The city so nice, they named it thrice. Short Creek is a little town right on the border between Utah and Arizona filled with fundamentalist mormons. It has recently become more popular because it was the home of Warren Jeffs for a while, and Under the Banner of Heaven talks a lot about the town and beliefs.
My boyfriend thinks mormonism in general is fascinating, and fundamental mormonism is beyond imagining, so we took a road trip down to southern Utah. We drove through a lot of nothing to get there (stopping off in Hurricane to visit their history museum), and turned off the main road just to drive around. Mark immediately pulled out his camera and started taking pictures.
Each house was oversized, like obviously oversized. And all were unfinished: an unpainted wall here, a partially built add on there. It's something to do with the taxes... you can't tax and unfinished house, so every building in Short Creek is perpetually under construction. The walls around the houses (compounds?) were all at least 10 feet tall. Some even looked like fortresses.
Mark stopped to get gas, and I took a perverse pleasure getting out and cleaning the windsheild IN A TANK TOP. I also went inside to get a drink, and it wasn't until I was walking out that I saw the sign: no shoes, no shirt, no service--T-SHIRT MINIMUM.
We stopped at the local eatery to get lunch, and this time I threw on a sweater. I respect the fact that a shoulder apparently sends the FLDS into a frenzy of lust. Mark got a Navajo taco (his first time eating one. Crazy New Yorkers), and I got a club that was A LOT of sandwich. We spent some time people watching.
The most obvious thing is the amount of skin that is to be covered. The fundamentalist mormons didn't alter the garment of the holy priesthood since JS originally designed it, so their underwear goes to their wrists and to their ankles. It used to be that children and those not yet married could get away with to the knees and t-shirts, but some over-zealous prophet (Rulon? Warren?) decided that children too must be modest. This means that in the heat of the Arizona/Utah sun, men are in button down long sleeve shirts, and the women are in long skirts with pants (PANTS!!!) underneath.
The next most obvious thing is the hair. All women wear a single braid down their back, with a bump in the front. The higher the hair, the closer to god. The women all have the same look, and even the young ones are carrying children (their kids, or younger siblings? It's hard to tell).
It was commodities day, so families lined up at the local (church? community center? watering hole?) to gather things like food and toiletries. Oversized vehicles filled the street in front of the area, and bored children tried to entertain themselves or escape the heat.
The city of Short Creek is surreal for a lot of reasons, not the least of which that a half step to the right, mormonism could be fundamentalism, and I could have been one of those women.
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