By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
As with any small town, there exists a small circle. It only takes one neighbourhood walk to be thoroughly caught up with the so-called talks of the town. Here is the former middle school principal’s house, there is the veterinarian’s, and the dentist must be working overtime since the lights are still on. These families only stay for holidays, and that family had to drill their plastic cows into their lawn because teenagers kept putting them in “inappropriate positions.” Their plastic milkmaid has been stolen, for good.
The bed-and-breakfast across the street has seen four owners, first generationally-owned, then husband-and-wife, then woman running an undercover meth operation, then new husband-and-wife. Fortunately, for neighbours and guests alike, recent renovations have removed all meth traces from the walls.
It is for these reasons, among others, that Huntsville, Utah, was the ideal place for my great aunt Mary Jane “Tuner” Markle and her husband, John Markle, a former Delta Airlines air hostess and a former Air Force and Delta Airlines pilot, to retire.
“This was back when you could smoke cigarettes on airplanes,” Tuner said, and took the job. She met John Markle on his first flight piloting for Delta, inviting him to a work party despite seeing another man at the time. Years later, Tuner would be stationed in Boston, John Markle would be flying out of Miami, and, still lingering on his mind, he would ask a friend for Tuner’s number. She happened to have just broken up with her other man, so perhaps it was perseverance, or a mere case of coincidence, but as the Delta Airlines slogan goes, “Keep Climbing.”
Tuner frequently visited John Markle while he was stationed in Miami, but she kept her flat in Boston just in case things went south. One time they did, they got into a big fight for reasons she no longer remembers. She described the ordeal, to me, as “one of those things you think to yourself, ‘Why does everything go wrong for me? Why can’t anything just work out?’”
It ended up being just another one of those things. Tuner and John Markle have been married forty years. They cruise in the spring and snow-shoe in the winter, and recount tales of drinking Japanese beer in Scotland, and comment on a thirty-year-old friend who got into a bad snowboarding accident. “I mean she’s young, but,” one of them said, and I cannot quite recall the but.
It is important, here, to note that although Tuner and John Markle live in Huntsville, Utah, they spend most of their time, nowadays, at their cabin in Pinedale, Wyoming. In fact, in two mornings, he was to leave, loading his pick-up truck as Tuner and I set the dinner table when we arrived in Huntsville.
“Here’s a story for you. You got time for a story?” John Markle said, as we sat down for dinner. “On May 10th, 1869, the transcontinental railroad joined West to East at Promontory Summit, about seventy miles north of here. Before the railroad, people would ride horses to Omaha or St. Louis. But the story I’m going to tell you is about the train to Omaha.”
“The whole Southern part of Wyoming is high desert,” he continued. “Evanston, about seventy miles from here, there’s three-hundred-and-fifty miles and not a forest. Two-hundred miles northeast of Pinedale is the Green River, and that spine is called the Continental Divide. People were in search of lumber to make railroad ties, and they’d go a hundred miles up the river, cut trees into ties, wait until the spring came and the ice melted, and float the ties along the river. It’s not magic, it’s physics,” John Markle said. He asked if I had ever heard of a tie-hack, and I had not. “A tie-hack is a fella that sits on the river and keeps the ties in line. It’s pretty neat,” he said.
He asked if I had ever heard of a rockhound, and I had not. “It’s just one of those geographical people.” John Markle cited a late-friend, Shorty Probasco, as an example, who collected ceremonial state quarters. Besides co-founding the Utah Antique Machinery Association, Harold “Shorty” Probasco also served in the US Navy as a radioman in WWII, worked for the Union Pacific Railroad as a switchman and a brakeman, and featured on the September/October 1981 cover of Gas Engine Magazine, having lived in Huntsville for fifty-eight years. Officially defined as a person who collects “rocks, minerals, and other artefacts as a hobby,” Shorty Probasco was certainly a rockhound.
“Have you heard of Kemmerer, Wyoming?” By this time, John Markle should have known that I had not. “The West was predominantly wood-burning, and the East was coal-burning. About thirty miles north of the train tracks is Kemmerer. Kemmerer is also the boyhood home of– have you ever heard of James Cash Penney?” I had not. “JCPenney?” I had. “Fast forward to now, around five, seven miles away, they are building a nuclear power plant, funded by Bill Gates. He recently went there and played poker, just to do it.” This was the end of John Markle’s story, and yet the train never made it to Omaha.
That night, Tuner gave me her copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country to read. “Bill Gates says, ‘Wait till you can see what your computer can become,’ but it’s you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer,” Kurt wrote.
Kurt also wrote that “one of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know.” Take John Markle, who would rather tell stories about the Goo Goo Dolls and Kemmerer, Wyoming, than of his time as US Air Force Captain John Markle, or, to Air Force buffs, as “an F-4 Phantom II pilot in the famous 550th Tactical Fighter Squadron in the spring and summer of 1972, some of the most intense periods of the air campaign over North Vietnam.” (This title was graciously given to John Markle from a podcast episode titled Lessons with MiG Killer John Markle.) He had been shot down in the middle of the North Vietnamese jungle, surviving a day in enemy territory before being rescued.
Perhaps we refuse to tell the stories that have been told too many times, that make us out to be people we no longer are, ones that recite as matters of detached fictions as opposed to our happenings from long ago. Besides, John Markle preferred to keep the Air Force talk to the Air Force folk. The following night, for instance, Tuner and John Markle had old Air Force friends over to watch football and eat dinner. John Markle would mistakenly refer to the players as passengers, saying “He’s been speaking the language of football since he was this big!” after a successful play.
