I see in the paper this morning that another local landmark, the old Geneva Steel mill, has fallen in the name of progress.
Now, before you start thinking my unquenchable sense of nostalgia has finally gotten the better of me and caused me to abandon all sense of perspective, let me state for the record that I’m not especially sentimental about decaying old industrial sites. Geneva was ugly when it was in operation, filling the skies of Utah County with orange haze and dumping god-only-knows into Utah Lake, and it was twice as ugly after it ceased operation and commenced to rotting. In addition, it was located in the next valley south of mine, so it’s not like I was seeing it every day and acquiring the affection that comes through constant familiarity. Still, it was familiar, if not intimately so, and its demolition is just one more step in the on-going process that is erasing the landscape I grew up with.

I tend to think of that landscape as the “hand-me-down world,” because I was surrounded as a child by artifacts, buildings, and institutions that were largely unchanged since the 1940s and ’50s. It was as if the entire Wasatch Front — the swath of Utah’s greatest settlement that runs from Provo in the south to Ogden in the north, with Salt Lake in the middle — was preserved in amber for decades, especially in the smaller communities like Riverton, where I grew up. There were newer buildings around, of course, housing developments and convenience stores and strip malls just like anywhere else, but change was slow and, for much of my life, the old outnumbered the new. I lived in an old house on a old street lined with old houses, and so did most of my friends. We went to school — elementary school, at least — in a building that had been used for that purpose for generations. Riverton’s business district — such as it was — included several little one-story brick structures that had gone up around the turn of the century, and the alfalfa fields that interweaved with the town couldn’t have looked much different in the ’70s than they had appeared on the eve of World War II.

I never appreciated this landscape when I was younger. It was boring, I thought, and ugly. I can’t deny that many of the old Riverton buildings I now miss so desperately fit the textbook definition of “blighted.” A lot of them were deserted and boarded up, and the sidewalks around town often glittered with ancient bits of broken glass that lay untouched because no one was around to sweep them up. But it wasn’t just the buildings or the fields that composed my lost world. It was a lot of other things, too, like the fact that my buddy Kurt Stephensen and I could rummage around in his grandfather’s shed and come up with a working shortwave radio set that looked as if it came out of a B-17. Or that a mysterious ancient chain sprouted from the backyard tree where my dad built me a treehouse, no doubt wrapped around the trunk by some previous owner and gradually engulfed as the tree grew. Or that wandering through somebody’s pasture you were as likely to run across the remains of a Model A as to see cow-patties.

I think the reason why I have such an affinity for history is because I used to be immersed in history. All of the old junk that cluttered my hand-me-down world was a tangible link to the past, specifically the past of my grandparents. This is going to sound strange, but the 1940s have never seemed all that far away to me. Looking back now I realize that I felt a sense of continuity with previous generations that I’m not sure exists anymore.

These days, everything is different here in Utah, and for a culture that claims to so revere its heritage, we seem to be in a race to see how quickly we can do away with all the reminders of it. Or at least all the unofficial, unsanctioned, non-museum’d reminders of it. The old landmarks are mostly gone, the fields sub-divided, the junk of the Greatest Generation hauled off to antique stores or the dump. Driving around the valley now, you’d think the entire place had just been constructed in the last decade, probably because much of it has been. Everything is shiny and sharp-edged, with none of the comfortable, worn-in atmosphere that I remember from childhood.

I believe that landscape influences one’s sense of self, and I wonder what the children growing up in this new Utah think and feel about it. Do they identify themselves as part of a long continuum, as I always have? Or are they in some sense isolated in history, tied inexorably to the here and now because they have no way of directly experiencing the past, as I did? Do they see the world around them as temporary and disposable, and do they long for more permanency, or at least a sense of longevity? I wonder. And I feel sorry for them.