that true? Well, sort of. In the U.S., undeveloped land in lion country is increasingly being developed, which is blurring the buffer between human habitat and lion habitat. But does the future of America look like more people being preyed upon by mountain lions?

“That was a fearmongering book. There’s no evidence of that,” Mark Elbroch, scientist for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization, says. There are lions everywhere, and these gruesome deaths are the outliers, not the norm. “There are definitely cats on the outskirts of towns all the time in the West, in people’s yards, living in between us all the time.”

Most encounters with mountain lions are one-sided: The lion sees you, but you don’t see it. If there is an actual encounter, people typically employ the right behaviors (stand

your ground, make yourself look bigger, don’t crouch down, yell, throw rocks) and the lion moves on. They usually hunt from dusk to dawn, a time when most people are asleep.

In the last few years as doorbell cameras have increased in popularity, they’ve been picking up roaming lions at night. Without those, the sleeping residents would be none the wiser.

We feel fear in order to protect ourselves from legitimate threats, but we also feel fear when our lives aren’t immediately at risk (a big spider, flying on a plane, etc.). Most of us humans are skilled at imagining the worst-case scenario. So how do we perceive whether our fear is warranted?

Experts point to the numbers. In the last 100 years, less than two dozen people have been killed by mountain lions in North America, and no human has ever been killed by a mountain lion in Utah. (For perspective, around 20 people are killed every year by cows.) A person is far more likely to be struck by lightning or drown in their own bathtub than to be attacked by a cougar. “It’s this latent, intuitive sense of danger. It’s not based on statistics or probabilities of being attacked,” David Stoner, Utah State University mountain lion researcher, says.

Stoner is right; the odds of being killed by a mountain lion are extremely low, but does it matter? Does low probability affect our fear?

Not really. And especially not now, when encounters are becoming more likely.

Mountain lions continue to demonstrate a strong aversion to humans, but they are adapting their behavior to a changing environment.

According to research by Montana’s Headwater Economics, since 1990, 60% of new singlefamily homes in the U.S. have been built in what’s called the “wildland-urban interface,” or the zone where undeveloped wildland meets human development. Prime real estate is often also prime lion habitat. While mountain lions are capable of surviving virtually anywhere, their survival is dependent on deer, and deer are attracted to human landscapes. Towns close to the mountains, in places like the Wasatch Front and Colorado’s Front Range (which has one of the highest mountain lion densities on record in the country), provide respite for deer during the winter when they must retreat from the snowy high country. A study from the University of Michigan showed that deer are attractJUNE 2021 37

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the photographer flying above mount timpanogos looking for mountain lions

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ed to the light of urban areas. In these urban areas deer herds also find a consistent, sustainable food source.

“It’s all about the food,” says Stoner, who co-authored the study. “So what happens?”

Deer develop an affinity for human habitats, and food security trumps the mountain lions’ fear of those humans, so they follow their prey into town. Climate change and drought may also drive deer and lions into towns in order to access reliable water sources. “The problem with human conflict with deer and mountain lions in urban areas is really just getting started,” Stoner says. “This is not a problem that is going to go away.”

In 2017, a police officer killed a charging mountain lion just outside of downtown Salt Lake City. “Typically they’re not in the city seeking people, they’re trying to find their own habitat and have just gotten a little bit lost,” Riley Peck, a wildlife program manager for the Division of Wildlife Resources, told Deseret after the incident.

The Mountain Lion Foundation estimates that there are fewer than 30,000 mountain lions in the U.S., and the density of those mountain lions varies widely. In Utah, the highest mountain lion density is in the northern part of the state where it’s the wettest, and also where the majority of the state’s population lives: the Wasatch Range from Provo north to the Idaho state line. “What part of the state do we have two opposing factors: very low hunting pressure combined with very high habitat quality?”

Stoner says. “The Wasatch Front. Specifically, right behind Salt Lake City.”

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There’s no data to predict how many more encounters could occur, but as the boundaries between human and mountain lion habitat are harder to identify, researchers see interactions on an upward trajectory. “There’s almost no real management intervention that can be employed to alleviate this, and this is true of many cities in the West,” Stoner says. “I think what we’re seeing now is really just the front end of what’s going to continue to be a real conundrum in Western communities for the foreseeable future.”

Elbroch agrees. “The trajectory we’re on is that things are just going to get worse unless we can figure it out, and all I know is that we haven’t figured it out.” In his book, “The Cougar Conundrum,” Elbroch says, “Every mountain lion story in the news eventually comes down to hunting.”

What he means is that after incidents like the mountain biker death in 2018, states often turn to hunting to try to address the problem of negative interactions between humans and lions. The ethos being if you kill more lions, there will be fewer lions around to kill people.

That’s exactly what happened in Washington.

“The state rocketed up mountain lion hunting beyond the levels that their own state biologists have recommended,” Elbroch says.

“WE’RE SEEING THE FRONT END OF WHAT’S GOING TO BE A REAL CONUNDRUM IN WESTERN COMMUNITIES FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE.”

But this approach actually could have adverse effects. Evidence suggests that we’re seeing more conflict between humans and mountain lions in the areas where hunting is the heaviest. A study by a team at Washington State University (ironically, the mascot of WSU is the cougar) suggested that reducing the number of lions hunted for sport would actually reduce negative interactions between mountain lions and humans, pets and livestock. In 2012, Washington state heeded this data, lowered its hunting quota and saw a marked reduction in these negative interactions, but after the 2018 death, Elbroch says, “all of that’s been thrown out the window.

There’s no connection between human safety and lion hunting, but people believe there is.”

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In 1990, Californians voted to make it illegal to hunt mountain lions for sport. To this day, California is the only state to have done so. It also has the lowest rate of human-lion interactions per capita in the country. Under the depredation law, the public can apply for a permit to kill a lion that poses a risk to public safety or livestock, but only after they’re tried nonlethal methods twice.

The first radio-collared mountain lion killed under the depredation law came in January 2020 after a lion known as P-56 killed a dozen livestock belonging to a single landowner. A different landowner requested a depredation permit in 2016 after 10 of their alpaca were killed and an L.A. Times headline read: “P-45 mountain lion faces the death penalty after alpaca slaughter, sparking protest.” The landowners received death threats from the community and ultimately rescinded their request. This doesn’t mean that all Californians are protective of mountain lions and want them to remain in the ecosystem. In 2019 alone the state issued 194 depredation permits and an average of about 98 are killed each year under the system.

For many of these issues with landowners who have a small number of livestock, the solution is often pretty simple: building a taller fence or putting livestock in a closed shelter at night. “I’d love to see a shift in legislation that demands that people protect their livestock, and if they can’t then they should be helped,” Elbroch says. “How do we get society to shift towards being accountable for themselves?”

This debate over mountain lions is nuanced at almost every juncture, and as scientists continue to learn more about this elusive animal, they hope to be able to determine the right way to coexist. But regardless of the data, it will come down to convincing the public.

“We’re not ready as a society to live with mountain lions. I would love to say we are, but we’re not,” Elbroch says. “We would need to be accountable for ourselves and our belongings.

We would need to actually believe that these animals have a right to live and are essential to healthy ecosystems. Not just that they have a right to be out there, but that we want them to be.”

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THE WEST

THE STORY THAT STARTED WITH A SOUND HOW ONE NAVAJO PHOTOGRAPHER PASSED DOWN A HISTORY OF HEALING AND BROUGHT HIS FAMILY CLOSER TOGETHER

BY MA RY M c IN T YRE

T

dancing in colorful dresses with small metal cones attached, the air jingling he jingle dress project began as a dream cradled in the darkwith the sounds of their dance. The spirits in his dream told him that makness of 2020. ing the dresses and performing the dance would help his daughter heal.

It was early spring and the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning He told his wife about the dream, and she set to work making four dresses, to ravage the world. With international travel banned, shelter-in-place their colors corresponding to the Ojibwe sacred colors. She finished each orders set, businesses closed and people losing their jobs, the world was dress with rows of metal cones to create the jingles. Once completed, the in turmoil. dresses were given to four women, and he showed them the dance he saw For Eugene Tapahe, a Navajo photographer, art shows were getting in his dream. The women began dancing. By the end of the night, the little called off — one after another. “The shows are how I make my money, girl who had been sick with the flu was cured and dancing with them. so the cancellations started really affecting me. It was getting dismal,” The power and symbolism of the jingle dress dance spread from the he says. By May, the Navajo Nation had the highest infection rate in the Ojibwe people in Minnesota to the Lakota and then westward into Moncountry. Eugene doesn’t currently live on the reservation, but much of his tana and south into the Four Corners region. By the family still does. Late in the spring, his aunt passed 1980s it was being performed by most of the nation’s away after contracting COVID-19. “I was really anNative communities. Because of its origins, the jingry because, for safety reasons, we couldn’t bury her gle dress dance is called “the healing dance,” and it on our family land, and we couldn’t come together to “I WAS WATCHING involves light footwork in rhythm with drumming celebrate her life,” he says.

A HERD OF and singing. The dance is now popular in powwows Then came the dream. Asleep at home in Provo, BISON, THEN I throughout the Midwest and western United States.

Eugene was transported to a grassy meadow in HEARD THE SOUND OF JINGLES. These social gatherings are not ceremonial but foYellowstone National Park, a place he’s been many I SAW WOMEN IN cus instead on celebration and competition dancing, times shooting photos, connecting with the land and TRADITIONAL and anyone is welcome to attend. The fancy dance, his family. The sun was setting over the verdant, rollJINGLE DRESSES. jingle dress dance and others are known as intertribing horizon. “I was watching a herd of bison, then I I FELT LIKE al dances, meaning that members of any tribe can heard the sound of jingles,” he recalls. “I saw women THERE WAS HOPE.” dance them. However, the dresses, music and dance in traditional jingle dresses start to emerge. First five, steps at powwows are different from the traditional then 10, 20, 30 of them were dancing in the meadceremonial dances since they are being performed in ow. I felt a calmness and healing. I felt like there was public rather than for ceremony. hope.” When Eugene awoke the next morning, his For Eugene, these aspects of Native culture are an important part of dream remained with him, crystallizing in his mind, reminding him of the who he is. “I grew up with the tradition of ceremony,” he says of life on stories he’d heard about the healing power of the jingle dress. He knew he the reservation near Window Rock, Arizona, where he was raised by his needed to make his dream a reality. grandmother. “She had a little home without running water or electricity. We lived by the sun and herded sheep. Grandma was very traditional.

We both loved life on the reservation.” Window Rock is the capital of the Navajo Nation and lies on the Arizona-New Mexico border, just south of the Four Corners region in the southwestern U.S. The jingle dress dance originated during the influenza pandemic of 1918.

Continued on page 46 As the story goes, a young girl of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe people Continued from page 40 was very sick with the virus. One night, her father dreamed of women

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P HOTO GRA P HY BY EUGENE TAPAHE

EUGENE TAPAHE’S GRANDMOTHER SUSIE RAISED EUGENE IN A TRADITIONAL HOME ON THE DINÉ (NAVAJO) RESERVATION NEAR WINDOW ROCK, ARIZONA.