It became clear that we each had a language of our own, that those in the Air Force expressed themselves in miles and hours, that those who lived in Utah thought from West to East. It was too late for me to speak any language but my own, and by the time I could even attempt, John Markle had left for Wyoming.
Huntsville, Utah, happens to be home to the Shooting Star Saloon, the self-proclaimed “oldest continuously operating saloon West of the Mississippi." It may seem counterintuitive to have an operating saloon in Utah, at all, seeing as around sixty percent of the people are Mormon. And it became a curious thing, because the majority of the people I encountered in Utah, including Tuner and John Markle, were Christian or Catholic, or agnostic, or ex-Mormon, but not Mormon.
Take, for instance, Tuner’s friend Pat, a former biologist at the University of Utah. Pat gave some snowboarding advice in preparation for my excursion to Nordic Valley the next day. She said not to land on my wrists if I was to fall backwards, or more specifically, “It’s like if you’re getting raped, you might as well enjoy it.”
Nordic Valley Ski Resort, which sits across Pineview Reservoir, marked a stark difference between the valley, one side covered in snow, and the other in rain. I went with a friend, and we made quick friends with our Nordic Valley snowboard instructors, who, that night, suggested we all meet again at a bar on Ogden’s Historic 25th Street.
Some may know of the golden spike, a commemoration of the meeting of the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad at Promontory Point, Utah. What is lesser known is that this railroad junction was soon after relocated to Ogden, Utah, once referred to as Junction City in the early 1900s. The railroads brought business and goods, but also exposed the Mormon community to non-Mormons, and drinkers, and prostitutes, that lined 25th Street.
But this night, the snowboard instructor did not show up to 25th Street. “He is trying to convince his girlfriend to let him come,” the other Nordic Valley snowboard instructor said, before asking my friend to a game of doubles pool.
It was at this moment an older gentleman turned to me and asked if I wanted to play pool with him. This was followed by a whisper in the bartender’s ear: “Ask her if she’s into older men!” He pointed to a younger man across the pool table, introducing him as his son. “He’s a professional pool instructor, he can teach you how to play.” A few minutes later, between rounds, he told me it was, in fact, not his son. “I met him a few years ago. We tell people that I left him one day to buy a pack of cigarettes and never came back. The bit goes, my wife and I would smoke a cigarette every time we’d have sex. A month goes by, and I’ve had one cigarette, and her box is empty. The joke– and most people don’t get this– is that she’s having an affair. So I left her.”
The real story is that Ryan, as his name turned out to be, was married out of high school, with four children, the youngest being twenty-three. “Have you heard of the rule of seven?” he said. I had not. “For men, you halve their age and add seven, and that’s their ideal partner in mental age. For girls, you do the inverse. So you double it and subtract seven.” he said. I told him I was sorry, and that I wasn’t all that good at math. “I was good at geometry,” he said, “but school wasn’t really for me. I’m more on the arts side, I like designing houses, stuff you’ve never seen before, stuff that makes you stop and think.”
Before the 2008 crisis (“God, were you even alive then?” he said), he was a building contractor, with money “all over the place.” When the economy crashed, so did his marriage. Soon after, he joined an online dating website, Ashley Madison, for people seeking affairs. One woman took a particular liking to him, and he became a male escort for two years. “The thing people don’t realise with male escorts,” he said, “is they just want you for arm candy half the time.” He referenced one time in which he was paid $250 an hour to play shirtless fetch with a client’s dog. I asked why he stopped. He said he wanted to leave before it became too much of an issue.
“I’ve had lots of money and had very successful businesses. I’ve had no money and lost it all, and I realise you are no happier one way or another. I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anyone else, besides my dad. It’s a falconer story, do you mind?” I did not.
“It was a Sunday, and I was taking my bird out for a hunt. I did this quite often, but this time I drove three hours out to the middle of nowhere. You realise if you break down on the road, it’s going to take you one to two days to walk back. You realise, you look around, and you realise how small you are in this world, like being lost in the ocean. My falcon flew, and she grew so small she started to look like a dot in the sky. Falcons go into a teardrop when they dive. My falcon was probably diving towards the ground at two-hundred miles an hour. And it reaches the ground, and all you see is feathers flying everywhere. I shout, Holy fuck, did you see that? and I turn around, and no one is there. This whole thing happened within the span of five minutes. Three hours to drive there, five minutes, and three hours back. It was a Sunday, and I should have been in church, but those five minutes were the most I’ve learned, the most alive I’ve felt in my whole life.”
Before leaving, he insisted on showing me a video of his falcon killing a pheasant. “Falcons have a ninety-percent mortality rate. Look, his first kill. I mean, he’s just a baby. It’s hard, having to raise them only to watch them leave, one day.” He asked if I would be coming back. “I like coming in here on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays. Lots more people, more lively.” “But it’s a Tuesday,” I said, knowing I would not be coming back.
Tuner quite enjoyed this recollection the following morning, as did John Markle, who had returned from his brief stay in Wyoming. (Tuner and John Markle have since sold their house in Huntsville, Utah, having permanently moved to Wyoming.) He proceeded to narrate the plot of the book series he was reading. “It’s fiction,” he said, “but it’s one of those things where the author must have, you know, she must have experienced something like this, before.”
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