“I don’t know how we do it,” I said to Kevin. “But we always seem to find the anarchists.”
It had been only four hours since we’d been dumped outside Salt Lake City’s courthouse by Tim the Weed Farmer, and we were already at Boing House, Salt Lake City’s anarchist commune. I’d only ever been to one in Detroit, but standing outside we could already see the similarities: open doors, painted facade, a garden, and a bunch of semi-dirty white kids hanging around.
There was one huge difference between this place and Fireweed in Detroit, though: free food.
It was a search for free food that had brought us there, actually. My plan of dumpster diving had not really worked yet (I hadn’t really considered the fact that you have to wait for nightfall for grocery stores to dump their food, and the fact that Kevin’s fast metabolism caused him to basically wilt like a dry flower.)
“Wanna head to Whole Foods and eat all their free samples?” I suggested.
“YOU’RE MY FAVORITE PERSON EVER!” said Kevin, exhibiting the first signs of life since he’d found out that corn could be purchased for 35 cents.
Whole Foods, always one-step ahead of me and the other hobo-children, seemed to have prepared for such a contingency, and free food was scarce. The only thing we saw was a gross-looking protein shake (not vegetarian, somehow.) Just when I was about to give up and head for the grapes (which I feel like an informal offering of free samples) we passed by a lady selling protein bars.
Judging by our backpacks and the way we seemed to relish her compacted fruit-and-nut rectangles, the lady asked:
“Are you hitchikers?”
“Yeah!” we answered. “We’re hitchhiking around the country.”
“That’s awesome!” she said. “When did you get here?”
“Just this morning,” said Kevin.
“Got any recommendations for stuff to do?” I asked.
“You should come to the Pride Festival!” said the lady.
One of the stranger things about Salt Lake City that I’d already noticed having been there only a few hours was that when it came to the white population (and SLC is mostly white) there were two main demographics: 1) Incredibly clean-cut Mormons and 2) Incredibly gay gays.
“I had no idea SLC was so gay!” I said.
“We’re one of the gayest cities in the country,” she said with obvious pride. “Less than half the population is Mormon these days, and the rest of us are very liberal. Tonight we’re celebrating the marriage law, right in Temple Square.”
Kevin and I, cut off as we were from the rest of the world, hadn’t yet heard that they’d just passed a law making gay marriage legal throughout the country. I had, however, had time to read the wikipedia page on SLC, so that I knew the city was based off a grid formation with the largest Mormon temple in the world at the very center (right next to the Republican Party headquarters, interestingly enough.)
“No way!” I said. “That’s so great!”
“Do you guys have a place to stay?” she asked.
“We’re just gonna sleep in a park,” said Kevin.
“Well you should check out Boing House, it’s just a few blocks away. I think you’d really fit in there. Tell them Krista sent you. And here, take some samples,” she said, grabbing a fistful of protein bars and handing them to us, practically making me tear up, I was so touched.
So one bookstore later we were there, and yes we fit in (ie. we were dirty, skinny white kids.) We walked through the door, passing a few boxes of food as we did so.
“Is anyone here?” I asked as we walked inside, soon bumping into a tall, shirtless, yoga-eyed man. By “yoga-eyed” I mean one of those people who seems to gaze around them as if life were a mildly interesting, enjoyable dream. He had a slow, serene smile.
We introduced ourselves, and were welcomed into the living room with its huge library of books. And Kevin said what we were both thinking:
“You guys really have your shit together!”
I agreed out loud: we’d both been at anarchist communes before. In the last one I’d been bitten by a dog, stayed in a house where chickens roamed, with bullet holes in the door. My last words uttered at that place had been to a guy named Dr. Bob, saying “Do you know your baby’s playing with a box cutter?” and him replying “Yes!” Don’t get me wrong, it was fantastic, but this place had a noticeably clean, stable vibe: on the walls was plenty of writing and art, but also a sign saying: “This is a sober zone,” which the other commune had most distinctly not been.
Rob, the shirtless dude, smiled.
“It took a long time to get that way. We’ve been here fifteen years. There’s a book on that shelf called “Punk Houses,” and if you look at some of those pictures you’ll see what it used to be like.
Still there remained remnants, pictures of naked guys diving into dumpsters, playing drums.
“So are you guys squatting or what?”
“No, we just get this house for dirt cheap. There’s ten of us, but across the way are squatters. Help yourself to some food, by the way: we have an organization called Food Not Bombs where we dumpster dive for food and hand all of it out. We find so much that there’s plenty for everybody.”
“Do you have any tips for dumpster diving?” I asked.
“We could take you on a run if you’d like,” he said.
“That would be fantastic!”
“Do you have a place to stay? You can crash here: we have plenty of room– there’s no travelers here at the moment so you can take the futon upstairs.”
“That would be great!”
Just then a lady with a septum piercing, dyed red hair and plenty of tats walked in, introducing herself as Andy.
“Would you like a peanut butter chocolate bar?” she asked me.
“I’m in heaven,” I replied, practically swallowing two whole. As I continued gorging on the bars Andy started to talk to Rob about a French film maker who was coming to stay.
“He’s making a documentary on this female train hopper who’s coming here,” she said to Rob. We asked some questions about train hopping (we’d heard from Tim the Weed Farmer that he’d met a train hopper who had met a man with a baseball bat hired by the train owners.)
“It’s apparently beautiful,” said Rob. “Best way to see Wyoming.”
I asked about his recommendations for things to do in SLC.
“You could go on the Temple tour,” said Rob. “It’s run by the Mormons.”
“That would be perfect!” I said. “All I know about Mormons basically comes from Angels in America. But we’ve been seeing Mormons everywhere. All the women are so weirdly beautiful and yet similar looking.”
“Ha, yeah,” he said. “People come out of that tour saying they feel stoned. I remember going on it and getting a whiff of this Mormon lady’s perfume, and just thinking to myself ‘Maybe I should just settle down with a nice, Mormon girl.'”
“That sounds perfect,” I said. “They seem like a weirdly perfect, happy, insular community. Kind of like this.”
He laughed. “Actually, I have a theory about that. I feel like the LDS have caused all of the groups in this city to react in a similar way, forming a similar-but-distinct group to counter them, but getting defined by them at the same time.”
“That’s so interesting,” I said. “Yeah, I guess the LDS is just another intentional community.”
Before going on the tour I handed my phone to Andy– she was going on a dumpster dive later, and wanted to give her number. She wrote her name “Andy (Slime)” in my contacts.
Rob toured us around, and it continued to be weirdly idyllic: obviously safe because there were valuables lying around, brightly colored with art and poetry written on the walls, and strangest of all large amounts of chocolate cake liberally distributed, apparently day-old from Whole Foods. We left light-footed having been freed from our heavy backpacks, and ready to explore the city.
We set off to explore Salt Lake City’s far more famous intentional community, the Church of Latter Day Saints.
this is real this is fiction 