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THIS PAGE: SUNNI BEGAY, ERIN TAPAHE, JOANNI BEGAY AND DION TAPAHE, THE DANCERS OF “ART HEALS: THE JINGLE DRESS PROJECT,” AT BEAR MEDICINE LODGE NATIONAL MONUMENT (DEVILS TOWER), WYOMING, NATIVE LAND OF THE LAKOTA, ARAPAHO, CROW, CHEYENNE AND SHOSHONE PEOPLE. OPPOSITE PAGE: PICTURED AT MONUMENT VALLEY TRIBAL PARK, ARIZONA, NATIVE LAND OF THE NAVAJO PEOPLE.

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THE DANCERS OF “ART HEALS: THE JINGLE DRESS PROJECT” WITH LOCAL TRIBESPEOPLE AT THE OLD AGENCY VILLAGE, LEECH LAKE RESERVATION, MINNESOTA — NATIVE LAND OF THE LEECH LAKE BAND OF OJIBWE PEOPLE.

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JUNE 2021 45

After growing up in the rural southwest, Eugene’s path to photography wasn’t a direct one. He left the reservation in 1985 to attend BYU and, after graduating with a bachelor’s in fine arts and graphic design, he went back to the reservation in 1992 to work at the Navajo Times newspaper.

“I found creating layouts pretty boring,” he laughs. “I told the editor such, and that I was more interested in reporting. One day, he handed me a camera to shoot a rodeo. That was my first photography experience.” Eugene learned by trial and error on the job. “It was really just a happenstance. It wasn’t like I totally loved photography, but I started getting into it and it totally changed my perspective.”

After Eugene’s dream about the jingle dress dancers, he knew he had to share his vision through his camera lens. “I told my wife and two daughters about it. We agreed it would be amazing if we could make this dream a reality.” They started planning a photography project to re-create the dream with his daughters as dancers. But two dancers weren’t enough, so they told their family friends, the Begay sisters — Sunni and JoAnni — about the photography project and asked if they were interested in joining. With the two sisters as additional dancers, “Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project” was coming to fruition.

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Eugene and the dancers’ first stop to shoot photos was the Bonneville Salt Flats. During the shoot, the group started talking about where to go next and discussed the idea of taking photographs of the jingle dress dancers at state and national parks as a sort of land reclamation for Native people. Soon, Eugene, his wife, Sharon, and the dancers — Dion Tapahe, Erin Tapahe, Sunni Begay and JoAnni Begay — were heading north to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone to create an image of what he saw in his dream. His goal was to use the curative powers of the jingle dress to aid with the COVID-19 pandemic. In Eugene’s words, the project is about capturing “a series of images to document the spiritual places our ancestors once walked, and to unite and give hope to the world through art, dance and culture to help us heal.”

The six of them traveled throug the Intermountain West, the Pacific Northwest and across the Great Plains to the Midwest — all the way to Washington, D.C. — capturing images along the way. Sometimes, they were out in the wilderness alone. Other times, they were in the middle of deserted cities, visiting landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, or in crowded streets, paying their respects to George Floyd’s flower-covered memorial in Minneapolis.

Each woman came to the project with her own conception of the jingle dress and of how to use the dance for good during the pandemic. Erin, Eugene’s eldest daughter, recalls her first experience seeing a jingle dress in third grade. “I was in an ESL class, but I didn’t need to be there — I spoke English very well,” she says. “One of the tutors was Native American and she realized I wasn’t learning anything. She came over and talked to me about her tribe and being a jingle dress dancer in powwows. After school, she invited me and my mom to go to her home to see the dress and learn about the dance. It was an impactful moment; having this powerful role model made me feel confident in expressing myself and helped me find myself as a young Native woman.”

Since the jingle dress dance didn’t originate with Navajo people, Erin’s family traditions didn’t include this specific dance. But as it gained in popularity through intertribal powwows, she began dancing in jingle dress competitions. However, it wasn’t until 2016 during the Standing Rock Movement and witnessing a ceremonial jingle dress dance that Erin and and her father felt the real healing power of the dance. For Dion, her younger sister, it came a few years later when BYU put on the annual university powwow. “My parents took us to watch the jingle dress 46 DESERET MAGAZINE

dancers and I clearly remember the way they composed themselves,” she recalls. “They were strong women, representing their culture. It’s been really amazing, years later, to be able to dance as one.”

At its core, the traditional Ojibwe jingle dress dance is for healing.

Dancers move as one with the drum. “When you’re dancing, it’s very powerful,” Erin says. “I don’t think people really know the full power.

You as a dancer have to be healthy in mind, heart and spirit because you are the pathway of healing for other people. It’s incredible to have this positive impact on other people.” Sunni chimes in, “It brings good energy to the audience, but it has helped heal me as well, to remember all the good in the world.” With all the gloom of the past year, the dance has been a way to bring comfort to their community, to strangers along their journey, and also to themselves.

The timing of Eugene’s “Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project” — coinciding with the pandemic and the ensuing difficult times — was important for both Eugene and the dancers. Eugene’s art market sales dried up overnight, while the pandemic derailed the women’s plans of graduating from BYU, applying to law school and starting careers. As Dion recalls, “It was hard to find hope at the beginning of the year, but through this project we’ve been able to provide hope for ourselves and others.”

Before the project began, the women felt strongly about using their education to support fellow Native and Indigenous people, and this project gave them even more incentive to push for equality and basic human rights by showing the power of their Native traditions in bringing people together.

The women experienced the gift of dance and ceremony in times of hardship, and after dancing with members of the Ojibwe tribe where the jingle dance was created, they felt respect and understanding for the traditional dress itself. They witnessed the unrest in the streets of Minneapolis following Floyd’s murder and saw firsthand the brutal outcome of inequities that plague our nation. Erin, who graduated in 2019 with a degree in journalism, says, “When I first got interested in journalism, I typed ‘Native American’ into the search engine of a major news outlet. Everything that came up was negative, really violent stuff.” Reporting on Natives, she found, wasn’t being done by their own people. “Until now, we Native Americans haven’t been able to share our own stories; an outsider had to do it for us. With the advent of social media, it’s much more accessible for anyone to put their voice out there. Natives can share our unique experiences and stories. We suddenly have people shedding light on all these different topics.”

Erin has witnessed this cultural shift just over the past five years. She continues, “Instead of remaining a topic of history, people are realizing we’re still here.” She is currently applying to law school and hopes to pursue human rights, acting as a voice for the voiceless and an advocate for underserved or underrepresented groups.

Sunni has a similar long-term outlook. Her current studies in political science and American Indian studies at BYU are in preparation for a law degree, her main interest being tribal policymaking. She is seeing change on the horizon. “As a child, I grew up around strong Native women, but when it came to power, they were never in charge,” she says. “They were never involved politically. But now, I see many women getting involved in politics.

It feels like the norm. I’ve been surrounded by so many Native women in the past few years and they are fierce. They have a mission. To have the power of education behind us, it feels exciting.”

After traveling all year to complete the project for fall gallery shows, the group had experienced so much, but they’d been too busy to return to the Navajo Nation. Then, they visited Monument Valley. “It felt like we were coming full circle,” says Sunni. They hadn’t seen family and friends on the reservation in months. “My dad always taught us that you go out in the world, learn as much as you can and, whatever’s good, you bring it back.”

SUNNI BEGAY, DION TAPAHE AND ERIN TAPAHE AT THE NATIONAL MALL LINCOLN MEMORIAL IN WASHINGTON, D.C. — NATIVE LAND OF THE ANACOSTINE, PISCATAWAY AND PAMUNKEY PEOPLE.

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DONNY OSMOND & the amazing Technicolor dreamlife

BY MI CHAE L J. MOONE Y

PHOTOG RAPHY BY NI COL E HI L L G E R UL AT JUNE 2021 49

The legendary crooner is about to begin a new residency in Las Vegas — this time without his sister. It’s got him thinking about all the different eras of his life.

D

onny osmond had an idea. The fabled crooner was wondering how he could possibly condense all the different eras of his career into one performance. He wanted a way to cover everything from his early days on “The Andy Williams Show” in the ’60s through his rise to intergalactic stardom in the ’70s, his stark fall from public favor in the ’80s, his dramatic return to the top of the pop charts, and his more recent run as a successful contestant on shows like “Dancing With the Stars” and “The Masked Singer.”

Donny decided the answer — the best way to recap the highs and lows of his life in music — would be through a rap.

Yes, Donny Osmond. That Donny Osmond. And yes, rap.

He’s telling me this as we sit together in the den of his palatial home in Provo. He leans forward in his chair, flashing that impossibly charming smile — a smile that has set so many hearts aflame for so many years now. He’s trim as ever, wearing a T-shirt, workout pants and Nike tennis shoes. In front of him is the sleek, polished grand piano used in the original “Donny & Marie” variety show in the second half of the ’70s. Over his shoulder is a striking view of the nearby mountains.

Honestly, when he first tells me he’s planning on rapping for six minutes about his six decades in music — he calls it “Six in Six” — I can’t tell if he’s joking. But then he starts beatboxing, slapping the arm of his chair to add some bass.

Then he starts rapping.

“It started back in Utah, I was 4 years old,” Donny raps. “Started singing with my brothers and the sound was like gold.”

In rhyming couplets, he goes through his rise to stardom with his family, his solo success as a teenager, and his darkest days, like when he starred in “Little Johnny Jones” on Broadway in 1982 — which opened and closed on the same night. He even mentions his appearances on “The Love Boat.” He covers everything through the long-running Las Vegas residency he had with sister, Marie, and his runner-up finish on season one of “The Masked Singer.” He was the peacock.

The rap is actually kind of amazing, in that not-sure-if-it’s-OK-tolaugh sort of way. It is OK to laugh, it turns out. In fact, when he’s done rapping, Donny can’t contain himself anymore and he cracks up at himself, clapping his hands as he giggles.

This rap, he explains, is a song he’ll perform in his new Las Vegas show later this year. It’s a new residency at the newly refurbished Harrah’s on the Strip. And this time, it’s just Donny, no Marie.

The residency at the Flamingo with his sister was a staple in Las Vegas, one of the most popular and profitable shows in the city’s illustrious history. They started in 2008 for what was supposed to be a few weeks — and went on for 11 years. Over that span, they sold north of 9 million tickets and performed more than 1,700 times. Then, for reasons that

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have never been made public, they decided to end it. Their last show was in November 2019.

This time it’s just his face on that giant marquee, just his name printed on those expensive tickets. He’ll be the one deciding which songs to sing and when, what to say to the fawning or fidgeting audience. And that audience will be there for Donny and Donny alone. Sure, he’ll have producers and designers and backup dancers and an entire live band there on stage with him, but the success of the show will rest entirely upon the shoulders of Donny.

