Email this article

Community Dreams

By Katharine Niles

Every May for the past three years my son and I have made a pilgrimage to Utah's canyons. The first year was emblematic of what I hoped for in the following years - a group of people with children who just might form a community. We gained permits for The Maze district of Canyonlands, and in a singular act of anti-wilderness purism, four-wheeled many miles into our designated campsites. This was done because we had three children, aged four or under, and a woman past 60 with back problems. We basically, according to Back Pain Woman, who also happened to lead an environmental organization and still loved Ed Abbey after all these years, followed Hayduke's notorious ride in The Monkey Wrench Gang. If Abbey could do it, so could we - but then Abbey was a man known to throw beer cans from car windows, too.

My son and his compadres had rotating babysitters while various parents went on hikes. I brought along an old Eureka tent for a "children's tent" and they spent many happy hours getting filthy in camp, or taking small hikes, or scaling mini-canyon walls in toddler attempts at rock climbing.

The next year was not as good; we four-wheeled over Elephant Hill in the Needles district and camped on the edge of a windy plain. The weather was iffy, and some of the group cohesion gone. Two couples with kids were undergoing separations, and the other couple with a kid did not come. A month and a half later, the husband of the couple that did not come would be dead of a blood clot, floating off out of his leg and going directly to his heart. He was 38 years old.

Gone were my aspirations for I had had a flash once, at some communal meal held at one of our houses when all was still rosy, of being one big happy Italianate family. But with Carl gone, divorce in the air for some of the others, and our own (modest) geographic distance from the rest of the group's daily lives, my dreams for that community faded.

So the next year, when we camped, it was just Chris and I and Chuck and MB. MB is Back Pain Woman; Chuck her bean-field raised, Stanford educated husband. We still had a good time, of course. We went to Natural Bridges and snagged the last available campsite at ten in the morning on a Saturday. MB, her back in remission, took a long hike with me down the canyons and under the bridges. We saw a mountain lion track and hiked up to Horse Collar Ruin, an unusual Anasazi cliff dwelling with horse collar shaped doorways. Chris and Chuck drove around the top, did little hikes, and flew a kite. At camp, MB, the Mother of all Mothers, invented games with Chris; we pulled out our respective camp chairs (Chris had Bugs Bunny on his - no fair), drank various concoctions, played cribbage, and ate. In a way it felt sad, because Carl was dead and people were bickering and the playmates of my son's, though still present and played with on occasion, were experiencing un-communal realities. But in another way I felt Chris was with his surrogate grandparents, and that all was well.

I still hope an annual camping trip, full of long-suffering friends, might evolve. We've lived here long enough now and in spite of the upheavals the same people are still around. We know each other better, warts and all. Fun can be had, and familiar fun at that. We all went to the horse barn at the county fairgrounds last weekend, for instance, and indulged in some really high caliber poop-kickin' bluegrass. My son did not stop running and dancing the entire night, and his little friends, now six and a half to his seven, speak in complete sentences and look at me with an intelligence that never ceases to shock.

I have high hopes those children will manage to grow up at least somewhat together. And maybe we adults, through them, will figure out what honest community looks like, and grope our way toward it again.

Katharine Niles, the author of The Basket Maker (GreyCore Press), is a teacher at Fort Lewis College. She lives in Durango with a dog, husband, and first-grade son, Chris.