Coke Newell

Some thoughts about

On the Road to Heaven

 A Bohemian Rhapsody from the New Mormon Trail

by Coke Newell

Zarahemla Books, 2007

            This is a love story, about a girl and a guy and their search for heaven. The guy is me, and the story is mine. The risks of telling it are great.

            You see, where I go with this story is right into the middle of the modern Mormon experience, the intimate realities of a journey into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the world’s fastest growing and most morally conservative faiths. But the course the story follows will surely make a number of people nervous, for I am a convert to the faith and this is a story of change.  

            You have to understand that most stories that end up on purpose in Salt Lake City, Utah, world headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have been stories written by insiders for insiders; stories that started somewhere out in the bad, bad world, where a perpetual path of full-blown faith and honorable enterprise led men and women of perfect virtue to sacrifice home and homeland, status and stability, family and friends in their striving to live worthy of the Kingdom of God.

            Well mine’s kind of like that, except that it starts out in a canvas tipi and wanders through the Panama Red realities of the Colorado hippie heyday and the wooded wonders of Yasgur’s farm on its way to faith and faithfulness. This is not the kind of story that will be found in great quantity in the public annals of Mormonism. Nor in small quantity. Stories like this one “just aren’t talked about” among the Old Guard.

            Or are they?

            When I discovered, investigated, and then came into the Mormon faith as an eighteen-year-old flower child wearing hand-stitched denim moccasins and a weasel-skull necklace, I was walking wounded and worried. I’d been around the block, so to speak. Not that I had intended to go around the block, I just hadn’t known where else to go.

            Raised in a very literary home, if not a religious one, books became my road map and my salvation. Along the way I discovered a few characters in literature who mirrored how I felt and why I was doing it, and the first two were Sal Paradise and Ray Smith. These were the pseudonymous characterizations of author Jack Kerouac, who once described his real-life ramblings as those of “goodhearted kids in pain of soul doing wild things out of desperation.”[1] The specific details of Kerouac’s life would become known to me through his “autobiographical novels”— especially On the Road and The Dharma Bums— the first published the year before I was born and the latter published the same year I was born. When I discovered them, these books had long since inadvertently launched an entire cultural phenomenon, a societal tidal wave known as the “Beatnik” generation, a generation and a culture that would scare the bejeebers out of everyone in America who was never a part of it.

            Yet while Kerouac’s friend John Clellon Holmes would years later admit that Kerouac and his closest associates “seemed to trespass most boundaries, legal and moral,” he would also say that “it was only in the hope of finding a belief on the other side.” And then make this claim: “The specific object of their quest was spiritual.”[2]

            That’s a claim, frankly, that even many devoted Kerouac readers have ignored and the great majority of Kerouac non-readers have outright rejected. Which is only to say, after all, that they simply haven’t walked that road.

            After finding Kerouac, I found others, among them Saul of Tarsus in the Bible and, late in the game, two young men in the Book of Mormon, one named Alma and one named Lamoni. Young men who had made big mistakes, taken improbable, perhaps even impeachable roads to honor, and then found a God who was willing and able to make his own judgments regarding the merits of their case.

            I met each of them in turn and said thank God for God.

            There are Latter-day Saints who can count five, seven, even nine generations in the Church. Most are very fond of telling the story of great-great granddad, who heard Mormon missionaries preach on a street corner in St. Louis in 1837, accepted their message and got his house burned and his milk cow shot for doing so. And who then continued to get plundered and driven all over the Midwest with another 20,000 Latter-day Saints for the next ten years until those who were still alive said to hell with the Land of the Free and headed west, walking 1300 miles in their socks to Mexican territory, the Rocky Mountain Great Basin, where they established Great Salt Lake City and finally found some semblance of refuge. 

            And those are great stories. Amazing stories.

            But they’re not really theirs, and they’re certainly not mine.

            Of the twelve-and-a-half-million Latter-day Saints alive in the year 2007, 71 percent of us are first-generation converts. We honor those early Mormon pioneers and we like those stories from the historic Mormon Trail. Nay, we love those stories— we read them again and again, we read them to our second-generation Mormon kids during Family Home Evening, we recite them from memory and cry every time.

            But they’re not our story, and our story has value. To our kids. To ourselves. To other seekers of faith and meaning. Maybe even to the Church we love, although I have to admit not a small amount of reticence at being one of the few to ever test that particular premise in national publication. Few, at least, since Alma and Lamoni.