Planning all of this has given the 63-year-old Donny a chance to think back on his 58 years in the entertainment business. He’s met so many people, created so much music — he’s recorded more than 600 songs — and experienced a series of total reinventions. Working on the new show has made him a little introspective, almost philosophical. More than anything, it’s making him think about his own identity.

“Who am I,” he says. “I was a little kid on ‘The Andy Williams Show.’

Then I was this little kid singing ‘One Bad Apple.’ Then I’m this little teeny-bopper on fan magazines. Then Donny of ‘Donny and Marie’ is the Sonny Bono, the fall guy, the stupid guy.” He pauses, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head. “All of these different personalities, and so many different careers. Who am I?” I ask him if this new show in Las Vegas is a new chance to tell his audience who he is.

“No,” he says quickly, smiling again. “This is a chance for me to tell me who I am.”

••• Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, Donny Osmond bursts into song. Not in a showy way. It’s pretty casual actually. He seems to sing without even thinking about it. He’s recounting a story about a time in Chicago, when he was performing “Puppy Love” as it was climbing the charts — and he goes right into the opening line: “And they called it puppy looooove …” Later he’s telling me about something that happened when he was touring as Joseph in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” in Minneapolis — and a second later he’s singing “Close every door to me …” and then carrying on with the story.

And his singing voice is — well, it’s heavenly.

He’s been in the music business for almost as long as he can remember.

He has literally one memory from before he was a professional entertainer. He was about 3 years old and he remembers playing in a sandbox. It was him and Marie, and a friend named Scott he’s since lost touch with. “I can’t believe I remember that name!” he says. He remembers playing with trucks and a shovel next to his baby sister and his friend.

“It was my haven,” he says. “And I left it at 3 years old.”

His four older brothers were already singing in a barbershop-style quartet when Donny joined them. He was 5 the first time he sang on “The Andy Williams Show.” Five. Think about a 5-year-old you know.

Now think about that 5-year-old traveling, singing professionally.

By the early 1970s, Donny was emerging as the star of the group.

More and more, he was put front and center. When he was 13, he had four top 10 singles on the radio. Thirteen years old. Imagine being world famous for something you did at 13.

By the time he was 17, he’d had 12 top 40 hits, either solo or with his brothers. Donny was the teen magazine cover boy of the time. He was Michael Jackson before Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber before Justin Bieber.

One time, he can’t remember exactly when, he trashed a hotel room — clogging the toilet, flipping the mattress, throwing things out the window — just because he could.

“My dad was so mad at me,” he says, a little embarrassed.

When he was 18 and his sister was 16, they had a weekly prime-time TV show that was so popular it spawned a line of “Donny & Marie” dolls and toys. Tiger Beat created an auxiliary publication, Donny & Marie magazine, dedicated entirely to the private lives of the two teen stars. He was barely 23 when he was asked to perform at Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

Within a few years, though, all of that disappeared. No more toys.

No more magazine covers. No more hit songs. Through bad financial management, the family lost something like $60 million to $70 million. The low point, as Donny sees it, came when he starred in the 1982 Broadway revival of “Little Johnny Jones,” the turn-of-the-19thcentury musical that produced the tunes “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “The Yankee Doodle Boy.” The revival bombed, closing after only one performance.

In his review the next morning, New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called the musical “a listless, not to mention listing, farrago.”

(Although he wasn’t entirely displeased with Donny Osmond’s performance, calling him “a give-his-all professional in a show in which professionalism is not exactly the holy grail.”)

“You really begin to wonder, ‘Maybe I’m not any good,’” Donny tells me.

He was 24 years old and he felt like his career was over. For most of the ’80s, his name was a punchline, a dated reference to a clean-cut bubblegum pop star from the giant-collar era of music. After all, he was the pitchman for Hawaiian Punch, the most ridiculously saccharine beverage in history. He was wholesome, innocent, pure, at a time when the American public wanted … not that.

••• At one point, he remembers his publicist suggesting Donny purposely get arrested crossing the U.S. border with drugs. He actually considered it for a moment — he was desperate — before eventually firing that publicist. In the end, he tells me, he just couldn’t imagine having to explain something like that to his wife and kids and siblings and all the people he taught Sunday school with.

“The problem was I knew it would work from a short-term point of view,” Donny says. “But long term, it would kill me.”

He realized he needed to change his image, though. He wasn’t a little boy anymore, even if he still sort of looked like one. Most of his siblings found success in the world of country music, but that wasn’t Donny.

He’s always been a student of pop. So he started wearing cut-up jeans and a black leather jacket, like George Michael. He started working with

singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel, most famous for his single “Sledgehammer,” which was reportedly the most played music video in MTV history. Still, though, Donny couldn’t get a record deal.

In 1988, he debated quitting entertainment entirely and starting a security company in Utah. He’d always been an electronics buff, sometimes soldering his own circuit boards on tour as a teenager. And he’d always had a lot of security, so he figured he knew enough to start a successful business. (To this day, his house has an elaborate security system.) He thought this might be the only way to provide for his family.

Around the same time, he recorded the song “Soldier of Love.” It didn’t sound anything like the songs he’d made in the ’70s. Hearing it now, the song is quintessentially ’80s, replete with some intense keyboarding. The song was a top 30 hit in the United Kingdom, but at the beginning of 1989 it wasn’t even for sale in the United States.

Several program directors at pop radio stations around the country heard the song and liked it, but they didn’t think their audience would want to listen to a song by the former child star. So stations played the song without telling the audience the name of the singer. For weeks, as “Soldier of Love” climbed the charts in America, radio hosts encouraged people to call in and guess the identity of the “mystery artist.”

Donny remembers getting a call from his manager at the time.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” his manager told him. “The good news is you’ve got a hit song. The bad news is nobody knows it’s you!”

“I was excited and hurt at the same time,” Donny says now. “But I realized that this was an amazing opportunity.”

He was finally revealed live on the air at a station in New York. “Soldier of Love” reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year. Another single, “Sacred Emotion,” made it to No. 13 on the same chart. And Donny’s career was relaunched, no drug scandal required.

“I did it the hard way,” he says with a little laugh. “I did it with music.”

Nearly 10 years after the “Little Johnny Jones” fiasco, he got another shot at theater, touring in “Joseph.” This time the show didn’t close after his first night, either. He played Joseph in more than 2,000 performances. When it came to making the movie version, the musical’s creator, Andrew Lloyd Webber, insisted Donny play the titular role.

By the late ’90s, he and Marie had another TV show, this time a syndicated afternoon talk show. He also sang “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” the most popular song in Disney’s “Mulan.” In the decade after that, he hosted a series of game shows, won his season of “Dancing With the Stars” and began the Las Vegas residency with Marie.

••• Can we talk, for a moment, about the way Donny Osmond looks? He’s 63, but he doesn’t look 63. He just seems youthful. No, his face isn’t as smooth as it was when he was 15, but whose is? Donny could pass for someone a decade younger. Some of that is from surgical adjustments, he’s acknowledged, but he also lives a healthy life. He’s mostly vegan. I get the impression he was exercising not long before I arrived this morning. And as a devout Latter-day Saint, he doesn’t drink or do drugs.

I ask him if he’s ever had alcohol in his life.

“Not on purpose,” he says.

There was a time, when he was a teenager, touring at the height of his fame, and during one moment in the show he was supposed to come offstage and take a few gulps of water. One night one of the stagehands thought it would be funny to replace the water with vodka — which Donny realized just as he was swallowing.

“I thought I was going to die,” he says. Then, after a beat, he jokes: “Best show I ever did in my life.”

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When his dad found out, the stagehand was fired.

“That’s abusive to a teenager,” Donny says.

For what it’s worth, Donny also seems happy. He seems content. He’s been married to his wife, Debbie, for more than 40 years. They have five sons and 12 grandchildren, all but two of whom are boys. All but one of his kids live in Utah, and his house is the general meetup point. For years, while he and Marie were performing at the Flamingo, Donny commuted back and forth from Provo. He’d fly to Las Vegas on Tuesday, then fly back Friday night so he could be with the family on Saturday mornings. Think soccer games, birthday parties, that sort of thing. Then he’d fly back for the Saturday night show, then back to Utah again for church Sunday morning. The next Tuesday, he would start it all over again.

When he was on “The Masked Singer,” he’d fly back and forth from Los Angeles to Las Vegas every day, sometimes arriving at the theater with just minutes — or less — to spare.

He plans to do something similar for the new show.

When he’s not working on the new show, or his forthcoming studio album — his 63rd album overall — he spends most of his time behind his house, in his garden. He tells me he built a waterfall and a fire pit and planted one fruit tree for each of his grandkids. He’s even starting a vineyard.

“A vineyard?” I ask.

“Yeah, I’m not doing a Donny Bordeaux or whatever,” he says. “I just love grapes.”

In fact, he says, he has some great grape juice in the kitchen if I’d like to try some.

So after talking in his den for more than an hour, we move to the kitchen, where he pours two glasses of iced grape juice. It’s delicious.

As we sip, we talk about other celebrities he’s known over the years.

Elvis, Prince, Michael Jackson. Donny and Michael Jackson were on similar paths for a while. They were around the same age, both the young stars of their respective family bands, both successful solo artists. There was a time, especially in the ’80s, when Donny was jealous of the way Michael Jackson’s career just kept ascending. When they talked, though, Donny got the impression that his friend was actually jealous of him.

“Michael always wanted to talk about family,” Donny says. “He had a rough childhood, so he would always ask about my family.”

He says it was the same way with Elvis and Prince. He remembers them wanting to talk about family, too.

“A lot of people weren’t as lucky as I was,” he says.

Speaking of family: When he learns that my wife is pregnant with our first child, Donny’s eyes get bigger and he flashes that radiant toothpaste smile again.

“Boy or girl?!”

Boy. “Oh, Mike,” he says. “This little boy is gonna —” he doesn’t finish his thought exactly. He just sits there, beaming at me.

••• When we finish our grape juice, he walks me out back to the garden he’s been telling me about. It’s a “garden” in the European sense of the word: a multiacre expanse of cultivated nature. A short gravel road winds past a dozen fruit trees, each labeled with a type of fruit and the name of a grandkid. He shows me the place where he’s putting the small vineyard, a system he has for collecting cut grass, and the massive rock structure he’s built around a pool in the far corner. Most of the area is invisible to the outside world.

As we get to the chairs around the fire pit he tells me to sit down. He

pulls out his phone and swipes at the screen a bit, then he looks up. Suddenly I hear the trickle of water pouring over boulders. He explains that he personally wired the waterfall to an app on his phone. (He’s really not kidding about this electronics stuff.) Within seconds we’re surrounded by the tranquility of moving water.

He’s talked about his anxiety over the years — he wrote a book about it in the ’90s. Since he was a little boy, he’s had an intense desire to be perfect for whoever might be watching him. When he’s recording a song, he spends hours going over it again and again, trying to get it just right.

Same thing when he’s planning the new show.

“I’ve learned something interesting in my life,” he says. “Show business can really beat you up and consume you completely. And it will just take you away from the important things.”

