1 Nephi 4

Our new Mormon neighbors, Elders Johnathon and Richard, have been receiving our letters in their mailbox, and we’ve been receiving theirs. (It’s because the word “Elder” resembles our last name.)

We continue to be on excellent terms with these missionaries. Elder Johnathon invited me to be his Facebook friend. Most of his photos are from high school, which he recently completed. He appears to have been a member of a highly successful dance team.

I’ve now read several chapters of the first book of Nephi. My favorite so far is chapter 4, in which Nephi decapitates Laban, who is lying drunkenly on the ground. Nephi then dresses in Laban’s garments, bluffs his way into Laban’s treasury, and carries away some brass plates upon which the Lord’s commandments are engraved. However, Nephi’s own brothers, Laman, Lemuel, and Sam, fail to recognize him because he is wearing Laban’s clothes.

The narrative is rapid and suspenseful, and one gets used to the linguistic quirks.

I’ve also learned, from the introduction to my “reader’s edition,” that these quirks are entirely attributable to Joseph Smith. Mormons regard his translations as fallible. In this respect, the Book of Mormon differs from, say, the Quran, whose every Arabic word is presumed to be Allah’s own.

When I first met Johnathon and Richard, I told them that although I’d be willing to read the Book of Mormon with them, I was unlikely to ever become a Latter-Day Saint, and I didn’t want to waste their time. “That’s all right,” Johnathon told me. “Our goal is for you to grow closer to Christ.”

I thought that was a pretty good answer.

I-15; Bryce Canyon; Hatch; Orderville; Zion

Here’s our first photo of Salt Lake City, taken near to the airport (we’d just gotten our rental car):

We headed southward on I-15. As she drove, Karin marveled at the scenery. First we passed snow-capped mountains which loomed over suburban sprawl (office parks; strip malls; gun shops; for-profit universities). Before long, the constructed things gave way to lush, green valleys with creeks and cattle in them. The mountains turned redder and smaller.

After some two hundred miles, we left the interstate and turned eastward, in the direction of Bryce Canyon National Park. The going was slower, and the hills rested nearer to the road.

Then came tourist town after tourist town, motel after motel. Bryce Canyon itself was swarming with tourists, many of them from such places as the Netherlands and Japan. Nearly all of these svelte persons were wearing hiking gear. With them, we rode shuttle buses to the vistas.

Proof that we were at Bryce Canyon:

Proof that we were at Bryce Canyon together:

(Karin thinks this picture is very funny.)

Worn out from riding the shuttle buses, we drove to the little town of Hatch, where we’d reserved our motel room. At first we had trouble finding the motel. We drove up and down what seemed to be Hatch’s only street. Karin pulled into a gas station to collect her wits.

I looked across the street. “That building is our motel,” I said.

This, too, was very funny to Karin. She laughed and laughed.

“It’ll be a fine motel,” I said.

Later, when we dined at the steakhouse there, we decided that it was a fine motel.

The next morning I made sure to photograph the motel:

And the carpet in our room:

Which I wouldn’t mind installing in my own house some day.

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The route between the town of Hatch and Zion National Park was perhaps the loveliest route of the whole trip. Much of it seemed to be permanently clouded over.

We stopped in the town of Orderville to buy supplies, and I picked up a free Spanish translation of the Book of Mormon. “It should be easier to read this version than to read the English version,” I told myself (Joseph Smith was no great prose stylist). The phrase And it came to pass mercifully was rendered in Spanish sometimes as Y sucedió, sometimes as Y ocurrió.

Also available: translations into Dutch, into Italian, into what may have been Bengali.

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Zion is a park for fatties. You can go through all of it in a car. (From what I could tell, there were more cars inside of Zion than anywhere else in Utah.) At Zion you needn’t pretend to be an outdoorsman: lots of people dress in regular clothes.

Karin & I performed a single hike, which wasn’t terribly strenuous. It took us to this vista:

Again, here’s proof that we were there together:

Much of the park resembled the scenery in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Next blog entry: our return to Salt Lake City. But by the time I publish it we’ll have arrived back in South Bend.