By Kohinoor Dasgupta
When I bought Goodbye to Poplarhaven/ Recollections of a Utah Boyhood at Salt Lake City, Utah, I had no trouble judging the book by its cover. I liked the title and the cover illustration. The name of the author, Edward A. Geary, did not ring a bell, and made me even more curious about what the pages held.
Goodbye to Poplarhaven is 163 pages long and divided into 23 chapters. It has illustrations by Ralph H. Reynolds. If it reads more like a recollection of a few clearly remembered days or seasons or experiences rather than a chronological memoir, well, that is how the book came to be at all. Fourteen of its chapters were previously published in "a different form and under different titles” in Deseret News.
A version of Goodbye to Poplarhaven first appeared in Dialogue: Journal of Mormon Thought. The material was deemed to be of interest to a wider readership. The University of Utah Press published it in book form in 1985. I chanced upon the book some 25 years later.
"I feel that I am growing closer to Andrew Anderson with each passing year. I am growing closer to my grandfather too, and understand better why, though he was a very orderly man, he held onto so many things that most people would regard as junk.”
Thus, in Chapter One, titled 'Disorder and Early Joy’, in the space of two pages, we meet both the little boy for whom Grandpa built a toy threshing machine (this was after the scrap iron drive of 1942-43 when the real threshing machine was hauled away) and a fiftyish man looking back at that time. We also meet Grandpa’s ingenuity: "an empty powder box, spools of various sizes to make pulleys, and a bit of copper tubing to fashion into a crank for operating power” were all he required to build the toy threshing machine. He had looked ahead to this day and thrown away nothing!
The second chapter, ‘The Town on the Prickly Pear Flat, is the one that best resembles a chapter out of a more traditional memoir. In it, we read about folks, mostly from Sanpete Valley, who answered Brigham Young’s call of August 22, 1877 (Young died just a week later) and moved into the isolated and largely barren Castle Valley. Under homestead laws, the settlers could become legal owners only after living on their farms for several years. By and by they built a mile-square town on the tableland and also planted saplings of willows, box elder, locusts, ashes, black walnuts, and catalpas. They also planted Lombardy poplars along the streets. In the author's boyhood, the rows of tall poplars gave the town a particular beauty.
"Poplarhaven” represents Huntington in south-eastern Utah, where the author grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. Huntington as Geary knew it does not exist any more, except as "Poplarhaven".
The second chapter also provides thumbnail bios of the author’s four great-grandfathers. While Geary will not provide such biographical summaries of other ancestors or members of his family, we do meet a few people up close as they weave in and out of the chapters.
Great-grandpa Geary was a big and strong man who died at age eighty-seven when the author was five years old. His son, the author’s beloved Grandpa, did not inherit his physique. Moreover, he was a sickly child who greatly missed his mom and his brother, both of whom died before he was eleven.
"One night in his teens,” Geary writes, "he [Grandpa] attended a dance after a long day in the hayfield and returned home after midnight to find his father dressed and waiting. "If you can dance, you can work,” Great-grandpa said, and work they did, through the remainder of the night and all the next day.”
By age twenty-one, Grandpa Geary had experience in farming, threshing and in hauling freight from Price to the Ute Indian reservation. He had attended grade school whenever he could spare the time, and knew some Bookkeeping thanks to three months at a business college at Salt Lake City. His father now gave him a 40-acre farm and a team of horses. However, the horses had to be sold soon to finance two years of service in the Northern States Mission. Upon his return to Poplarhaven, Grandpa married Alice Grace and settled down to a busy life of varied work and civic duties in addition to farming.
Fire and water feature prominently in Goodbye to Poplarhaven. While Grandpa witnessed some sixty fires in his lifetime, the author has his own catalog of conflagrations, starting with the Brasher Hotel fire when he was two. As for water, the Town Ditch, the irrigation canal, was of vital importance. It was diverted from the Big Canal which ran half a mile above the Geary homestead. On one weekend every March, whether it was warm enough for spring or not, it was time to spring-clean the ditch, removing grass and willow and repairing headgates. Cleaning the Town Ditch usually was a farm boy’s first paid job, 75 cents per hour in water company scrip, redeemable against water assessments come November. The boys usually redeemed the scrips right away at Clare Guymon’s store for 80 cents on the dollar.
In Chapter Six, titled 'Hying to Kolob', the author recalls a time in his childhood when his rumination on death turned into full-blown anxiety during a polio outbreak in the town. The "headstone man” appeared out of the blue at the time. He drove his van from town to town looking to be hired to mend broken stones in graveyards. The author took every opportunity to hang around the headstone man when he was at work and even when the man was done working of a day and sat by the canal, "jawing" with the free spirit, Bert Westover.
One day the author, Grandpa and Dad went with the headstone man to do some tending and repairs on the family plot.
"Grandpa took the shovel over to Great-grandpa’s grave, where the settling of the earth had left a depression. ….
"I suppose that’s where you’ll put Grace and me,” he said, indicating a space beside Great-grandpa’s grave.