When he feels himself drifting too far, he comes here. He cuts some grass. He prunes some trees. He turns on his waterfall and listens.

“I find it so necessary to just balance my life,” he says. Then he points at the gorgeous rocky crags in the distance and jokes: “I spent a lot of money to bring those mountains in.”

He says he was self-conscious about so many things for so many years.

He knows his life hasn’t been “normal” — his word. He only went to school for two weeks in the second grade, then two weeks in sixth grade, then one semester at BYU. “Don’t talk to me about geometry or calculus,” he says. “When my kids were studying that, I was like, ‘I’ve got to go write a song.’”

More than the education though, he was self-conscious about his peers. He knew as a teenager that most boys his age weren’t listening to Donny Osmond. “They were listening to Jimi Hendrix while their sisters were listening to me,” he says. “I’ve never had the acceptance of the guys.”

Even when “Soldier of Love” came out and his career rebounded, most of his fans were women. Although by then, some had begun bringing boyfriends and husbands to his concerts. He assumed they were all being dragged to the show and hated it.

“That was intimidating.”

He had the same mentality when he started the residency in Las Vegas in 2008. Soon though, he decided he didn’t want to feel that way anymore.

You don’t want to be self-conscious, he told himself. Seeing the guys in the audience, you don’t have to be self-conscious anymore.

He says he entered shows like “Dancing With the Stars” and “The Masked Singer” because he didn’t want to be self-conscious. That’s why he doesn’t feel weird about singing “Puppy Love” anymore. It’s why he’s comfortable rapping. And why now, he’ll often see the men in his audience, pick out one or two early on, and watch as their moods lighten throughout the show. Most of the time, by the end of the night, those men are dancing and swaying with everyone else in the room.

I ask him why he and Marie decided to stop their show at the Flamingo. They were still one of the most coveted tickets in Las Vegas, even after 11 years.

Donny says that Marie wanted to do it for another year. He’d already been talking to a producer about doing a solo show. He says there wasn’t one moment, one disagreement or something that ended it. He just felt like it was time for another reinvention.

The night before he made the announcement about the new show, he called Marie to make sure she knew. He says she told him that she wants to be in the front row on opening night.

“She’s a classy lady,” he says.

•••

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I can already see it. Every night, the audience at Harrah’s will absolutely weep. Tear ducts everywhere spilling forth. “It’s going to be a moment,” Donny says.

After talking for a while, Donny wants me to listen to a few tracks from his new album, several of which will also be part of his new show. Inside the office near the front of his house, he has a telephone booth-size recording studio, insulated with thick soundproofing on all sides. Inside the booth, there’s an open laptop with a file opened to the latest version of each track.

“Not many people have heard this,” he says, leaning over to start the first song.

I am legitimately not prepared for how contemporary Donny Osmond’s new songs sound or how much I like them. Several tracks could play on any pop station in America right now. If you didn’t know who you were listening to, you might think it was Mike Posner or Justin Bieber. One of his new songs, with a catchy refrain that repeats “It’s never too late to start again” sounds like it could go right in the middle of a Disney movie.

That song will also be in his new show at Harrah’s. He shows me a swatch of a new kind of purple paint that will apparently illuminate on its own, lighting the entire room at some point during the performance.

The purple paint is just one of the hints he gives me about the new solo show. When he sings “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” the room will fill with different moments from the animated “Mulan” — as long as he can get clearance from Disney. At one point in the show, he’ll stop and interact with the audience. He’ll call for requests, anything from his vast catalog, and he and his band will be prepared to perform 20 to 30 seconds of it, like some sort of live jukebox. He’s had to revisit hundreds of old tunes.

“Some of these songs I’ve never performed in public,” he says. “They were B-sides or album tracks.”

Of course, he’ll also do the “Six in Six” rap. There will be a tribute to his brothers, with old footage from “The Andy Williams Show.” And near the end, Donny will perform a tribute to his sister. He says the dialogue isn’t completely worked out yet, but it will be something like: “There’s only one person on this planet that shared these experiences, that can relate to what I went through, and that’s my sister.” Then, as the screens show footage of Donny and Marie through the years — their first duets, their prime-time show, their talk show — Donny will sing the Beatles song “In My Life.”

He hasn’t had his first show yet, but I can already see it. Every night, the audience at Harrah’s will absolutely weep. Tear ducts everywhere spilling forth.

“It’s going to be a moment,” Donny says.

He tells me that as he’s been plotting this out, he’s had a chance to look back at who he was at different times in his life. He says he understands and accepts the different people he’s been through the years.

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“I’m all of it,” he tells me. “I’m every one of them. They’re all me.”

He’s that successful child star. He’s the failure. He’s that young man in his 20s who hated the joke he’d become. He’s the anonymous artist.

He’s Joseph. He’s Donny of “Donny and Marie.” He’s even that little kid in the sandbox. Though now his sandbox is huge and has a waterfall he controls with his phone.

“My garden is my sandbox,” he says. “But it’s also a place I can see my grandkids.”

Donny is also still that hopeful kid who grew up in a house full of music and wanted nothing more than to entertain whoever was in front of him. That’s what drives him, he says. When an audience loves him, it’s like a drug. It’s something he’ll completely reinvent himself to hold on to. He’ll work day and night, until he’s close to breaking down. Until he has to force himself to step back and focus on the only thing more important.

By midafternoon, Debbie is home and their third son, Brandon, has come over with his sons Peder and Benson. When Peder and Benson see their grandfather, they come running across the yard to give him a hug.

Then they both tell him about their new ninja socks.

When Brandon learns I’m writing a story about his dad, he jokes about giving me dirt on him.

“Oh yeah, my dad is on all sorts of drugs,” he tells me, smiling.

“Yeah,” Debbie says without missing a beat. “Statins.”

Conversation moves quickly between Donny, Debbie and Brandon.

Plans for the weekend: kids’ soccer games and helping Brandon and his family move. They talk about which days Donny will commute to Las Vegas when the show starts and whether Debbie will go with him. (She will.) They talk about how they want to expand the kitchen to accommodate the growing family, so this house will still be the meetup point for all the adult children and grandkids. Then, somehow, someone mentions one of the songs on Donny’s new album, and how much Peder and Benson like it.

“You like that song, don’t you?” Debbie says to them. But the boys are eating pizza and neither of them responds.

So Donny starts singing. Then Debbie joins in. Then Brandon joins in, too, the three of them subtly harmonizing. Then Peder and Benson nod and sing along. Just sitting in the kitchen, talking about nothing in particular, and suddenly all the Osmonds present are singing.

Donny smiles that smile.

Eventually it’s time for me to go. After a day of conversation and listening to music and watching water flow over rocks and drinking delicious grape juice, Donny walks me out and says goodbye.

He says he has some more work to do in his garden.

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ROAD TRIP

AHEAD TRAVEL IS

BACK !

BY STE PHE N FR I E D PHOTOG RAPHY

BY W E STON COLTON

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AS T RAVE L RETURN S, THE OPEN ROAD HAS N E V E R B E E N M O R E I N V I T I N G . T H E S TO RY O F F R E D H A RVE Y, WHO IN V EN TED HOSPITAL ITY AS WE KNOW IT, OFFERS THE MOST EXHILARATING PAT H T H R O U G H T H E S O U T H W E S T

I

n may 1931, Will Rogers — the movie star and newspaper columnist and arguably the most famous person in America — decided to take his wife on a vacation for Mother’s Day. Rogers was well known for his near obsession with flying and had just piloted himself on a cross-country tour to promote his new film, a homespun adaptation of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee.” But he and Betty, both 52, had decided to leave their kids at home and do a driving journey: a version of what had already become the quintessential American trip, which people called the “Southwest Detour.” They would explore America’s most recently added states, Arizona and New Mexico.

From their home in Beverly Hills, they went first to Tucson, Arizona, and then drove over 450 miles east along the Mexican border to Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico. There Will gave “Ma” a white desert flower and then “walked her for seven miles” through what he described as “the Grand Canyon with a roof over it,” the caverns featuring “all the cathedrals of the world ... with half of ’em hanging upside down.”

From Carlsbad they drove to Roswell, which had yet to be visited by aliens; they went to check out the polo instruction at the New Mexico Military Institute for their son, Jim. And then they drove several hours north to get onto the nation’s newest, most talked-about paved highway: Route 66.

Where they got onto Route 66, the 4-year-old road was almost completely parallel to the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the nation’s largest railroad, which ran from Chicago to Los Angeles through the Southwest. So the best restaurants and hotels along the route were those in the major AT&SF train stations, run by a company — and a name — as well known as Will Rogers himself.

Fred Harvey, the British-born hospitality genius, had created the first national chain of quality restaurants, the first national chain of resort hotels, the first national chain of retail stores — in fact, the first national chain of anything — starting with a trackside restaurant in Topeka, Kansas, in 1876. He also had created one of the dominant social phenomena of the American West. By insisting that all his restaurants be staffed by single women recruited in the Midwest — the famous “Harvey Girls,” 58 DESERET MAGAZINE

the nation’s first all-female workforce — he had become a matchmaking sensation, as waitresses married and settled down in all the restaurant towns, large and small. And the food in his restaurants and hotels was as good if not better than anything you could get in New York or Chicago or London, with the freshest ingredients shipped in by train; his company is credited with teaching much of America how to eat well, from local to international cuisine.

It is unclear how many Fred Harvey restaurants Will and Betty stopped at once they got on Route 66. Probably the first one they came to was La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because at that time Route 66 ran right up to the hotel, which is off the city’s historic main plaza. They most likely stopped at the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, which was a favorite for movie stars on their way to or from Hollywood, and the city also had an amazing Native American art museum — the famous Fred Harvey Indian Building — in between the hotel and the train station, with live demonstrations of rug making and basket weaving. They may have checked out El Navajo in Gallup just to see the stunning murals, which had been adapted, with tribal leaders’ permission, from Navajo sand paintings.

But we know for sure that they spent some time at Petrified Forest and Painted Desert, which were right off Route 66. And then they ended up in Winslow, Arizona, where something fascinating and counterintuitive had recently happened: Even though the country was going into its second year of the Great Depression, the Fred Harvey Company had just opened its most ambitious resort hotel, La Posada. It was the newest Fred Harvey stop on the way to the one that had become the most renowned — El Tovar, the Harvey hotel at the lip of the Grand Canyon.

And as the couple ate at La Posada and toured the gorgeous sunken gardens and watched the trains go by bathed in the red-orange sunlight, Will Rogers decided to write about what this had inspired in him. He had a column that ran four or five days a week in pretty much every newspaper in the country; most of the papers ran whatever he wrote in a prominent box on the front page. And on May 12, 1931, he posted this populist paean to driving awed through the exploding colors of the Southwest and being taken care of by the holy host of American hospitality.

