In 1994, my family pointed out some injustices that we observed in the congregation that we belonged to – the Allred Group (AUB). Suddenly we found ourselves excommunicated… again… only a few years after having been cut off from the LDS Church. Disillusioned, my parents moved back to Arizona.
Martha and I stayed in Utah, trying to make a go at it by ourselves. We were basically still a newlywed couple with a little baby – Sophie. We found ourselves experiencing the worst bout of bad luck ever. I was working construction, piece meal, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and barely making enough to make ends meet. (I have learned that money is relative.) We were trying to get into a house, but we were having no success everywhere we turned. One house had structural problems. Another had a cloud on the title. After some serious praying, we felt that we needed to move to Arizona.
So in our prayer, we told God, “You need to make this happen. We need money if we are going to move.” That day, our tax return arrived in the mail. We paid all of our bills, loaded as much of our belongings as we could into our Mercury Topaz, and gave away the rest of our belongings and drove to Arizona.
This is where our real venture into United Order began. Martha and I lived in my parents’ house in Mesa, along with my brother and his wife. The day I arrived in Arizona, I found a job hunting for natural gas leaks for the gas company. My dad worked as a social worker. My brother worked in the lab. Every week, when we got paid, the three of us put our paychecks into the proverbial “common pot”. From that pot, we paid all of our bills together, bought our gas and groceries, and if there was anything left, we took care of entertainment, or put it into a surplus fund. (There was rarely anything left.)
We got up every morning at 4AM for prayers. The wives cooked and cleaned together. We ate together. Although there were some drawbacks of being 25 and living with your parents – and there were a few minor disputes among the women about the chores – this was a happy time. We all felt united and that our needs were met.
But there was a general feeling that this lifestyle would work better out of the city and in a more rural setting. Our small neighborhood was nice – mostly Mormon – but we were surrounded by bad neighborhoods with a lot of gang activity. Any given evening, one could step onto the front porch and listen to gunfire coming from nearby neighborhoods. Someone tried to break into our house once, and on another occasion someone stole all of my tools out of my truck.
On the weekends, we would drive around Arizona, looking for land. Prescott, Cottonwood, Flagstaff, Tucson – anywhere outside of the Phoenix area. After one such excursion, my parents found a 40 acre ranchette outside of the Show Low area, in eastern Arizona. I knew this area, because as a Boy Scout, many of our outdoor activities took place here. It was high elevation, pine trees, lakes – and a lot cooler weather than Phoenix. It was a place that you would not soon forget, and I felt good about it.
So one February afternoon, the whole Jessop clan drove up from Phoenix to look at this land. It was located about five miles off of the highway down a bumpy stretch of dirt road. The property was a piece of windy rangeland with only a few juniper trees – a perfect circle of earth surrounded by rolling mountains and a huge expanse of blue sky. The only trace of civilization was the jet contrails high in the sky. It felt safe. I loved it immediately.
We bought the place with cash that the United Order had set aside, and the next project was to put a well on it. My dad asked me to put a stake down where we wanted the well and the tank. I walked around the empty property, and it was the only time I ever “witched” a well. Looking around the sagebrush, I searched until I found a place that “felt” right. We hit water 100 feet before most of our neighbors did, and it was sweet water. Our property sits on top of a lava bed that serves as a natural filtration system, and you can taste it.
My father put his home up for sale, and my brother put his home in Utah on the market. With the proceeds, we purchased two double-wide trailers to set up on our new property. But between the sale of the homes and the set up of the mobile homes there was a period of about two weeks when we were homeless.
In December, 1995, Martha and I again loaded up all of our belongings into our car, along with our two babies and headed into the wilderness. We lived out of a motel, and I drove down the snow-covered dirt every day to oversee the set up of the trailers. We spent Christmas in the motel, and by New Year’s Eve, we were in our new home.
There was no electricity. The nearest power source was over four miles away. Back in Mesa, I was an avid Trekkie. My day finished out regularly with an episode of “The Next Generation”, and suddenly here I was without a TV. Entertainment consisted of reading a book by candlelight in a drafty trailer, hoping the flame would not blow out.
And there was no plumbing. We had a well and water. But no septic tank. The toilet was a toilet seat set on top of a bucket. You would take the contents of the bucket somewhere on the large expanse of the property, dig a hole with a shovel and bury it.
The first day there, I refused to do this. In the mud and muck, I drove my car up the hill and sloshed through the mud until I found a nice juniper tree to do my business. But the car got stuck in the mire, and I had to walk home with the awful clay mud you find here caking to my shoes. The mud froze in the night, and when I finally got my car out the next day I had to chip the mud away from the wheel wells with a chisel and hammer. My next visit to town, the frozen mud caused my wheel bearings to drop and bounce merrily away, leaving me stranded.
And it was cold. We bought propane heaters and set them up in the kitchen, but they barely did the trick. The heat barely reached the bedrooms.
My first night there, the wind swept up over the Mogollon Rim and rushed across the plateau and blasted into the side of our trailer. The walls shook, and Sophie started to cry. She wouldn’t stop, and Martha asked me to go get my father so that we could administer a blessing to her. I stepped out into the cold to walk over to my father’s trailer. The ice crunched beneath my shoes, and the stars – unobsctructed by any city lights – were brighter than any I had ever seen. I looked at my watch and saw that it was midnight – the New Year. As the wind howled over this cold place, I wondered, “What the hell am I doing here?”
In the next installment, I will discuss how I adjusted to life on “The Land”, and how we continued living the United Order there.
