Suburbs

The suburbs of Salt Lake freak me out. I imagine how they came to be founded as splinter sects in the dull wilderness: a man or brothers or cousins with many wives in the middle of nowhere, where there existed only the political structure of family. Not an offshoot of cultural richness or even somebody’s Walden, but a churlish packing off to some wasteland in order to exert more power over the land, the women. I imagine the women, digging and sweating and birthing in their flour-sack dresses with raw hands. I think of young girls with hair long enough for a prince to climb, destined to marry some old man not of their choosing, to bear children, yet never to have sweethearts of their own. And now the places are mazes of great, airy houses made of inexpensive materials, dotted every couple of blocks with eerily identical ward houses. There are signs that say “Children at play,” but mostly the houses are silent edifices. These communities grow exponentially and are creeping out of the valleys and up the mountainsides.