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You folks that think a desert country is terrible should see Arizona and New Mexico. The whole states are covered now with hundreds of the most beautiful kinds of flowers. Saw the Petrified Forest again. What’s these Baptists that think the whole world started with Noah going to say about a thing like that? Just another miracle, I reckon. Wild buffalo fed the early traveler in the West and for doing so they put his picture on a nickel. Well, Fred Harvey took up where the buffalo left off. For what he has done for the traveler one of his waitresses’ picture (with an arm load of delicious ham and eggs) should be placed on both sides of every dime. /// Like a lot of Americans, my wife and I reacted to 9/11 by shifting much of our travel to endlessly rediscovering the U.S. (something I suspect will happen again for many as COVID-19 travel restrictions abate).

And while we’ve been all over, via our home airport in Philadelphia, it is that Southwest Detour we keep returning to. This is partly because of the unmatched scenery — the way you can see the next three weather systems coming toward you at a distance, sun then rain clouds with rainbows right behind them — as well as the incredible food, the long, astonishingly straight drives, the trout fishing. But it is also because the Southwest — especially northern Arizona and New Mexico — is the birthplace of American cultural tourism, living history.

It is home to the Grand Canyon, which began replacing Niagara Falls as the country’s favorite destination for natural grandeur, as soon as a railroad line was built so people could get there. The Southwest is also where, in the words of the late Native American historian Frank Waters, “the Fred Harvey System introduced America to Americans.”

Waters, who was part Cheyenne and was raised visiting the Navajo and Pueblo reservations in New Mexico, meant this as a tribute but also a backhanded compliment. The Harvey company was in the Southwest to run quality hotels and restaurants along the railroad tracks — and later dining cars and union stations as trains got faster and the number of food stops was reduced. But the company was, along with its partner the Santa Fe, part of an ongoing effort to bring tourists to the area without completely commercializing it; an extremely delicate balance. The company also began a process that was later joined by the National Park Service (which the Harvey company helped create) and continues to this day, attempting to tell an increasingly more perfect, more accurate, more diverse saga of American places with all the explanations and apologies necessary. As part of this effort, it was the Harvey company that lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt to pass the 1906 Antiquities Act to stop the looting of Native burial grounds and abandoned cities. And the company partnered with Native American artists and craftspeople to create better local and national markets for their work.

The Fred Harvey Company went on to create some of the first multicultural tourist materials and books, which explained, much to the surprise of many tourists, that white people hadn’t been the first or even the second to populate the area, and that the scars of what the government had done to Native people were not going to go away just because white people had forgiven themselves. It was tourism seasoned with some diversity tension, because the company’s goal was to teach and challenge visitors, attending to their creature comforts without placating them.

The company — which was simply called “Fred Harvey,” one of the first and most famous acts of brand marketing in business history — began during the height of Reconstruction in 1876 and reached the peak 62 DESERET MAGAZINE

of its fame in 1946 when MGM released “The Harvey Girls,” starring Judy Garland as a plucky Fred Harvey waitress in New Mexico (singing an Oscar-winning theme song, “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” by Johnny Mercer). It was a private, multigenerational family business partnered with one of the world’s largest public companies, and continued that way until the mid-1960s, when it was sold to a hospitality conglomerate.

Its ethos then remained alive at the three legendary Harvey hotels that not only have never closed but also remain true to their architectural and cultural history — El Tovar and Bright Angel Lodge, at the lip of the Grand Canyon (where ’60s staff began referring to themselves as “Fredheads”), and La Fonda in Santa Fe. But, for most, it became a lost story of Americana.

And then, starting in the 1990s, several Western museums began to rediscover Harvey, and entrepreneurs with really good and unique taste — in design, food, customer service and American cultural history — began restoring the existing buildings to their original architectural significance. Nearly a half-dozen have been saved, two of them as utterly delightful full-service hotels: first the one in Winslow that inspired Will Rogers, and more recently the one in Las Vegas, New Mexico — the Castaneda, which Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated in 1899 by holding the first reunion of his famous Rough Riders there.

The hotels have been through their own rough rides during COVID-19 pandemic. Most of them, including those at the Grand Canyon, had to close for a period of time and then reopen with limited capacity. But they have a long history of resilience during national emergencies. After all, the Harvey system had to accommodate World War I — during which the railroads were nationalized and consolidated by the federal government — as well as the 1918 influenza pandemic. It had to accommodate the Great Depression when many smaller locations were shuttered by the railroad while the larger ones quietly took on the responsibility of feeding Dust Bowl refugees. And then all the Harvey locations had to be reopened during World War II and retrofitted to serve troops crisscrossing the country.

So, now is a perfect time to discover, or rediscover the world of the Southwest Detour, as American tourism reopens — and long-distance travel, by car and train, returns as the best way to experience the continuing marvel and challenge of our nation. And to explore the saga of how Fred Harvey first made that possible. /// Harvey came from Liverpool, England, to New York in 1853, at the age of 17, to get a job during America’s first world’s fair. He worked as a “pot-walloper” — a dishwasher — at Smith & McNell’s, just a block or two from where he got off the boat. After 18 months learning the restaurant business there, he traveled to St. Louis, where he worked in a restaurant, became a U.S. citizen and then started his own place, the Merchants Dining Saloon, with a partner. It was popular until the Civil War erupted, causing Fred’s partner, a Southern sympathizer, to disappear with all their money. Fred was, by that time, married; he and his wife, Anne, had a young son and another on the way. But Anne died during childbirth, and Fred was left a penniless single dad with two little boys who would both soon succumb to scarlet fever.

He moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, home of the Pony Express, and restarted his life working for the railroad. He remarried, to Barbara “Sally” Mattas, a young Czech seamstress, and they moved across the river to Leavenworth, Kansas, where Fred worked as a ticket agent for rail, boat and wagon train travel.

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When the route for what became the second transcontinental railroad ended up going through Kansas City, instead of Leavenworth, Fred and Sally remained in town to raise their family, but Fred became a railroad warrior — traveling the ever-extending train lines, selling tickets and booking freight.

At this time, railroads weren’t very concerned about passengers: Their motto was “freight doesn’t complain,” so they paid little attention to the comfort of humans. Dining cars weren’t allowed west of Chicago, so trains stopped every hundred miles and local people ran little restaurants in the train stations — usually awful restaurants, because most people were traveling to relocate. So even if they were dissatisfied, they were never coming back.

Harvey ate an enormous amount of this bad food, and since he already had some stomach ailments, he became acutely aware of the need for improved hospitality along the rapidly expanding western rail lines.

He reasoned that if any railroad ever figured out how to make a long train ride across the country easier on your digestive system, and maybe even delicious, that railroad would succeed. So, at the age of 40 — with a full-time, full-travel job — he started a side business running trackside restaurants in small Kansas towns the way he learned they were supposed to be run in New York City.

He partnered with a new line called the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad — whose owners had dreams of one day replacing the historic wagon-train path, the Santa Fe Trail, with steel rails all the way to New Mexico (with a connection into Mexico). They let Harvey take over the dingy second-floor dining room at the Topeka station, which he reappointed as a big-city-quality restaurant with imported silver and linen tablecloths, and food fresher than anyone else could serve because it came literally right out of the refrigerator cars into his kitchen.

Soon, the railroad let him try something more ambitious — its hotel and restaurant in Florence, Kansas, which he transformed by audaciously hiring away William Phillips, the head of food service from his favorite hotel, in Chicago. As the railway added food service farther and

farther west, Harvey and Phillips devised ingenious systems to instruct employees, maintain standards, plan menus and even signal ahead to stations what diners would be eating — by telegraph (this is all way before telephones) or train whistle codes.

Harvey had nothing but a handshake agreement with the AT&SF: The railroad provided the space in its depot buildings, took care of utilities and let Fred Harvey food and employees ride the trains for free. Harvey kept all the profits, and the restaurants were an immediate success.

When the AT&SF tracks reached New Mexico, Fred Harvey quickly tripled in size, opening in eight new towns in three years. And outside of its largest New Mexico location, Las Vegas, the railroad also built a huge health resort for Harvey to run, the Montezuma, taking advantage of the medicinal hot springs. But New Mexico presented unique challenges: It really was the Wild West, and the trackside restaurants were robbed often. There was also racial tension because most local waiters were Black men, many of the cowboys were embittered former Confederate soldiers and everybody had guns.

After a racial incident at his Raton, New Mexico, restaurant, Harvey experimented by moving the employees of color out of harm’s way into the kitchen and having the waitstaff be all single white women from the Midwest. “Harvey Girls” became the signature of his restaurants, especially as the AT&SF expanded from New Mexico across northern Arizona and all over California, and hundreds of waitresses had to be hired as quickly as possible.

Over the next decades, more than 100,000 single women would have the experience of being a Harvey Girl, traveling, escaping their hometowns and making new lives for themselves in the romantic West. Their training included innovations Harvey created to shave every possible second off the service, making a 30-minute food stop seem as unhurried for customers as possible. A “cup code” was invented so one Harvey Girl took your drink order, then moved your cup into one of several positions that told the pourers behind her what hot or cold drink to give you.

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Fred Harvey was soon making the equivalent of $1.1 million a year personally, after all expenses (the country didn’t yet have taxes). But his health suffered. He had what today would be diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome and clinical depression, but at the time was described as the latest fad diagnosis: “Americanitis” caused by the pressures of being successful in America. So, he started living in England for part of the year as a treatment. And he asked his son Ford to leave college and start learning the business. Ford learned quickly and moved the company to Kansas City.

After the Depression of 1893, tourism in the West began to percolate, aided by an ad campaign with the slogan “See America First.” The AT&SF expanded south to Texas and finally added dining cars, maintained by Fred Harvey; it also made a big investment in resort hotels in the Southwest for the Fred Harvey Company to run. They started with the Castaneda in Las Vegas in 1899, and soon after began construction of a new hotel and southwest hub in Albuquerque. They also created a new branch line to the Grand Canyon so a hotel could be built there.

(The Union Pacific had branch line service to Yellowstone; the AT&SF wanted its own competing natural wonder.)

Sadly, Fred did not live to see this; he died in February 1901. The Alvarado Hotel complex opened in Albuquerque in May 1902; El Tovar opened on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in January 1905. Western tourism would never be quite the same.

The Harvey company had always worked with local tour guides, allowing guests to book trips to nearby natural attractions or Native American pueblos. In 1925, Ford and his son Freddy decided to invest in their own company that would take tourists along the Southwest Detour — between Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, New Mexico, accessing

all the sites one could visit from there. They bought and expanded La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe as its headquarters, bought Cadillacs and buses to be “Harvey Cars,” hired a new kind of Harvey Girl — college-educated women, “Detours Couriers,” who could lecture about archaeology and culture — and started advertising in magazines worldwide.

The Detours company itself was only run by Fred Harvey for five years.

But during those years Route 66 opened and made the Detours route as drivable as it was accessible by train. It also became accessible by plane as Freddy insisted Fred Harvey become a partner in Transcontinental Air Transport, the nation’s first cross-country air-rail service, in 1928. Small airports were built near the Harvey hotels in Clovis, New Mexico, and Winslow, Arizona; Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes, Will Rogers and other celebrity aviators were often seen there. With three ways to get to the Southwest, people came even during the Great Depression; after World War II, tourism soared to even greater heights.