When the job was finished, Grandpa rode home with the headstone man, but Dad and I walked, taking the long way over Sandberg’s Hill. Dad told me the names he had given to each of the ridges and hollows when he had played on the hill as a boy. It struck me as odd because I called them by different names; yet they were the same places. It was strange to think of my father as a boy and of Grandpa as a boy before him. And in all that time, the hills hadn’t changed. It was only people who changed… I began to catch a vision of mortality, of mutability, that went beyond the anxiety about my own death.”
Fazed, the child snuck away to his hideaway in the willows to think over things. Living forever, but all alone, was suddenly a bad idea. His prayer changed and grew branches until he gave up and upped and ran to the headstone man’s camp. There, an apricot tree overhanging a cellar promised a fruitful climb. Boyhood anxieties are mutable too.
In Chapter ten, titled 'Spring’, that season is moved ahead of ditch-clearing day in March, to the first of February. The author remembers mud underfoot, a biting wind, and sometimes a brilliant blue sky. In the next chapter, he describes in minute detail the arduous work of haying, for the men and boys, and for Old Belle and Prince, the cable horses.
When he was about fifteen, Geary started working on Saturdays at the flour mill owned by the efficient Sandbergs. He would sweep out the deep storage bins and lime their corners. He had trouble breathing inside the bins. He lifted sacks and packaged cereals and pancake flour. The desirable and comfortable job of bagging flour by means of the "wonderful” bagging apparatus, the miller kept to himself.
Year-round farm work culminated in harvest season. Before we can be flies on the wall at the sumptuous harvest dinner, the author describes the abundance of good years on a farm. While wheat, oat and barley ripened, fruit and berries were not restricted to orchards and lawns. They were everywhere, up on the canyon, in the foothills, and by long-derelict cabins. The profusion of plant life would have delighted the Pioneers of Prickly Pear Flat!
The author likes machinery, and their design and their operation are described exactly. The writing is hypnotic. We witness Grandpa and his farm hands, including the author, coordinating their manual skills precisely with the machine’s ruthless purpose. In autumn, the machines used were the binder and the thresher. The binder reaped grain and left "a trail of neatly bound bundles”. The bundles were gathered in shocks, and the shocks had to stand in the field long enough to dry out completely. Finally, on threshing day, Neil Howard and his crew arrived. Howard was as fascinating to the author as the threshing machine. The man had lost his legs in an accident when he was five, but he managed fine with one short artificial leg and crutches. He ran a farm and a sawmill, and in autumn he made the rounds of towns with his threshing machine and men. Geary writes: "I have never in my life felt more important than when Neil Howard stopped to talk to me.”
At the end of threshing day, it was time to rake leaves from the lawn and burn them in bonfires. Dinner was well earned, for the family and for the threshers. Geary writes:
"We could sit down at the dinner table knowing where everything on it had come from, and the process by which it had been prepared.”
After his fourteenth birthday, Geary was ordained a Ward Teacher. On the last Sunday of every month, he accompanied Brother Rasmussen on his beat. He recounts the terror of one November night when he was returning home alone (Brother Rasmussen had the flu) after a visit with Billy Evans!
In 'A Season on the Mountain’ (Chapter Twenty-one) Geary describes the most memorable summer of his father’s life. Certainly, it makes for a memorable chapter.
The first families to settle Poplarhaven mostly hailed from Sanpete Valley. Travel between Sanpete Valley and Poplarhaven involved either an arduous journey on a wagon track over the high plateau or a long way round. In 1925, the Bureau of Public Roads at last approved the construction of a better road. The work was given to local farmers and stockmen. Grandpa Geary had worked construction before: in 1906 he had joined the crew that built a dam on the plateau. So in 1925 he won a contract for building half a mile of road and a bridge across the creek. He hired two men, Bert Westover and Silas Cox, to help him. His son, the author’ dad, was a boy at the time. Dad was camp minder, part-time cook, handyman, gofer and learner. He also read, thought, and explored on his own.
Geary writes:
"As the season advanced the days grew hot even in the canyon, the tents stifling and heavy with the odor of tar. But the heat of the day was brief. The sun rose late and went down early behind the canyon walls, and the nights were usually chilly. Dad frequently took a walk at nightfall, going up the little canyon or along the creek, drinking in the fragrant air and listening to the woodland noises that now seemed to have nothing alien in them. If he was walking by the creek, he might hear the splash of a beaver and see the sleek head moving at the point of a wedge of water. In the mornings he routinely took the brass bucket up to the ridge, which always caught the first rays of the sun.”
Anyone who has lived in Utah even for a little while, has experienced solitariness and beauty, one way or another. If this book is read for what it gives, and not judged for what it does not (for example, it is thin on details about "women’s work”), it is a wonderful record of a different kind of connectedness than we understand, or are capable of, today, and very enjoyable.
Goodbye to Poplarhaven/Recollections of a Utah Boyhood by Edward A. Geary.
Illustrations by Ralph H. Reynolds
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