            And what is that value? That God can be found, and that personal faith can make for one a better life. A satisfying life. A meaningful life. Which is just my point: some of us didn’t start out perfect. Those who want to read about people who were wrapped in silk and platinum right out of the box will just have to buy a different book.

            So what’s the setup of this story?

            It’s wooded, thankfully.

            I grew up with no religious faith and no religious heritage. I grew up with mountains and lodgepole pine sap running through my veins. My parents’ home at 10,000 feet elevation in central Colorado gave me all the heritage and inspiration I needed. For a while.

            Lonely walks when no cars were in sight up the winding dirt road that climbed from the nearest paved highway to my house— seven miles — gave me plenty of time to think, and plenty of clean air to do it with.  But somewhere along the way I wanted more: I wanted answers.  Was life meaningful? Did I have a purpose? Was there anything beyond the rigors of my sojourn here? And I wanted to do good. I became a vegetarian when I was 14.  I collected aluminum cans along the highways to finance my shoestring journeys by thumb around the back roads of America during my mid-teen years.  Ratty-haired, Lynyrd-Skynyrd Wannabe that I was, I helped little old ladies across the street and contemplated no shame greater than embarrassing my mom in front of one of her friends.

            I set my course by the Tao Te Ching, Black Elk and Ram Dass. Along the way I began piecing together my own personal image of a very puzzling god with chunks of Taoism and Buddhism and Christian Science and Native American thought. Committing myself to a teetotaling Dharma Bum existence, I rejected keggers with friends in the city to a quiet night alone in the old 9 by 14 log cabin two friends and I had discovered and then restored on the ridge leading up to Black Mountain (called Mount Kolob in Mormon Standard Time). The three of us called ourselves, after a popular underground comic of the day, the “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.” There we would read, and walk the woods, and wonder.

            And then there was The Girl.

            Ahhh, the girl. She came in from the snow and she went out with the cold west wind.

            But together, in the meantime, we were bonafide mountain people.  And Mountain People, I have learned through experience, need explaining.

            Mountain people are not your typical country folk. Mountain folk spend a lot more time laying in wood for the winter— felling, dragging, chopping and stacking— than they do stretching their barbed wire or branding their beasts. In fact, mountain people like to cut barbed wire, uproot the fence posts, and let the coyotes have at it. Mountain people don’t have lawns, or street lights.  Or streets.

            Colorado mountain youth in the 70s single-handedly put Celestial Seasonings teas, Mountain High ice cream and Barbara’s Fruit and Nut Muffins on the cultural and economic map.  Those who could were usually bearded. We wore a lot of flowery cloth patches on our overalls. Real Mountain People let the wilderness dictate the shape of their house (our roof had a 6/12 pitch to shed the 400 inches of annual snow, for instance), the lay of their potato patch (ours went around the aspen trees, and would have gone altogether before any trees did), the size of their dog: poodles and Pomeranians being bedtime snacks for bears.

            Mountain people let the land lead, the weather prescribe, the wind entertain. Some, certainly not all, chose to live weeks at a time alone in an old, abandoned USDA beekeeping station at 10,000 feet elevation just to see if we could.  We’d line a rock crevice with pine boughs and spend a couple nights just to see how it went.  We’d put on 85-pound packs and cross-country-ski across the Continental Divide at 13,000 feet against a wind chill factor of minus 130 (that according to the national Ski Patrolman who first saw us coming out of the woods on the upper slopes of Winter Park) primarily because the view was so good from that elevation.  We’d free climb the 170 vertical feet of Colorado’s Ship Rock bare-footed because that was most likely the way some Native American once did it. (One. Once. Maybe.)

It’s just part of the culture, part of the breed, to choose things like solitude.

Altitude.

            Religion.

In a two-week whirlwind pentecost during the Spring of 1976, one of the “brothers” returned to his Christian Science roots, the other took up residence, spiritually and physically, in a 12-foot tipi of his own crafting, and I became a Mormon, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The naive vigor of youth freshly reborn eventually cost me both friendships.

            And The Girl. Ahhh, the girl.

            The traditional story of Mormonism, the one where an estimated 7000 men, women and children lost their lives in the driving, plundering and long Mormon Trail to their remote “Zion” in the Salt Lake Valley of Utah, is an incredible story, a valuable story, an indelible drama seemingly without parallel or precedent in American history or literature. Yet a parallel exists.  It is the contiguous story of the Mormon convert experience; two journeys to the same end.

            Different trails, same reasons.

            I’ve only been down one of them, after all. This is the story of the Trail I walked.

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