It has been nearly 100 years since the Southwest Detour became America’s favorite cultural vacation, and a lot has changed. (I wrote a book about it — and the entire Fred Harvey saga — called “Appetite for America,” if you want to read the story or listen to the new audiobook while driving.) But the Southwest Detours route is still, today, teeming with energy, and awash in so many ways to access a uniquely American and startlingly diverse living history. /// My wife and I have done the Detour more than a dozen times by car and twice by train. Every time we do it, we learn something new and meet fascinating people from around the world. (We especially enjoyed the

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fun-loving group from Australia who drank us under the table at the bar at El Tovar during their Detour, which they were doing in a caravan of red Ford Mustangs.)

The only thing you really should plan well in advance is hotel rooms at the Grand Canyon, which is where we normally start, after flying into Phoenix and driving there. El Tovar and Bright Angel on the rim and tiny Phantom Ranch at the bottom (for hardcore overnight hikers) are the biggest reservation challenge and most smart travelers plan their whole trip around those room availabilities. I still remember my utter disbelief when I was first told what people do to get these reservations, a year in advance. On the first day of every month, at exactly 11 a.m.

Mountain Time, Xanterra (the company that bought Fred Harvey and runs its historic hotels at the canyon) opens for reservation every room on the South Rim — for a one-month period exactly 13 months in the future. (You dial a toll-free number and keep calling until a reservation sales agent mercifully picks up.) The very best room is El Tovar’s presidential suite, which is one of only six suites that have balconies with canyon views. (Sleeping out on the balcony in a lounge chair under the stars — with full access to room service — is as close to “camping” as my wife, Diane, ever wants to get.)

At El Tovar, I relish being able to slip out of the hotel bar and stroll along the rim really late at night or flop out of bed at 5 a.m. to go watch what is arguably the greatest sunrise in America in my pajamas. During the day, we wander around the historic sites near the hotel. But the highlight is the scenic 26-mile drive to architect Mary Colter’s masterpiece, the 70-foot, stone silo-shaped Desert View Watchtower — the Sistine Chapel of the Southwest — which has astonishing paintings by Native artists all along its curved interior walls and spiraling staircases. The

views from the watchtower are just amazing, especially when thunderstorms are following the blue-green Colorado River toward you.

From the canyon, we try to spend some time in Sedona — and get the Southwest’s most scenic lunch among the red rocks at Enchantment Resort. But our main goal is always to get to Winslow in plenty of time to check in at the original Fred Harvey La Posada Hotel and begin our routine of doing spectacularly restful nothing. I have gone out with a cup of coffee to sit in one of the rocking chairs and watch the trains pass at sunrise and gotten lost for hours daydreaming. I have read, and occasionally written, parts of books sitting next to Mary Colter’s sunken garden.

From Winslow we head east — this road across northern Arizona is so absurdly straight I could make and eat a sandwich while driving and never have to move the wheel. There are endlessly stunning and colorful rock formations much of the way, and the magical Petrified Forest/ Painted Desert National Park is right off the highway. Our gas tank is a constant worry. Not only are there long distances between filling stations, but some of them sell — besides gas, soda and chips — a full array of guns, big knives and, I’m not kidding, swords. (Diane has considered buying a sword on her way to the ladies’ room and returning the purchase on the way out.)

There’s nothing Harvey left to see in Gallup. More surprisingly, there’s nothing left of Harvey in Albuquerque either — the former center of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe universe in the Southwest let the Alvarado be demolished in 1970 and still hasn’t forgiven itself.

From Albuquerque it’s less than an hour to Santa Fe. When we get to town, we go immediately to La Fonda on the Plaza, as people have for almost a century. La Fonda has been restored with great Fred Harvey historical accuracy and loving hospitality by board chair Jenny Kimball’s

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team, and it still has so much amazing artwork from the 1920s and ’30s that the hotel gives docent tours. Santa Fe is the eating and shopping and museum capital of the Southwest. I couldn’t even begin to tell you where to start, depending on your own taste. I will say we never leave town before we have eaten at La Plazuela at La Fonda, at Geronimo on Canyon Road (we go early to wander the galleries nearby), at Maria’s for New Mexican food, and at Harry’s Roadhouse for comfort breakfast, lunch or dinner. We always check out the New Mexico History Museum — which features the best permanent Fred Harvey exhibit in the country and holds the annual Fred Harvey History Weekend. And we often make the Harvey-themed daytrips to the charming Harvey House Museum at the old Belen train station and the newly restored Legal Tender Saloon at the old Lamy station.

From Santa Fe it’s just an hour’s drive east to Las Vegas, New Mexico, which was the first major Fred Harvey outpost in the Southwest. It can be done as a daytrip, but we always go and stay longer. That’s because Las Vegas is actually the most inspiring recent Fred Harvey comeback story, in terms of Western history and historic preservation.

By the late 1940s, both the railroad and Fred Harvey had abandoned Las Vegas and left its two most architecturally significant buildings to rot. One was the old Montezuma Hotel outside of town, which had burned down and been rebuilt twice in the late 1800s, by the same architects who created the famous White City at the Chicago World’s Fair.

The other was the trackside Castaneda Hotel, the first of what became many Fred Harvey/Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Mission Style resorts. Both regularly made national lists of the most in-danger architectural landmarks.

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Then two completely different kinds of preservation miracles happened.

In the 1990s, the land around the old Montezuma was used to build a modern new American campus for United World College; in 2001, the school spent $10 million to dramatically and rapidly restore the grand Montezuma building itself. (While it’s a private campus, you can tour the buildings with the fine local guide service Southwest Detours.) Its restoration made the pathetic condition of the Castaneda even more painful, and for decades people in town yearned for someone to save it.

In 2014, Allan Affeldt and Tina Mion — who had miraculously saved La Posada in Winslow in the 1990s — came to Las Vegas’ rescue and bought the shell of the Castaneda. They also bought an older but still-working hotel in town, the Historic Plaza, which had been a setting for a lot of films (including the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men”), and went to work.

Four years, $10 million and a lot of historic tax credits later, my wife and I and lots of Fredheads from all over were thrilled to be there — with a crew from “CBS Sunday Morning” — at the opening of the Hotel Castaneda’s public spaces and the unveiling of its newly replicated sign.

And in early November 2019, we were there for the grand opening of the hotel and its sumptuous new restaurants, Bar Castaneda and Kin. We stayed in one of the 20 perfectly appointed suites, created from the original 40 rooms (one of which Teddy Roosevelt slept in). And the very first dinner in the main dining room ended dramatically, as Fred Harvey banquets did during the company’s heyday, with flaming baked Alaska that lit up the entire Land of Enchantment.

The next morning we got into our car and continued on our Southwest Detour. We can’t wait to get back on that road.

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THE NEW CULTURE WAR BATTLEGROUND IS YOU THE SHIFTING DEFINITION OF IDENTITY IS CHANGING AMERICAN SOCIETY, AND THE VERY MEANING OF EXISTENCE

BY CA RL R. T RUEMA N

T

here’s a famous scene from Lewis Carroll’s classic “Alice in Wonderland” in which Alice is staring silently at a hookahsmoking caterpillar. The larva finally breaks the standoff with a question: “Who are you?”

Alice hems and haws until the caterpillar asks again, this time more pointedly: “You! … Who are you?”

This question is the most pressing of our time. And its answer holds the power to shape society. Indeed, the source of today’s deepest and most worrying political conflicts ultimately is grappling with differing definitions of what it means to be human — to be a person.

Carroll’s children’s book prefigured our modern problem. And so, too, did the 20th century philosopher Sydney Shoemaker when he imagined a fictional scenario where a surgeon operated on the brains of two men, Brown and Robinson. At the end of the operation, his assistant replaced the brains in the wrong bodies.

Unfortunately, one of the men dies.

The survivor, however, now has the body of Robinson and the brain of Brown. He does not recognize himself in the mirror but he thinks of himself as Brown, has Brown’s memories, is still in love with Brown’s wife. And as he slowly recovers from the operation, he slowly but surely starts to act exactly as Brown used to act.

The immediate question, of course, is: Who is he? Is he Brown, trapped in the body of Robinson? Is he Robinson but just with the wrong brain? Is he some hybrid of the two? Or is the human body simply a tool for expressing inner identity and of no significance for who we are beyond that? The answer to these questions

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rests upon a prior understanding of what it is that gives us our identities. What is the real “us”: Is it our psychological states, our feelings, our bodies, or something else?

In the years since Shoemaker’s thought experiment, the political culture of the United States has tilted strongly toward a psychological construction of human identity. In short, public policy is increasingly driven by the assumption that private psychological states or

WHAT IS THE REAL “US”: IS IT OUR PSYCHOLOGICAL STATES, OUR FEELINGS, OUR BODIES, OR SOMETHING ELSE?

feelings are the basic foundation for personal identity — for who we think we are. The idea that bodies can contain the wrong mind and ought to be fashioned to our inner will and feelings is now widespread.

The political significance of this might not be obvious at first glance but becomes very clear when we reflect upon how our culture is changing as a result. Take, for example, the idea of freedom as traditionally understood

in America. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are — or were — basic to the American experiment. They are enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, a placement which surely points to the priority they held in the minds of the founders.

These ideas, though, were also rooted in a certain understanding of humans: that they were made in the image of God and that they were deserving of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet these truths — once thought self-evident — are under increasing scrutiny as new, and even revolutionary, ideas of the human person are sweeping across Western culture.

And the alarming news for many is that, as much as religious conservatives might want to view this current trend as a simple battle of good versus evil or us versus them, Americans from across the ideological spectrum are all deeply implicated in the modern revolution of human selfhood. The way out will demand that we capture an older and more truthful understanding of who we are.

•

•

This new debate over the “self ” has emerged as a central battleground in the ongoing culture war. It’s sometimes called “expressive individualism,” a bit of jargon used by modern philosophers to explain how we think of ourselves these days. “Expressive individualism,” the American sociologist Robert Bellah explains, “holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition” that must be ILLUST RAT IO N BY JOSH GOSFI ELD

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IDEAS

expressed “to be realized.” In other words, our inner space, our thoughts and feelings, our emotions, are what constitute the real “us.”

And that to be the true “us” we must give expression to those inner feelings. As we’ll see, this idea carries profound implications.

Certainly, human beings have always had an inner space. This is obvious. The Psalms contain emotion and introspection. The dramatics of Greek tragedy depend on the agonies of soul. Shakespeare’s masterpiece “Hamlet” is an extended glimpse into the inner mind of a melancholy prince. But the rise of “expressive individualism” is not simply about humans having an inner life. No, “expressive individualism” is concerned with the authority — and the importance — we ascribe to our inner life.

Today, the power of our inner life is nearly absolute. Psychological feelings — more than even biology — often play the decisive role in determining personal identity.

