Last Monday morning I slipped and tumbled down the basement stairs, coming to rest against a bookcase containing some of my earlier writings. While awaiting rescue, I pulled out a handwritten journal from 1969, which includes an account of my visit with Sam Lawrey, the Heber Valley Hermit. Sam is long gone, as is his humble shack–buried deep beneath an earthen dam, behind which the tiny settlement of Keetly and surrounding farm land is submerged beneath Jordanelle Reservoir. Once forested hillsides today sprout multi-million-dollar condos and a high-end ski resort named after the mule deer herd it displaced. The rural road Sam once crossed in order to collect water from the Provo River is now a four-lane divided highway. Odds that an elderly man, or even a displaced deer, could make it across the pavement without getting run over are next to zero.
In other words, things have changed since the day Jim Lind and I paid Sam a visit. What follows is my journal entry regarding that encounter.
10/25/69
Jim Lind and I paid a visit to the reclusive Heber Valley Hermit yesterday, climbing through a barbed wire fence and crossing a rutted meadow in order to reach his humble shack, which was surrounded like a gopher’s burrow with discarded tin cans and junk. We spotted the hermit urinating from his front porch, and it was some time afterward that he spotted us. His first response to our cheerful salutations was muted, though gradually he began to open up.
We learned that he was 81 years old and had owned the property for sixty years, living alone without benefit of electricity or indoor plumbing. I asked if he had a pet.
“No. I used to keep a horse or a dog, but no more. You know, you can’t have even one thing. If you do, then you have to stay home and tend it.”
“Do you go out often?” asked Jim.
“No.”
We complimented the old fellow on his fine head of silver-white hair, with a matching beard that hung nearly to his waist.
“I have to trim it sometimes,” he said, indicating the opening where his mouth was. “Makes it easier to eat.”
We asked about his teeth; i.e., whether he had any.
“Pulled ’em this spring with pliers,” he explained. “They got so they was bitin’ me, so I had to pull ’em out.” He went on to say that while having no teeth makes it harder to chew, it was now easier to spit.
Impressed by his hirsuteness, I remarked that in San Francisco, he might pass for a hippie.
“A what?” asked Sam, cupping one ear.
“A hippie!” I shouted.
“Oh…a nicky.”
Sam had picked up a canvas water bag and we followed as he set out to collect water from the river, which would entail climbing through the barbed wire fence and crossing the highway. He managed the fence well, but nearly lost his footing on some loose roadside gravel.
“You know, nature is funny,” he mused. “None of us can understand it, but were all going down the same road.”
Having determined that Sam was philosophically inclined, we pressed him on the meaning of life as he saw it. He expressed a belief that farming was an essential occupation.
“But what will happen after they flood the valley?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll go live in town, I guess. In a rest home.”
“It won’t be as nice as here,” I said.
“No. I won’t like it.”
Breaking the somber silence that followed, Jim suggested that Sam must know a lot of stories.
“Yes,” answered Sam. “And that’s what they are–stories.”
Getting back to the subject of nutrition, we asked Sam about his diet. He answered that he can eat anything so long as it’s clean. Some things, however, give him “the shits,” he added.
Venturing further, we asked what he thought of processed foods and chemical preservatives.
“No,” he replied. “I don’t like conservatives.”
This being the fall of 1969, we then asked if Sam was aware of the current cyclamate scare.
“What’s that?” asked Sam, cupping one ear.
“It’s a food preservative,” I shouted. When they fed it to lab rats, they got cancer.”
There followed a prolonged silence as Sam struggled to process the magnitude of the issue before offering an opinion.
“Well, I wouldn’t eat anything a rat would eat!”
As I closed the notebook, it occurred to me that I’m now 81 years of age–same Sam was back in the fall of 1969. Should I recover from my recent fall, I’ll most likely be needing a cane to get around. And just like Sam before me, I must face the fact that the world I was born into is rapidly slip-sliding away.
