You haven't lived until you've buried your neighbor with your own hands.

My wife and I moved to Bluff, Utah (pop 250?) five years ago.
It's an inconvenience.

I discovered, when we moved to the area, that people frequently describe large distances in terms of hours required to reach a Wal-Mart. Cortez, Colorado is an hour-and-a-half away. Cortez has a Wal-Mart.


Bluff seems to be a good haven for eccentrics or hermits of many stripes, and it requires a certain willingness to be inconvenienced to thrive in a little village in the desert. This self-reliance perhaps leads to the particularly volatile political climate, but it also provides a chance for a more direct relationship with one's community. When I lived in larger cities, it was a pretty anonymous process when the garbage was taken away, or when the toilet would flush, or when a siren passed the neighborhood. Here, the recycling program is a man named Keith who collects, sorts, and sends away countless pounds of material from the town's businesses and homes. He accepts some money for gasoline, but for the most part does it only because it should be done. When we hear a siren it means that the ambulance has people from town in it. If it isn't a patient in the back, then it's the crew in front... perhaps my kid's kindergarten teacher, or his best friend's mom, or his principal. If something catches fire, we go put water on it. The best argument I can make for pulling over when you see a fire engine, is that it might be someone like me behind the wheel. I tend to weave erratically when I drive the engine.

Perhaps the most inconvenienced family in town runs the Recapture Lodge, where the phone ringing might be someone calling for a room, or for directions to a trailhead, or for a river shuttle from Mexican Hat. They might be calling because a house is on fire, or because someone crashed their car miles from town. The four kids are the sort that you'd hope your own children will tag along with in hopes of beneficial peer-pressure--that whatever they've got, your kids will catch. Jim's the Fire Chief, LuAnn often runs the radio or calls us out of bed if something has happened; I've even heard Lacy, their oldest daughter, running radio traffic from their home within the maze of the lodge.

Last January, when a tour bus rolled in the darkness between Bluff and Mexican Hat, I got a call from Lu. Jim got to be in charge of the whole scene: three town's fire and rescue crews, ambulance crews running back and forth to four states, fifty patients and another busload of skiers who stopped to help them in the cold night.

Five months later the burden of that authority still seems very fresh on Jim. Feeling responsible for people's lives, for people's hours spent in pain, is an inconvenience of the highest order. He put it into perspecitve for me by reminding me that in a town as small as Bluff, there is no insulation from what needs to be done. The lodging, the teaching, the rescue, and the burial, is done by those who live here. As he says, "you haven't lived until you've buried your neighbor with your own hands." There is a certain luxury, in a city, in being insulated from these experiences which are so deeply human. There is something fundamental, something beneficial, about a self-reliance that embraces both the opportunity to do what one wishes, and the duty to do what one must.