Nevada By Way of Provo

I recently came to a conclusion while driving through Nevada with some friends for the Thanksgiving break, which was that I think I hate Nevada. Maybe this is unfair to you, a reader with a deep and personal attachment to Nevada. Maybe you grew up there and really like it. That’s great—but I simply can’t fathom why. It’s a state my instincts tell me is built on the fear of the open and unknown, and any city built there is this sort of golden, glittery monument to nothing, all casinos and sin and vice and nothing interesting. (What a prude, amirite?) Even the gas stations feel the need to testify their Nevada-ness, each one containing a small casino, filled with slots ready to claim their next victim, who always seems to be a sixty-something-year-old passerby who just can’t put a cigarette down for five seconds. All of this left me with a sense of dread on the drive from Provo out to the San Francisco Bay Area, one that I couldn’t quite shake off, either there or back. I think, though, the question that was haunting me more than anything was why I felt such a visceral reaction. Nevada means nothing to me—why am I so interested in it, or any location at all, as a place of right and wrong, good or bad? Has my time in Provo changed me in some way to be a judgmental person, a way that I don’t particularly want to be changed?

I’m very drawn to the story of the Sacred Grove and the First Vision these days. The story of a young man praying, and that being the focal point for the way so many lives are lived, is compelling, if perhaps a little bit egotistical on my part. More so than that, though, I’m really drawn to the idea of the place itself being holy. I find myself imagining Joseph Smith thinking back on it years down the line and wondering how he thought of that place, what it meant to him when he no longer was a part of it. That grove of trees is nothing assuming, as far as I remember it from my trip up there at the ripe age of something close to ten. (I was far more concerned with the drive up there and making sure that we didn’t have to watch the Strawberry Shortcake DVD, a fight I inevitably lost.) The only reason my siblings and I had any idea anything we saw was holy was because we were told it was holy by Mom and Dad, who made sure on the drive down that we would be reverent when we walked through. I still find myself thinking about it, ten or some odd years later, even if there wasn’t anything stimulating there for pre-teen me to distract myself and engage with. I think that’s largely because I’ve grown to appreciate the idea of that kind of place being holy. It was quiet, and that was important. It was outside, and that was important. And it was there for the person who needed it, and that was most important of all. 

By this line of thinking, maybe there is sanctity in the places I’ve lived in throughout an Air Force childhood, and someone else could see it if they stepped into my shoes. Maybe the little suburb of Tampa, Florida, that I was born in, the one that constantly felt like it might fall apart at any moment from a hurricane wind, has that same divinity that the grove did. Maybe someone else could feel God giving them a purpose in life in Manassas Park, Virginia, in that same strip mall where I first learned Tae Kwon Do dumbed down for a seven year old.  And yet, I don’t feel that sacred pull about those places, even if I love them dearly. The sacredness of the grove feels like it comes almost from a sense of voyeurism, of looking into someone else’s life a long time ago and seeing it as quaint and charming, so different from the hustle and bustle of right here, right now. These places, the Manassas Parks, the Tampas, are too here and now (or really too here and 2000’s), too entrenched in me and the way that I am, against my own will. In the same way I hate Nevada, I love the grove, even without a real connection to them like some of these other places. I can’t blame this sort of lack of connection to Florida or to Manassas or Ohio on my Air Force–brat childhood. If Joseph Smith could move at the age of eleven and still end up exactly in the place he needed to be, why couldn’t I find this same potential in the places I lived in?

And maybe therein lies the issue, that I’m viewing places as things to be used, to have a purpose that is fulfilled by people, rather than to just exist as God’s creation. I think the places I’ve lived that I love the most are the places where I’ve let the place change me, rather than me trying to do something to or for the place. And I’m not just talking about the actual nature and climate of the place, but also the people, the culture, the way the air is charged underneath a summer’s night so that you can practically feel the current of the city rushing up and down the streets, like some sort of grand mechanism, some clock spinning its gears that you, yes, you, get to be a part of. Places like Okinawa, Japan, or Springfield, Virginia, are near and dear to my heart because they are parts of me, parts that I didn’t think I was going to want but yet now I can’t imagine my life without. The hum of 11p.m. traffic right outside DC, or the way you feel like you’re walking through soup when you get off the plane in Naha, those are parts of me the same way my heart or my liver is, even if they weren’t always. These places had to change me to get me to be the person who could live and be alive there, and hopefully that change is for the better.

This all brings me back to Provo, a place I never thought I’d live in. On the day before I started band camp at BYU, I attended a devotional especially for new students, where our band director told us to let this place change you, and not to try to change it. I burst out crying and told my parents immediately that I had made a terrible mistake and needed to go back home, where I would fill out applications for different schools, ones that didn’t feel the need to turn me into some cookie cutter, color-by-numbers Mormon. It was just too much for someone who didn’t want to come here in the first place, who was following a spiritual prompting he hopefully believed in and an aversion to spending money. My parents, wise sages that they are, told me to give it a semester, to not even worry about changing, but to just try being a person who lived in Utah, and then reevaluate. And funnily enough, that director was right, though maybe not in the ways that he thought he was. Provo has changed me, though not into being someone who doesn’t try to make change. Being in an environment surrounded by so many people who didn’t grow up around the world or who didn’t fight with their parents about feeling like the only Democrat at church, and yet still have these common threads of religion and of culture is something that’s been freeing. Whether the friends I make are the most dyed-in-the-wool, temple-going members of my faith or never want anything to do with the Church again, we have something in common, which is that shared culture and heritage, something I’ve never felt before. Living here has made me want to be a more spiritual person and less religious at times, and on other days, the exact opposite. It’s connected me to people I never wanted to see again and brought friends into my life I never would have guessed I would have. And it’s brought me closer to God, whether that was through church, through class, or through frequent hikes up Rock Canyon. I’m more myself because of this silly little contradictory town, folding in and out on itself. Provo is incredibly sacred, at least to me, and I’m starting to think that if I think so, that’s enough.

So to answer my question from the beginning, I think I hate Nevada, or at least was morbidly fascinated by it, because among other things, I haven’t known it yet or let it change me yet. Sure, those reasons I listed off are real factors to hate a place, but maybe there would be something there for me in Nevada, if I let there be. I don’t think I’m ready for that, though, and I might never need to be. Right now, I’m working on breathing in Provo and letting it flow in and out of me. I’ve changed a lot since I first got here, and hopefully I’ll get to change some more, to be the person this place needs me to be, which feels like the right thing to do. Really, I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s holy to live somewhere and be alive there. I highly recommend it.