Growing up in the south east Utah desert was like seeing the world through a soda straw. I knew the world was there. I just didn’t know much about it. Since my dad’s jobs as a construction carpenter were on and off affairs, during the off days we did tour some of the places in the West – where there were rocks. Two weeks in the hills above the Yellowstone River wasn’t enough to tell a kid much about what else was there besides Montana Agate.
There was one event that stands out in my memory. A murder-kidnapping-suicide happened out in that same desert where my dad and I hunted dinosaur bone. A local man shot a tourist in the head, murdered his wife, and kidnapped the wife’s young daughter. Every lawman in south east Utah was looking for them. When the local man was found at a desert crossroad, FBI agents confronted him and he committed suicide. I heard my dad comment, “I know that country. They’ll never find that girl.” They never did.
If CNN had existed back then, this story would have dominated half their air time for at least a week. The shock to Price, my little town, was like a sudden earthquake. Everyone knew someone connected to what had happened. That included me. I was in the eighth grade and the son of the murderer was a classmate.
I didn’t know him well … just enough to recognize him in the hallways. In those days when computers were only far away curiosities, you learned about things by hearing them from your neighbor more often than even the radio news, especially in a place like Price. When the shock wave of what happened traveled through Price, my classmate, “Abe”, simply wasn’t there anymore. No one knew what happened to him. Students in middle school were not “kept informed” or “included” then.
I was talking to Roxy this morning over coffee and something triggered the old memory. Roxy couldn’t remember anything like that happening at all. To make sure I was retelling the story correctly, I consulted the hive memory of the human race – the Internet – and found an amazingly detailed account. I learned that a few things I remembered weren’t quite right. But the main thing was that the memory of what it was like on the desert back then came rushing back like a tidal wave. People and places that I remember like a photograph were sprinkled throughout the story.
If you’re interested in the whole story, you can find Part One here:
Part Two is linked in the story. Like I said, “Detailed!” It got tiresome for me when the victims, a family from Connecticut, was covered. I skipped past a lot of that. One thing I learned, that I didn’t know before, was that the local man was not just a murderer, he was a decorated hero of WW II in the Pacific. He was also unemployed and desperate for a job to feed his family. That part of the story wasn’t being passed around Price.
About two weeks after that, the story ended for me when I was walking back home from classes at school and I stopped to look at the magazines at Sampino’s store. There was my classmate Abe, sitting at the end of the lunch counter, eating a bowl of soup. He didn’t look up. He wasn’t a close friend and I didn’t have any idea what I would say to him – even if I wanted to – and right then, I didn’t. So, I left again. I have always wondered what the rest of his life was like. I’m not sure I actually want to know.
In other news, the coyotes have been serenading us at night in Surprise Wash for the past couple of weeks. One of the two fawns of the deer family that has been showing up for breakfast didn’t seem to be there this morning.
There’s another mass shooting being mentioned on CNN. There’s an average of more than one mass shooting every day now.
Ukraine has announced that yesterday, 600 of Moscow’s personnel were killed, bringing the total since February 2022 to 268,140.
Ain’t life grand!
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