Geog regional essay

Joy Prior
February 16, 2011
Geog 120H
Section 001
Regional Essay
Spanish Fork Utah is a town just south of Provo were there are moun’s, sum hun’ing, and warshing in the creak. It is one of those small towns on the frontier of suburbia; the north half is filled with multicolored brick Mormon churches. In town the streets are organized in precise squares. Most of the neighborhoods have open front lawns and white back yard fences. The south half of town is square fields of alphalpha, irrigation ditches, and wooden hay barns. When the Rocky Mountains are filled with powder snow the herds of Elk come down from the jagged ice rocks and wonder through the barren fields. Although, apart of the Mormon Valley region these stretches of fields nestled along the Wastach Front are distinguish unique.
Unlike the rest of the town, the paved roads used to be dirt roads and they are thinner and wonder more than the cities. There are no sidewalks, instead each of the long stretches of assault are lined with weeds, white cattle fences, and rock driveways. Every Saturday there are runners sweating in new jackets and white shoes training for a marathon running past the locals in Levi jeans and brown coats hauling hay bales. Most people drive large trucks with pitchforks bouncing in the back, but on Sunday afternoons minivans filled with grandchildren drive by on their way to family dinners.
Instead of cookie cutter houses the homes are clustered together, were the edge of one farm ends and another one begins. In all of these clusters there a house that stands as a monument for the generation that moved back to the family farm: a remolded log cabin, a paneled Victorian, a square brown bricked, a pastel stucco, and a modern red brick house. All of them have panel windows and a smoke coming from the fireplace. In between these clusters of houses are fields of corn, hay, and horses on dirt so hard it is more like a breakable rock. At the end of the fields there are looming spray irrigation pipes.
There is a greater chance for a dinning table to have been a neighbors than for it to have come from IKEA. The living rooms have cotton flower printed couches and along the hallways are family pictures hung next to a framed edition of the Family Proclamation to the World. All of the houses have large dinning rooms with oak chairs, and in the closets there are plastic folding chairs for visitors. The bedrooms have polished bunk beds and instead of Lightning McQueen sheets the beds are covered in hunting, John Deer Tractor, or plaid. Each dinning room table has a plastic flower center piece and a homemade table runner. The large lawns take half an afternoon to mow with a ridding lawn mower and in the summer tangled haired children bounce on tramplings waving at the passing cars.
At night there are not even street lamps illuminating the empty roads, and from the dark porches the city lights of Utah Valley seem like a bubble of hazy glowing smog. The stars seem like freckle across the sky. When the sunrises the black shadows creep back towards the rocky mountains; the sun beams reveal grey bearded and plump women hunched over vegetable gardens.
In Utah Valley, a place torn between agriculture and suburban development the Southern fields of Spanish Fork seem like a relic for what Utah “used” to be. In a few hours the one stop light will have the usual morning traffic: the drivers from Woodland hills going to work in the Salt Lake, and Provo area. Someone might consider this region a look into the past, but before most of us are eating breakfast a pair of dusty boots next to the screen door reminds us that these open fields are alive as much today as they were fifty years ago.