One of the most important sources in influencing society’s move to prioritizing inner feelings is the 18th century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s most famous saying was “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.” This memorable statement is a neat summary of his philosophy that individuals left alone in a “state of nature” are the most authentic humans. By “state of nature,” Rousseau means “free of social conventions.” In short, Rousseau’s thought is emblematic of the tradition of thinking that sees society — and collective norms — as the source of human ills.

Rousseau articulated this philosophy in numerous works, including his autobiography, “The Confessions,” which focused on his own inner life and demonstrated how the various wicked acts he had committed over the years — from stealing a neighbor’s vegetables to framing a co-worker for another theft he committed — were really the result of the environment in which he was raised. And in “Emile, or On Education,” he wrote what was to become a foundational text in modern child-centered approaches to education: The purpose of education, he argued, was not to press the child into being that which society demanded but to allow the child to develop according to the voice of nature, undamaged by society.

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The artists, poets and composers of what is now called the Romantic movement built on Rousseau’s ideas. When William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their poetry collection, “Lyrical Ballads,” in 1800, they included a preface that explained why their poems largely focused on ordinary, rural characters and scenes: It was because they were unspoiled by social artificiality. Their poetry was not simply entertainment; it was designed to help readers become truly authentic, appealing directly to “natural” emotions.

WE ARE SELF-ORIENTING TOWARD PSYCHOLOGICAL STATES OF OUR CHOOSING — FROM CURATED SOCIAL MEDIA BUBBLES TO IDEOLOGICALLY AFFIRMING NEWS FEEDS.

At the heart of this project is an assumption that humans are best when untainted by their community.

But what if that assumption is wrong?

•

•

Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud identified the inner space of the human psyche not as the home to universal human empathy but rather as an often dark and potentially destructive space. For Nietzsche, the desire for power and control, and the exhilaration of humanity’s creative and destructive urges, were central to the inner life of humans. With no God, in his view, there was nobody to whom humans were accountable except this potentially dark inner self. As for Freud, the inner voice was more often consumed with — and defined by — extravagant sexual desires. Happiness in this view was found in embracing and giving full expression to such desires.

After Freud, then, sex was not something we did, but something we were.

These three ways of thinking — Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud — have come to influence today’s brand of “expressive individualism.”

It’s why we are slightly more individualistic, hedonistic and impatient about external authority. We are self-creating in profound ways, but we are also troublingly self-orienting toward psychological states of our choosing — from curated social media bubbles to ideologically affirming news feeds.

Modern technology and modern consumerism both make us feel like masters of the universe. Ever more impressive technology allows us to construct identities of our choosing, whether online or in person. Consumerism permits us to pick (and perhaps even design) what we buy and what we wear and, therefore, in a certain sense, who and what we claim to be.

Ubiquitous pornography encourages us to view others as instruments to our own pleasure. Elective abortion allows us to think of babies in the womb as intruders into our bodies and lives. All of these things, and more, are predicated on the notion that what we feel or desire is fundamentally who we are, and is of the highest importance.

Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” clause has slowly, and ironically, become a foundation for social disintegration rather than cohesion. It’s read today as an invitation to do as you please, rather than a uniting mantra aimed at shared ideals and the common good. Even our own bodies are now negotiable in the context of a notion of selfhood in which inner feelings have supreme authority in shaping our sense of purpose and happiness. Does your inner self feel uncomfortable in your body? Then the body should be significantly altered to fit the real you.

•

•

Some of these trends might seem innocuous or even benevolent. After all, shouldn’t we foster freedom for people to make meaningful choices, to govern their own lives, and to help different people feel a sense of selfdetermination and self-ownership? These do seem like beneficial goals. But, as conservative

V I T MO Headphones in.

Worries out.

Take a 5-minute spiritual break to reconnect with your soul and experience God’s light.

IDEAS

writer Rod Dreher has observed in reference to Dante’s “Divine Comedy”: “In Dante, sinners — and we are all sinners — are those who love the wrong things, or who love the right things in the wrong way.” Modern society’s impulse on matters of personhood is, at its best, a wellintentioned effort at inclusivity that becomes strangely tyrannical when not properly harmonized with other worthy concerns.

Indeed, while these trends would suggest that society is tilting in a fully individualistic and libertarian direction, the paradoxical truth is that it is actually driving us toward a new and worrying ideological authoritarianism. The emerging consensus in many influential circles is not that all “identities” are made equal, but that some identities are actually incompatible with a healthy society (i.e., those whose identities may offend another’s identity).

In some ways we intuitively get this: The “inner life” and “identity” of, say, a serial killer, is rightly deemed illegitimate, and we attach drastic legal sanctions for any person who gives expression to this inner life. Other identities, however, we privilege and protect in more subtle ways. For example, any action that seems to not affirm someone’s identity — say, by refusing to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding — can become a matter of public concern that merits punishment.

For Jefferson, if something neither picked his pocket nor broke his leg, he did not think it something that the government should take an interest in regulating. But once the self becomes defined not by property or by a physical body but by an inner psychological space, the words and actions that hurt start to become rather more alarming.

That is why wars over words — pronouns, epithets — now dominate the public square, and why a careless tweet can ruin a career or reading the wrong Dr. Seuss book might get you canceled. And it is why society is becoming more authoritarian in the name of protecting the vulnerable. To protect the pursuit of happiness in a time when each decides what that means, some individuals and groups need to be suppressed so that others may flourish, especially if one group chooses to not privilege another’s chosen inner identity.

This is particularly difficult for religious con74 DESERET MAGAZINE

servatives. When traditional attitudes toward sexual behavior collide with modern notions of identity, religious conservatives may be labeled as anti-social or harmful to the sexual identity of others. When the belief that bodies are fundamental to who we are, and therefore no one can be “born in the wrong body,” crashes up against the notion of inner identities, those who hold such views are considered bigoted.

The causes for this are not entirely the election results over the last two decades or the

EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM IS A DISTORTION, BECAUSE WE ARE NOT BORN FREE BUT RATHER INTERDEPENDENT AND EMBODIED.

consequences of a few liberal appointments to the Supreme Court. They are much more long-standing and deep-rooted. What we are witnessing today in the new culture wars is the latest stage in that inward, psychological turn of the human self. Only by recognizing this intellectual error can we find a way forward.

The new way forward, however, is in many regards an old way. It’s restoring the common understanding of personhood that once united disparate colonies at the nation’s founding.

As Bari Weiss recently wrote in Deseret, this “consensus view relied on a few foundational truths that seemed as obvious as the blue of the sky: the belief that everyone is created in the image of God” and “everyone is equal because of it.”

This doesn’t mean abandoning our inner life, which is fundamental to who we are, but it means placing it within the balance of the outer life that hopefully reaches toward family, community, country and God. The Jewish and Christian understanding of creation and hope of the resurrection point to this: “We” are created

as bodies; and our salvation is the salvation of the whole, body and soul. This identity is divine and calls upon us to be better and rise above our dark desires and ambitions.

•

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Flowing from an acknowledgment of our bodily identity, we must confront our necessary dependence upon others. As bioethicist Carter Snead has argued, we humans are always characterized by dependence. As babies and children, we are utterly dependent upon others. As we grow, we become less dependent to a degree, but then as we reach old age, we become more dependent once again. At no point are we ever the free-standing autonomous creatures of Rousseau’s thought experiment. And it is our bodies that are the source of this dependence, our physical constitutions that connect to others and define the nature of those connections. Acknowledging this reality should transform how we think both of ourselves and of others.

“Others” do not exist for “our” satisfaction or self-actualization. Rather we all exist for the sake of one another. And that, of course, has implications for sexual morality and behavior.

To those who acknowledge their bodies as who they are, not simply the raw material of self-creation, and who understand the rational, dependent nature of our life, sex can never be simply a means of personal pleasure whereby others are reduced to being mere instruments of our own satisfaction. Nor can it come to occupy a central place in how identity is understood. It is not sexual desire that defines us but the relationships of which sexual activity is a meaningful part.

None of this may make a great bumper sticker, but it has this in its favor: It is the full account of what it means to be human. Expressive individualism is a distortion, because we are not born free but rather interdependent and embodied. This may not be the modern self we want, but it’s this true self that we must ultimately confront to answer the caterpillar’s penetrating question to Alice — the question we all must confront as we look into the mirror.

Carl R. Trueman is a professor of religious studies.

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CULTURE

AN UNLIKELY RETIREMENT I THOUGHT BY NOW I’D BE PEACEFULLY OFFLINE, BUT TRUE ADULT BEHAVIOR IS LEARNING HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA WELL

BY FEN DI WA N G

B

to a rejection of on-screen socializing. “There is no stage of life where you orn in one of the last identifying years of the millennial genercan’t make a strong argument for there being a vast digital world available, ation, I have had the profound fortune — or misfortune — of no matter how quirky or esoteric.” growing up alongside the evolution of “Big Social.” The networking platGetting the green light to gaze and post and scroll from those with a forms that have changed our world — Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and doctorate may be surprising, but research finds it is not that we’re on social Instagram — came of age as I did. And for 15 years, I have shared my life media — or the amount of time we spend on it — that is significant. It’s online and looked onto others’, mesmerized by a never-ending parade of how we use it. Whether for social gain, intellectual capital, entertainment digital show-and-tell. or escapism, “these reasons are legitimate. It doesn’t have to be capital letFacebook dominated high school and most of college. Excited proclater important. It only has to serve a purpose you endorse,” Rutledge says. mations about which college or sorority a person chose became routine, Broadcasting my Sunday hike or the viral recipe I tried that briefly as did albums of school dances, weekend happenings and family vacainflated my culinary ego may feel small and lame, but it’s an effective way tions. Later, Instagram showed up, in a more commanding format, and to share a moment with the people I care about. For the average social late adopters like myself thought, “What would I even take photos of? media user, the shared experiences we have with most of our followers My life isn’t that interesting.” The answer, evident today, is “everything” assigns our audience value. And showing value to those we value feels and “yes, it is.” good. Proving worth to our community has always been critical to our Before the advent of Big Social, humans were not yet omnipotent besurvival. So has knowing where to be seen. ings. Our knowledge of other people’s lives was conThe urge to download TikTok and invite-only fined to conversations and observations within the newcomer Clubhouse is primal. “Social proof ” is square miles surrounding our homes, at school, work the psychological concept that we’re hardwired to and extracurriculars. Now, thanks to algorithms and copy the behavior of the masses because it must be a collective impulsivity, I know my friend’s cousin IS THE NEXT correct. It’s how we figured out which berries were recently got engaged at a picnic on the beach in San PHASE OF safe to eat, Rutledge says. Social media isn’t nutriDiego and my writing instructor from 2016 has a “GROWING UP” tious in the way foraged fruit is, but our curious nacat with a birthday coming up. When speaking with TO STOP ture is hard to inhibit. friends, framing questions with, “Did you see…?”

