The Hearts of the Children

Our latest escapade was a journey into the heart of the Great American West, searching out the spirits of our ancestors, breathing in the majesty of our nation's pristine state parks and marveling at the layers of the earth laid bare in wondrous colors and formations.  Or as Freestone would put it, "Driving to the middle of nowhere and looking at graves and rocks."

My ancestors on all sides were converted to the church in Europe and made the permanent pilgrimage across the Atlantic to join the Saints in the Americas.  That alone took enormous faith, but it was merely the beginning of their sojourn.  My King ancestors settled in upstate New York before joining those church members who were driven from state to state and finally into the wilderness, traveling west across the plains before arriving in the Salt Lake Valley.  No sooner had Thomas Rice King and Matilda Robison King gotten their bearings in Salt Lake than they were asked by Brigham Young to start a settlement in Fillmore.  Later, they were asked to establish yet another settlement further south in what would be known as Kingston.  Kingston isn't even a dot on the map today, but I have always wanted to go there and just see where these hearty ancestors of mine lived their lives.  So I put it on my summer list:  "Go to Kingston and see where ancestors lived."

I knew I wouldn't be able to get Scott excited about a road trip culminating in a remote stretch of nothingness.  So I turned to my dad.  He is the one who gave me a big book entitled The Kings of the Kingdom, all about our progenitors.  It was his fault my curiosity was piqued, and I knew he'd want to go with me.  From there, I needed enough kids to fill up the van, so I recruited the most gullible of the bunch and bribed Ruby to accompany us.  Golda would have none of it.  I asked her, "Golda, where's your sense of adventure?"  She replied, "I left it in that last motel with the cockroaches."

I tried to tell her that I read the reviews this time, but she stated her position clearly:  she would not stay anywhere that ended in "otel" unless it started with an "H."  So we started off without her.  I took Tziporah in her place because I couldn't bear to leave those rosy cheeks and drooly smile.  And Tziporah didn't complain, either!  The trip started 18 hours ahead of schedule when my dad suggested we go to the Manti Pageant on our way.  It worked out perfectly, with our first ho- sorry, motel being just south of Manti.

Dad, Ruby, Ari, Freestone, Ptolemy, Tziporah and I got to the pageant in plenty of time to see the real pageant: the crowds.  Street vendors, anti-Mormon preachers, youth groups, families, all kinds of people.  We watched the show on blankets, except for Ptolemy.  He found a girl and was smitten.  He spent the whole evening flirting with his new girlfriend.  It was sad when they had to say good-bye at the end.  He may never see her again.  He didn't even get her number.  She didn't have a phone...and neither does he.

We were inadvertently smart about how we did the pageant.  While 90% of the crowd headed north afterward, we sped south, away from the backlog of vehicles, to Richfield where our $37.00 a night motel was waiting.  The owner promised to leave the keys "on top of the Coke machine," since we would be arriving after midnight.  We walked into two very clean and spacious rooms and woke in the morning to brilliant red hills blazing all around us in the sun.  The adventure was afoot!  With just one small glitch:  Back in our house in the Salt Lake suburbs sat a neat, freshly laundered stack of the clothes I had planned to wear on the trip.  All of them.  Pajamas, everything.  It's a good thing the focus of this trip was the hardships of our forebears.  Because how could I complain when they had traveled thousands of miles in the clothes on their backs?  So really, my lack of clothing was just part of the trip's theme.  And it made packing up the motel room super easy.

First stop:  Kingston, the crown jewel of our trip.  Now, I'm almost positive that Kingston has never been called the "crown jewel" of anything.  It a town that's three blocks square, with no public buildings.  Nevertheless, we found a way to spend nearly an hour there.  First, we took a picture next to the "Welcome to Kingston" sign, where we were attacked by giant ants.  Approaching a local in her driveway, we were invited by her and her family to pull up a plastic chair and sit in the shade of their carport.  That's what you do for fun in Kingston.  We talked about the old textile mill and the woman pointed out the original King home, which we took pictures of on our way out of town.  Dad and I spent a lot of time on this trip imagining what it must have been like for our ancestors to be called to settle these remote, barren, empty places.  Even now, if I were "called to serve" in Kingston, I would probably have a crisis of faith, and it's only an hour's drive from everything modern civilization has to offer.  When Thomas and Matilda arrived in that place, it was with a wagonload of goods, period.  It was several days' journey to anywhere else, over rough, unforgiving terrain.  The odds didn't seem to be in their favor, but they carved a home from the arid land.

Our next stop was the Antimony cemetery, where we knew Thomas and Matilda were buried.  We let the kids search the tombstones for names of Kings, and we found quite a few.  We also found a sobering number of babies' graves.  Throughout the trip, Dad read excerpts from the Kings of the Kingdom book.  My favorite talked about the trek across the midwestern plains.  After bearing five boys, Matilda Robison had had a baby girl, named Matilda Emily.  At one year of age, while the family was struggling across the prairie, the baby died of Scarlet Fever.  They took the footboards off their wagons to fashion a tiny casket, wrapped the baby in a blanket and buried her as best they could in the frozen ground.  The book talks of how they burned the brush all around the grave to destroy the scent and keep the wolves away.  At the end of the day's journey, Matilda looked back across the land and could still see the grave site of her little namesake in the distance.  It was all she could do to keep from running back to her baby's grave, but she had to carry on.

