[First corrected draft]
“Let’s go back to that one in the Avenues,” Cheryl said to the burly real estate agent driving us around the Salt Lake valley. We’d been touring pleasant homes in Sugar House, built twenty to thirty years earlier soon after World War II.
As we drove north on 700 East, Eric swept his hand in a semi-circle in front of him. “Notice how the streets up here are all so wide? Brigham Young insisted they be this big, even though back then when he was laying out the town, there wasn’t any traffic. People say he had a vision, from God or whatever, that Salt Lake would grow and be so busy, the roads would need all this space. Whatever, we’re glad now he did that.”
Crossing Temple, he jogged left and continued up hill on I Street. Turning left at 7th, he pulled up in front of a small brick house halfway down the block. We all got out and walked up the concrete steps, crumbling in a few places, to a covered porch. As Eric fumbled with the lock box, Cheryl and I turned around and absorbed the view from 577.
The entire valley spread out below. To our right, at the end of 7th, the Capitol Dome gleamed back at us. Panning left, the Oquirrh Mountains ran from the Lake to the open-pit copper mine, marking the western limit of the valley. Due south, a slight rise hid Provo and Utah Lake from view. Circling back along the eastern rim, the Wasatch Front rose 7,000 feet, its summits sparkling with fall’s first snow fall. I counted five canyon coursing into the mountains, Little and Big Cottonwood, Millcreek, and City, with Emigrant Canyon emerging through the University due east of us.
“OK, got it,” Eric said, waving the key. “Let’s go in and take a look.”
The heavy wooden door, painted white on the bottom half, featured a leaded glass window on top. We entered a room stretching the width of the house, leading into a dining area and the kitchen beyond. On the right, the one bedroom featured an interior brick wall, a small closet and an adjoining bathroom. As we passed through the dining area, Cheryl pointed to a giant box hanging outside, filling up the entire window.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Swamp cooler,” Eric said. “That’s what we use here for cooling. Load it with water, run the fan, works great ‘cause it’s so dry here in the summer.”
“Only one floor?” I asked.
“Well, there’s a basement and an attic. Downstairs is…this door, I think,” Eric said.
Below, a washer, dryer and utility sink were dwarfed by a giant iron furnace occupying most of the center of the single room. Eric examined the massive structure rising almost to the ceiling. Behind it, a chute led from a small ground floor window near the ceiling and ended at ground level.
“Hmm…Looks like and old coal furnace, converted to electricity.” Silver metal pipes led from the top in all directions, disappearing into the ceiling. “Must be about twenty years old,” he said.
Swiveling to face one of the walls, he pointed at the neatly labeled shelves. “Here’s where they stored their year’s supply.” I examined the labels: “Beans”, “Water”, “TP”, “Flour”, each shelf ready to hold its required staple.
“Why would they do that? There’s a big pantry upstairs, in the kitchen.”
Eric laughed. “Mormons. They tell us to always keep a year’s supply of food available. My mother had a little chart, telling her what to buy, when to rotate it. I always knew it was time when we had beens and canned tomatoes for dinner.”
“That must be exhausting, keeping up with all the rules,” Cheryl said.
Eric laughed. “Not if you don’t follow them!”
“You’re a Mormon, but you don’t do all that?”
Eric shook his head. “I guess I’m what you call a Jack Mormon.”
“Jack Mormon?” I echoed.
“Yeah, I got baptized and all, but sort of fell out with the whole thing when I grew up.”
Cheryl and I lingered on the porch while Eric walked down the steps to his car. The house was empty of furniture, but someone had left a wicker two-seater sofa outside. We sat there. Cheryl began, “So what do you think? I like this area, it’s just up the hill from my place.The U’s a mile over there, it’s so close to downtown and everything. Can we afford it?”
I gazed at the front lawn, browning from the lack of rain in October. Cottonwood trees along the avenue had started turning gold and orange. A faint hum drifted up from the city spread out below us. I looked southeast, to Little Cottonwood canyon.
I pointed. “There’s where Alta and Snowbird are. I want to ski there all winter!”
“Can we afford it?” Cheryl asked.
“Didn’t we figure our upper limit was $72,000? They’re asking seventy-seven. We can make an offer at seventy and see what happens.”
“All that financial stuff is so confusing to me” Cheryl said. “The mortgage payment is only $395 a month? That’s less than our rent in Venice!”
