Long Journey to Mill Creek

I am very fortunate to live in this wonderful place called Salt Lake City, Utah. But that statement has been years in the making.

Many years ago, my parents picked up my family moved from Utah to California. I still remember when Dad took my younger brother and me and a truckload of furniture to Reedley, California. We found a home, parked the truck at a secure location and then proceeded to hitchhike back to Utah to get the rest of the family for the trip to California. But that is another story. We were now Californians! Swimming pools, movie stars!

I adopted the way of thinking that anywhere but Utah would be a good place to live. California was a great place to grow up and the endless sunshine added to my joy. Where else could you play baseball all year long, float the lazy rivers of the San Joaquin valley and eat the fruit right off the vines and trees. Life was good.

As I prepared to go to college, I again had that anywhere but Utah mentality. I settled on a great little school in Southeastern Idaho. Some might say "That's Utah with a different name" and they might be right, but the name mattered and I enjoyed my two years in the hard winters of the Snake River plains.

Then I was off to see the world. Two years in Hong Kong, another two years in Taiwan and I was finally ready to settle down and get an education that would bring me work. My choices for MBA were UCLA and BYU. That should have been an easy choice. But after following a serious decision making process that has served me well, I turned to the unlikely choice of BYU. Now you have to understand that going to Happy Valley (Utah County) was the ultimate in betraying my life-long pursuit of staying out of Utah. The only reason that I could justify this move was to tell myself that for the next two years I was going to be locked up in a library studying my guts out and it wouldn't really be like I was "living" in Utah. It worked well, I got my degree, found the love of my life, and high-tailed it back to California after two-years.

Then I wandered around a bit more. Some time in California, back to Idaho, to the deep south in Alabama and back to California. And then something strange happened. My company asked me to transfer to Seattle. My wife, whose family all lived in Utah, then asked if it wasn't time to consider a stint in Utah near her family. We had been on the road for 12 years and the kids needed to get to know her family. Counting on that aforementioned decision process, we made the move to Utah. That was 17 years ago.

Why would I write about this journey? Monday was Memorial Day and after a hard day of working in the yard and running errands, we packed a picnic lunch and within five minutes we were lost in the Wasatch mountains building a fire and roasting our favorite cuts of meat. The late spring runoff was gently rushing down a nearby creek and we were completely at peace as we enjoyed a perfect evening barbecue. There may be other places as beautiful and quiet as Mill Creek Canyon on the east side of Salt Lake City, but on this day and at this moment I felt that this was indeed "the right place." That is what Brigham Young said when he came into this valley.

The outside world may not understand what we have here in Utah but the huge number of outsiders, such as myself, that have come for one reason and then found hundreds of other reasons not to leave is amazing.