SHARING? That’s why we open the apps, though which ones is rhetorical and obsolete. Yes, you saw and so did may be shifting. Time spent on Big Social by Gen I. While standing in an elevator. While heating my Z and millennials ages 12 to 34 has been waning, lunch. Two minutes after my alarm rang, scrolling according to a comprehensive study by Selfhood, from bed with one eye open. a global insights platform by creative agency ZAK. Extending ourselves online is embedded in modern culture, and I am a modern woman. But while looking on Instagram Fatigued by curated news feeds and mood manipulation, they’re turning at the infected C-section scar on the lower abdomen of a food influencto more intimate communities like YouTube and Twitch to make “real er-turned-mommy influencer, I wondered if social media will ever phase friends,” rather than hoard followers and likes. out of our lives. Will those of us who have graduated from spying on prom It’s not the first time the pendulum has swung from one side to the photos and brunch spreads to adult milestones like marriage, homeownerother. In ancient Greece, Socrates cautioned the invention of writing, the ship and children ever retire from social media? Is the next phase of “growearliest “content,” would enable society to rely too heavily on private text ing up” to stop sharing? and not the truths of public discourse. Today, the opposite is true. More Dr. Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist specializing in technolothan 3.5 billion people worldwide and 7 in 10 Americans use social media, gy’s impact on individuals, society and brands, thinks probably not. And each of us with a dedicated voice and wellspring of personal information we don’t have to. Despite “digital detoxes” succeeding juice cleanses and available to whomever wants it. widespread advice to leave our devices behind for a fuller, happier, stopUnless you’re Cal Newport, a Georgetown computer science professor, and-smell-the-roses life, she says social media isn’t bad. For young people accomplished author and social proof outlier who has owned not a single figuring out their places in the world, it’s developmentally appropriate. social media account in his 38 years. There are few left like him, enigmas For the rest of us, it’s a great tool to actualize our mid- to top-tier Maslow exempt from the gravitational pull of their phones. But Newport believes needs: belongingness, relationships, esteem and creative expression. Clinithere should be more — and has dedicated a part of his career and identity cal professor Karen North of University of Southern California’s Annento encouraging others to reverse engineer their lives to pre-social media. In berg School of Communication agrees that growing older does not lead his TED Talk, “Why you should quit social media,” he smartly addresses

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common reasons why we claim we can’t abandon ship: It’s fundamental to modern life and to building a reputation, and it’s harmless fun. His rebuttals? Social media is an addictive, elective technology not all that different from a casino slot machine draining our time, disrupting our autonomy and providing little — if no — tangible reward.

He predicts a wave of “digital minimalism” will wash over us all soon, like the rise of health-conscious culture after the obesity epidemic of the 20th century. Veganism, paleo and Crossfit are part of a societal response to being fed up with processed foods and the vices that erode our “natural state.” “Named philosophies,” as he calls them, or simply committed lifestyles, emerge when an issue becomes so severe that the “forces behind it are too strong for just good intentions and advice to solve,” said Newport in an interview with GQ. “Digital minimalism” is this: Reduce time online, invest in a small number of meaningful activities and happily miss out on everything else.

One thing everyone can agree on, from technology enthusiasts to neo-Luddites, is the need for greater privacy. Discretion is trending — most people I know who use Instagram for fun have their accounts set to private — both in limiting access to soft data like filtered photos with punny cations and hard data like our age and what we like to buy online.

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The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that those sitting on stashes of data are ripe to play naughty, and it’s not trolls and hackers but institutions with an agenda, too.

If socials, big and small, propel your goals by facilitating education, pleasure and connection, then you’re doing it right. If they distract from responsibilities or breed self-comparison, it’s time to reframe. The latter is inevitable says Rutledge, and to expect people to not compare themselves to others is unrealistic. The challenge comes in knowing how to see yourself in relation to another. A tennis player looking at Serena Williams may doubt her athletic ability without arms as toned and lean, but another may be inspired to build muscle.

I thought by now, in 2021, an adult removed from the grips of youthful decay, I’d be off social media. I would have dissolved my accounts or embraced a more impressive pastime or found a separate, precious home for my fondest memories. But true adult behavior can simply be learning how to use it well. As our priorities mature, our tolerance for engagement does, too. “For (technologies) that stick with us, at some point they settle in and find a place in our lives,” says North. “The digital world and beyond has found its way.” Which means it’s a mindset, not a login, we retire. We no longer want to fit in. We want to find what fits us.

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ON AMERICA’S NEXT COMEBACK IN HER RECENT BOOK, SHAYLYN ROMNEY GARRETT ARGUES THAT COMMUNITY WILL SAVE US

BY LO IS M. CO LLIN S

A

sk shaylyn romney garrett who she is and she’ll tell you she’s a Latter-day Saint, a working mom approaching middle age and someone who’s “always exploring at the edge” of what those descriptions mean. She says she’s a “changemaker” seeking community, connection and healing “in a fragmented world.” She is also co-author with Robert D. Putnam of “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again” and “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.” What it takes to build bridges and what kind of human dynamite can knock them down has been a thread she’s pulled at most of her life, including scouring the country with David Brooks’ Aspen Institute initiative, Weave, to find people crafting communities in different ways.

She speaks Arabic and lived for six years in the Middle East, two of them with the Peace Corps teaching English in a public girls school. That inspired her to launch a nonprofit called Think Unlimited that taught creativity, critical thinking and social entrepreneurship. She tells her own story on the blog Project Reconnect.

Garrett and her husband, James, have a daughter named Sophie, 7, and year-old son named Aeon. The family also includes a dog named Dewey after one of her favorite progressives, John Dewey.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What contributed to your interest in community?

The roots of this go way back to my upbringing as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These communities are 84 DESERET MAGAZINE

unique, particularly in the modern American landscape. We know from the data that they have high amounts of social capital, which is how we measure connection and community. When I was young, I just knew how it felt to grow up in a tight-knit supported community.

Then, when I got to Harvard, I took Putnam’s sophomore seminar, when he began teaching the research behind “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” I was captivated by the thesis that American connectedness and social capital had been in dramatic decline for 50 years. That was 20 years ago and the decline has only deepened.

Yet Latter-day Saint communities, while not entirely exempt, have been an outlier.

How do you define community?

There are different aspects: One is our experience of feeling connected to human beings. In that sense, the opposite would be loneliness. Another is social trust — the sense that most people around me can be trusted, they have my welfare in mind, they’re generally not out to get me. And that we’re all trying to make it through the world and get ahead in life together, rather than every man for himself.

Another aspect is a sense of belonging, of being part of a group that is hanging together, whether that group’s trying to accomplish something together, or is defined by shared identity. That sense of belonging can be big — like I belong as an American — or narrow, like I am a working mom approaching middle age. I could feel a sense of community with other women who are like myself.

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When it comes to social capital, there are a couple of different types.

Bonding capital is belonging to people who look like me. Bridging capital is connections to those who are unlike me.

Ideally, we want a mix of both to build healthy, thriving communities.

in those communities versus how responsive government leaders were to citizens’ needs and desires.

So it affects us personally, it affects our neighborhoods and the way that we experience our life right outside our doorstep. It also affects the health of the democracy on a big scale. The fact that all of these things have been in decline for decades turned out to create a multifaceted crisis.

If you wanted to look for a silver bullet to solve polarization, economic inequality, the loneliness epidemic, the culture of narcissism we’re seeing ourselves in, if you wanted to pick one thing with huge power to affect all of that, reinvesting in relationship and community would be at the very top of that list.

Are there differences in capital value?

Yes. There’s often great value in bonding capital. For example, immigrants from Southeast Asia will bond together to create a mutual aid society where they’re not just engaging in personal relationship connection, they’re pooling capital to cover expenses for someone starting a new business, and that becomes a revolving credit situation. Shared identity can be not just about feeling supported, but also about getting ahead in the world.

Did you always feel like you fit in?

The American identity is built on the concept of bridging capital, and Over the years, I’ve come to understand that in order to feel belonging, we’re all different in these different ways. Particularly in a diverse dewherever we are, we actually need to lean into aumocracy, bridging capital is incredibly important, thenticity. For a long time I felt that I had to contort because you need to understand people who are not myself to fit into all these different communities like you, you need to be able to compromise with that I wanted to be part of. As I’ve matured, I’ve them, work with them to create shared solutions. gained more courage to own all the orphaned parts The two play different roles, and we need both. of myself, and to bring my full self into any commuHowever, bonding capital can have a dark side.

AMERICA GOT nity. That’s a journey that we all have to go on, to You can have groups competing with one another, OUT OF THIS MESS first understand ourselves well enough to know who thinking my group, my identity is all that matters.

ONCE BEFORE; we really are, what are all the disparate parts of ourWhen we don’t know or understand anybody not WE CAN DO IT AGAIN. selves, and then find the courage to show up fully. like us, we think of them as an alien “other” that THE WAY WE WILL DO IT IS TURNING I have found that, as a Latter-day Saint who’s very is our enemy. I think we’re seeing some of that in BACK TOWARD interested in politics and ideas, a working mom who America today.

ONE ANOTHER. doesn’t fit the mold, I’m able to contribute in an incredibly vital way rather than hanging back.

Is white nationalism an example?

Yeah, exactly.

Any last word on this?

Religion is a powerful form of connection. When It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the multifaceted crises you have limited social capital or religious commuAmerica finds itself in. We are facing historic levels of nities, there can be a sense without the right sort of income inequality, historic levels of political polarization. We are facing hisnarrative attached that we are the only ones that understand the true natoric levels of loneliness and isolation, cultural narcissism and self-centeredture of reality, true nature of God, and everybody else is fundamentally ness. In that dark place, it’s easy to lose hope. wrong and morally flawed. But we’re seeing that now when it comes to America has been in this same moment before: 120 years ago during political ideologies in a way that we’ve never seen before, when people are the last Gilded Age. From statistical, hard measures, we know that religifying their political identities. That also happens when it comes to America looked very, very similar to how it looks today. A determined race. group of reformers came onto the scene and engineered a multifacetIn religion, race and politics, we become tribal in particularly destruced upswing in which all of these negative trends started moving in the tive ways. right direction. For 70-odd years, everything was getting better on these different measures that I’ve mentioned. We got out of this mess once What does it mean when you say we’ve been losing community for 70 years? before; we can do it again.

Bob Putnam’s earlier work showed the power of social capital. Not only The way those reformers got out of the mess and the way that we will are community, connection and social capital super important for perdo it is by association building, rather than turning inward — turning sonal well-being — people with higher rates of personal social capital back toward one another. live longer; adding meaningful connections to your life can extend your The solution can begin right in our own families, outside our doorlife — it also has effects on the health of the community. The incidence steps and, to a certain extent, inside our own heart. Investing in commuof crime, for example, or the general safety of a neighborhood. It affects nity is heart work. our politics and the success of democracy. Bob’s original research on The solution may be simpler than we think, and a lot closer to home in this was about different parts of Italy. The levels of social capital they terms of reinvesting in the power of community. had he found predictive of how much corruption would be experienced 86 DESERET MAGAZINE

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