My dad made the comment that we hear about the most valiant spirits being saved for the last days.  He said, "Stories like these make me wonder if the most noble spirits have already been here, and we're just the leftovers."  We give ourselves too much credit and our brave, noble, self-sacrificing ancestors, not enough.  They lost their children, their very lives, and who is reaping the benefits?  We are.  Seeing Thomas and Matilda's tombstone in the corner of a rocky, desolate, roadside cemetery was sad.  After all their toil and sacrifice, to end up there, it didn't seem fair.  But again, the pioneer hymn came to mind. "Why should we think to earn a great reward?  With the just, we shall dwell."  The lonesome, craggy, rocky place of their burial is not where my ancestors are, and not what their lives were about.  Still, thinking of the lush, green valleys of England from whence they came, to end up in a windswept desert...I hope they had great faith that what they did was worth it.

I know they must have...our book includes correspondence between Thomas and Brigham Young in which Thomas is called to build Cove Fort.  He protests that building such a structure would cost him more than his net worth.  Brigham says, essentially, "Do it.  We'll settle up later."  And Thomas Rice King does it.  Another account in the book is of a woman who says that she was asked to give everything to the church.  Someone asked, so what did you do?  She replied, "I done it."  Simple.  Faith.

After our visit to the cemetery, I said to the kids, "And that concludes the dead ancestor portion of our trip."  We were moving on to Bryce Canyon National Park.  What amazing foresight our country's leaders had to set aside these vast landscapes of untouched wilderness!  It's so great that we have these parks to drive through so that our children don't have to always watch movies in their own homes.  They can watch movies in their cars while spectacular scenery streams by unnoticed and unappreciated.  At least we didn't have video games.  Freestone even complained that his "thumbs were getting out of shape."  (I hope my ancestors didn't hear that!)  We did haul the kids in and out of the car to view numerous canyons, all of which looked remarkably similar.  Even so, the sheer majesty of these vistas never ceases to amaze and confound.

After spending the day in Bryce Canyon and the surrounding rock shops and tourist sites, we drove to our motel in Panguitch, where they had botched our reservation.  Since we had already done the park and the motel wasn't that spiffy (don't tell Golda), we saw no reason not to drive north and see where we ended up.  My dad doesn't mind adventure.  Tziporah does, though.  She was upset and cried in the car for what I thought was 20 minutes.  My dad claims it was "a lot longer than that," but eventually The Tiz came to terms with the fact that we were hours from home, covered in red dust and bereft of lodging for the night, and she fell asleep.  Fate smiled upon us and the winds blew us to a heavenly Quality Inn in Beaver (no "otel" in the title) with a spacious lobby, a pool and a great military discount that Dad took advantage of.  We swam, dined at Dairy Queen and read late into the night on couches in the lobby.


The next morning we made another seat-of-our-pants decision and decided to drive up Provo Canyon to Park City to meet Scott and the other kids, rather than go home.  Ruby said, "Mom, you told me to pack two outfits and that was like a week ago."  OK, she was exaggerating, but the trip did end up longer on both ends than we had originally planned, with the Manti Pageant at the beginning and Park City at the end.  And we weren't finished yet.  We stopped in both Fillmore and Cove Fort to see landmarks and talk about where our ancestors had spent their lives.  Then we made the final drive over Timpanogos to Heber.  Despite Ruby's protests, she was one of the kids who decided to stay with me in Park City for an extra night.  After we all had lunch together at the Ranch, Scott took Dad and some of the kids home and the rest of us - me, Ruby, Ari, Xanthe and Tziporah - did all of our laundry, (I washed my whole outfit!), swam and relaxed.

Now the girls are asleep and I am left to ponder the events of our trip.  If my summer list had one thing on it that had the power to change me, this was it.  I have always wanted to go to Kingston.  I just needed the barest excuse - a self-imposed to-do list - to get me there.  My dad was a good sport to go and to finance the whole expedition.  Thanks, Dad.  Golda was joking before we left and said, "It's going to be so boring.  Bill is going to say, 'I had to haul the dead sheep to the gully' and all that."  Sure enough, Dad happened to mention the old farm protocol for disposing of dead sheep, and the kids all laughed.  Far from being boring, however, Dad's stories and those he read from the family history were interesting in a whole new way, as we heard them against the backdrops where they actually occurred.  I keep thinking of the scripture (D&C 2:2) ...And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers.

As difficult as it is for me to imagine what Thomas and Matilda King's lives were like and how they were able to carry on, my life would be even more unfathomable to them.  On some level, I am ashamed of what a lazy oaf I am, despite being descended from such indomitable stock.  I hope to do better.  I hope to be a mite more worthy of a great-great-great grandmother who was called upon to bury her baby in the frozen ground of a place she would never again see.  Of a man who would walk into an unknown wilderness and tame it with his faith and will...time and again.  So little is asked of me, and yet, can I do it?  I have to, or else the lives of those valiant saints whose rocky, windswept graves are now in my heart will have been in vain.