Martha and I stayed in Utah, trying to make a go at it by ourselves. We were basically still a newlywed couple with a little baby – Sophie. We found ourselves experiencing the worst bout of bad luck ever. I was working construction, piece meal, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and barely making enough to make ends meet. (I have learned that money is relative.) We were trying to get into a house, but we were having no success everywhere we turned. One house had structural problems. Another had a cloud on the title. After some serious praying, we felt that we needed to move to Arizona.
So in our prayer, we told God, “You need to make this happen. We need money if we are going to move.” That day, our tax return arrived in the mail. We paid all of our bills, loaded as much of our belongings as we could into our Mercury Topaz, and gave away the rest of our belongings and drove to Arizona.
This is where our real venture into United Order began. Martha and I lived in my parents’ house in Mesa, along with my brother and his wife. The day I arrived in Arizona, I found a job hunting for natural gas leaks for the gas company. My dad worked as a social worker. My brother worked in the lab. Every week, when we got paid, the three of us put our paychecks into the proverbial “common pot”. From that pot, we paid all of our bills together, bought our gas and groceries, and if there was anything left, we took care of entertainment, or put it into a surplus fund. (There was rarely anything left.)
We got up every morning at 4AM for prayers. The wives cooked and cleaned together. We ate together. Although there were some drawbacks of being 25 and living with your parents – and there were a few minor disputes among the women about the chores – this was a happy time. We all felt united and that our needs were met.
But there was a general feeling that this lifestyle would work better out of the city and in a more rural setting. Our small neighborhood was nice – mostly Mormon – but we were surrounded by bad neighborhoods with a lot of gang activity. Any given evening, one could step onto the front porch and listen to gunfire coming from nearby neighborhoods. Someone tried to break into our house once, and on another occasion someone stole all of my tools out of my truck.
On the weekends, we would drive around Arizona, looking for land. Prescott, Cottonwood, Flagstaff, Tucson – anywhere outside of the Phoenix area. After one such excursion, my parents found a 40 acre ranchette outside of the Show Low area, in eastern Arizona. I knew this area, because as a Boy Scout, many of our outdoor activities took place here. It was high elevation, pine trees, lakes – and a lot cooler weather than Phoenix. It was a place that you would not soon forget, and I felt good about it.
So one February afternoon, the whole Jessop clan drove up from Phoenix to look at this land. It was located about five miles off of the highway down a bumpy stretch of dirt road. The property was a piece of windy rangeland with only a few juniper trees – a perfect circle of earth surrounded by rolling mountains and a huge expanse of blue sky. The only trace of civilization was the jet contrails high in the sky. It felt safe. I loved it immediately.
We bought the place with cash that the United Order had set aside, and the next project was to put a well on it. My dad asked me to put a stake down where we wanted the well and the tank. I walked around the empty property, and it was the only time I ever “witched” a well. Looking around the sagebrush, I searched until I found a place that “felt” right. We hit water 100 feet before most of our neighbors did, and it was sweet water. Our property sits on top of a lava bed that serves as a natural filtration system, and you can taste it.
My father put his home up for sale, and my brother put his home in Utah on the market. With the proceeds, we purchased two double-wide trailers to set up on our new property. But between the sale of the homes and the set up of the mobile homes there was a period of about two weeks when we were homeless.
In December, 1995, Martha and I again loaded up all of our belongings into our car, along with our two babies and headed into the wilderness. We lived out of a motel, and I drove down the snow-covered dirt every day to oversee the set up of the trailers. We spent Christmas in the motel, and by New Year’s Eve, we were in our new home.
There was no electricity. The nearest power source was over four miles away. Back in Mesa, I was an avid Trekkie. My day finished out regularly with an episode of “The Next Generation”, and suddenly here I was without a TV. Entertainment consisted of reading a book by candlelight in a drafty trailer, hoping the flame would not blow out.
And there was no plumbing. We had a well and water. But no septic tank. The toilet was a toilet seat set on top of a bucket. You would take the contents of the bucket somewhere on the large expanse of the property, dig a hole with a shovel and bury it.
The first day there, I refused to do this. In the mud and muck, I drove my car up the hill and sloshed through the mud until I found a nice juniper tree to do my business. But the car got stuck in the mire, and I had to walk home with the awful clay mud you find here caking to my shoes. The mud froze in the night, and when I finally got my car out the next day I had to chip the mud away from the wheel wells with a chisel and hammer. My next visit to town, the frozen mud caused my wheel bearings to drop and bounce merrily away, leaving me stranded.
And it was cold. We bought propane heaters and set them up in the kitchen, but they barely did the trick. The heat barely reached the bedrooms.
My first night there, the wind swept up over the Mogollon Rim and rushed across the plateau and blasted into the side of our trailer. The walls shook, and Sophie started to cry. She wouldn’t stop, and Martha asked me to go get my father so that we could administer a blessing to her. I stepped out into the cold to walk over to my father’s trailer. The ice crunched beneath my shoes, and the stars – unobsctructed by any city lights – were brighter than any I had ever seen. I looked at my watch and saw that it was midnight – the New Year. As the wind howled over this cold place, I wondered, “What the hell am I doing here?”
In the next installment, I will discuss how I adjusted to life on “The Land”, and how we continued living the United Order there.
2 comments:
You are a character, and very refreshingly honest. I actually liked your part on the polygamy show. I think it was more real-life than most people like to admit of their own families. Keep the posts coming!
Thanks for your comments.
I have had fun & intend to comtinue.
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