“It’s about what we’re paying now for our two places between us.” Cheryl had moved into a month-by-month duplex down the hill in the avenues, on 3rd. I was living in Manhattan Beach in a tool shed behind the rented home of Gary and Karen. Gary had been one of my junior residents until my graduation in July. Since then I’d been working “as a mercenary” as I put it for Kaiser in West Los Angeles. Most mornings, I’d ride my bike for a half hour so along the beach path, then drive my orange VW van to work up the San Diego Freeway and La Cienega
Kaiser had been growing so fast in the ‘70s that the specialty center and hospital they’d erected was already overflowing, and the Ob-Gyn department had been relocated into an unused patient ward. 12 of us shared six double patient rooms, each of which had a private shower and toilet. My roommate was Dr. G–, recently arrived from Brooklyn. While we all were paid the same salary, depending on our tenure, I overheard him boast on a phone call that “I cut myself a great deal here”. Whatever that deal was, it allowed him to afford a home in Beverly Hills, south of Sunset. I’d decided if he could swing that, I could surely swing an 80-year-old place in the Avenues of Salt Lake.
“If I work until Christmas, we should have enough to last us through the summer. I’ll ski all winter, look for work next spring, and go from there.”
We were all grown up. We’d been living together the past four years. I was a full-fledged doctor, a specialist who was “board-eligible” in Obstetrics-Gynecology. Cheryl had started a two-year training program in Nurse-Midwifery, all expenses paid courtesy of Federal legislation designed to increase the number of medical professionals needed for the “baby echo” which was starting as the Baby Boomers began having families.
“Wait a minute. How can you ski if you’re not working?”
“I’ll buy a season pass. At Snowbird or Alta. There’s a ski expo this weekend I saw in the paper, they said you can buy a local’s pass there.”
I first skied in Sun Valley, Christmas 1967. Lift tickets were $5 a day then. Over the next decade, inflation flared, fueled by the “guns and butter” tactics of the US, and two oil embargoes by OPEC. For example, gasoline went from about 31¢ a gallon to $1.20 by 1978. So it was a bit of a shock – a pleasant surprise – when I arrived at the front of the line for the Snowbird booth.
“No, we don’t have season passes. But we do have our annual locals’ deal here at the export – buy all the day passes you want for $5 each.”
I took a hundred.
My plan was to drive my van daily from the Avenues along the “bench” at the base of the Wasatch Front, 20 minutes or so to Little Cottonwood Canyon, then 20 minutes up to Snowbird. But first, we had to buy that house.
“What’s this mean here, under our names?” I asked the officer at the bank who was helping us through the process of signing papers for our mortgage. Underneath the line where we were to append out signatures was written “Al M. Truscott, an unmarried person” and “Cheryl A. Hanna, an unmarried person.” I felt an unspoken disapproval of Cheryl and I, who were living together without the imprimatur of matrimony.
The bank agent stammered, “Well, it’s just…”
Cheryl interrupted, “If there were just one on the loan, would it say that?”
A cough, then, “Um, if it were your hus…If it were Al, alone, there’d be no need.”
“What if it were just me?.”
Again, a hesitation. “The law is different for…”
I hurried to sign it, and indicated Cheryl do the same. Driving back to her apartment, I said, “That was weird, that “Unmarried Person” thing.”
“It’s a different culture here. At the swimming pool, at the U, you’re not allowed to wear a two-piece swimsuit.”
“What, a woman’s belly button is forbidden? It’s like a Boy Scout camp!”
“What do you mean?”
“Everybody is so ‘courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent’, all that stuff in the Boy Scout Law.”
“I thought that was ‘Be Prepared’?”
“That’s the Motto. The other stuff is the Law. And there’s no women, girls, in the Boy Scouts. That’s what this place is like. Everybody’s got a smile on their face, so polite, but if you don’t follow the code, you feel like an outsider.”
Cheryl touched my shoulder. “Then why do you want to come here? Just keep flying back and forth every week or two, stay with Gary and Karen, save a lot more money.”
“Well, first of all, I want to be with you. And when else am I going to be able to ski every day in such a great place, only 45 minutes away? And the price! Can you imagine what this would be in LA – twice as much, I bet. We stay here a couple of years, the way prices are going up, we can then afford a bigger house somewhere, we need to do this now. I need to do this now.”
“And go where,” Cheryl asked?
“I don’t, I’ll have to look for someplace after I ski. In May. The season ends April 30.”
“You…what do you mean, you’ll look for someplace. Don’t I get to decide where we go?”
Oops. “Well, sure, we both have to decide. What I mean is, you’ll still be going to school, I’ll have to go someplace to interview, I’ll need to have a job by summer; I’ll run out of money by then.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”