All Work and No Play? Hardly.

Taking care of Social Services in three counties obviously kept Maun pretty busy.  And when I was painting and running the antique shop my days could get pretty long as well.  Somehow, however, we always had time for fun.  When we hired my student to run  the antique shop on weekends we could get away for camping,  sometimes in the mountains for fishing and sometimes in the desert which we soon learned to love.  We were even busier during the time it took us to build our house.  But later, when Maun’s job  had become somewhat routine and I was working at the college we seemed to spend as much time playing as we had working during the early years.   May we share a glimpse of some of the things we did?

We are having lunch on the deck of our new house in our old fashioned tennis whites after a match.  Tennis and skiing were the two activities that always seemed to engage us no matter what else was going on.  Tennis might seem like an unlikely sport for a very small town in the desert but there was a surprising number of people who played and we never lacked for people to play with, very often on an organized basis.  The buildings and grounds office where I worked at the college was right across the street from the courts in the city park and I could practice serving and hitting against a backboard on my lunch break (slightly extended).  I also used the grounds shop equipment to keep the courts clean,  sometimes on college time.  The college team used the courts so I just figured it was part of my groundskeeping job.  Maun and I both got to be pretty decent players.  In a tournament we could both typically win one singles match, one doubles match and one round in mixed doubles.  That meant every tournament meant six matches if we entered every event, a lot of tennis.  And Price, being on the edge of the desert, had a longer season than Salt Lake.  The floods of 1983 came after a biblical seven year period of drought and in the preceding year we played outdoors at least once in every single month of the year.

Once after a match when we were still living in Grandma’s house Maun and I came home in our same spiffy whites to find the neighbor’s ram blocking our way to our door.  The owner, who was crippled and couldn’t walk, was in his car in front of the house, very concerned,  and he wanted me to chase the ram home.  I did, right through the sagebrush and cactus with my bare legs.  What a perfect picture of the contrasts we found in Price.

Maun and I were used going skiing from Salt Lake so we thought the hour and forty five minutes it took to get to the nearest resort to Price, Robert Redford’s Sundance, was a long way.  Not wanting to drive this far encouraged us to take up cross country skiing.  So it became our routine to spend one  weekend day cross country skiing and one day at Sundance.  Sundance is a beautiful place and even though I wasn’t a very good skier at the time, Maun was much better, we liked it very much.

But cross country skiing was the real adventure.  There were were dozens of places to go and the back country extended forever.  In the picture we are skiing at Avintaquin on a road that goes from Highway 191 to Soldier Summit.  We are skiing on snowmobile tracks this day but on many other outings we were breaking trail in deep powder.  Maun made everything she is wearing in the picture except for her hat and gloves.  The sewing machine she got for her first birthday in Price and that we still have some forty years later was a very good investment.

Maun and I had learned to sail from one of my students at the University in Irvine.  We were hooked and weren’t going to give it up just because we lived in a desert.  In keeping with our new do it yourself mode of living we made this boat from a kit.  Where did we find the time?  As you can see from the unfinished garage housing the finished boat, some of the time was obviously borrowed from our house building.  We ended up owning four different boats in our sailing careers and in many ways Susie Two was the best one.  Susie, the dog we saved from his mother’s spoiled milk and nursed with a bottle, was so dependent that she would never let us go alone so we named the boat after her.  A guy who taught at the college and was a very good sailor sailed with us one time and showed me what the boat could do.  After sailing with him I was no longer afraid of the boat and from then on we had a very good time with it.

So where do you sail in the desert?  In the picture with the boat on the trailer we are at Lake Powell.  In the good old days, as we old farts say, right next to the Bullfrog marina, there was a beach that we called Hobie Beach.  There we could  camp on the beach and launch the boat from there without using the crowded boat ramp.  And after a day of sailing we could just run the boat up the beach and leave it there overnight.  Remembering that makes me wish we had done it many more times.  But Lake Powell was some distance away and there were other reservoirs, Starvation and Scofield, for example, that were much closer.  And toward the end of our stay in Price we discovered Huntington State Park, with its tiny reservoir, just twenty miles down the road.  We never thought about it much because it was so small but after I learned to sail the boat we could have as much fun there as anywhere.  There, too, we could camp and picnic right on the beach.  It was fun.

It apparently happen to every one who owns a boat,  they end up wanting a bigger one.  We wanted one we could sleep on so we could make overnight outings to bigger waters.  At the time there was an established Catalina dealer in Salt Lake who treated us very fairly and sold us this used 22 footer, used but in excellent condition and completely equipped.  It was a fine boat.  We bought it in 1982 and arranged for a slip at Utah Lake State Park at the beautiful new marina they had built there.  We had one perfect season there and then came the floods.  The same heavy rains and snow that closed the highway from Salt Lake to Price destroyed the marina and the state never replaced it.  So we ended up with a twenty two foot boat in the driveway. The next season we put it in dry storage at Lake Powell and had to rig it and launch it every time we wanted to sail.  Needless to say, we didn’t use it nearly as much.  We took both boats to Park City and got a slip at Bear Lake for the Catalina and finally sold it to folks who would let us borrow it as part of the deal.  We also sold the kit-made boat and bought and Olympic class racing boat.  That was a mistake, it was hard to rig and sail.  Maun and I could sail it just fine but every time we took friends we ended up in the cold water.

Sailing, skiing and tennis don’t really have very much to do with living in the beautiful desert on the edge of Canyonlands.  True enough, but that is not all we did and it was the desert we enjoyed most of all.

This picture of our friends Bruce and Carol was taken in the middle of winter during a drought year.  You can see the snow on the La Sal mountains but it is warm and dry in the park.  Our friends came to see us for a ski vacation but we ended up hiking instead.  Amazingly, toward the end of their stay it snowed a little bit and we ended up skiing in Park City on twenty two inches of snow.

Arches was our playground.  Moab was in Maun’s district and whenever she had business there I would tag along and visit the park.

More desert fun.  We made a canoe trip with our friends Fred and Barbara down the Green River through Labyrinth Canyon to the takeout in Mineral Canyon not far from Moab.  We spend three days on the river in beautiful scenery.  Again we are talking about the good old days as now one must wait in line for a permit to make the same trip.  If you look closely at our canoe you will see that it is full of dents from an earlier trip Maun and I made down the Price River.  We got carried away and went farther than we had scouted and crashed into massive boulders, wrecking the canoe and dumping us into the cold river.  Again Susie the dog was with us and she ended up way downstream from us and on the other side of the river.  She was frantic and this time it was good that she always wanted to be near us as it didn’t take much to coax her to swim across the river.  We took the canoe to the body shop where they did a pretty good job of pounding out the dents.

Fred and Barb came to Price with the oil crisis when the big oil companies bought the coal mines.  Barb is a a qualified social worker and Maun hired her soon after their arrival.  Fred worked for Atlantic Richfield, the company that  bought the mom and pop mine where we got our coal.  We couldn’t help but tease him when he told us that he was the safety training officer.  “Oh,” we said, “one of those jobs Mrs. Swisher used to do.”  Even  with our teasing we became good friends and as chance would have it, we are colleagues with Fred at Deer Valley.  It was on this camping trip that Fred taught us to cook  over an open fire rather than using a camp stove.

Backpacking was totally new to us.  This is in Horseshoe Canyon, a side canyon of the Green River with the cactus in full bloom  Maun made her pack, again from a Frostline Kit

Makes you wonder why we ever left.  In some ways we didn’t.  The adventuresome way of life we developed in Price has stayed with us.  The adventures have changed but the spirit is the same.