Married my cousin in Arkansas, married two more when I got to Utah

It just so happened that my visit to Utah's Dixie coincided with PBS's airing of The Mormons and my reading of Under The Banner Of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's enthralling tale of polygamist Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints. During an afternoon thundershower, I found myself with little else to do but drive around the dry, profoundly empty, red-rocked region. After a moment's consideration, curiosity got the best of me: I had to go to Colorado City, Arizona, the border town (with Hildale, Utah) inhabited by thousands of Mormon polygamists.

I'd seen the pictures before, but something told me I had to go. I didn't quite have a handle on it: How big is this place, really? Are people out walking around? Are there businesses open, that I could patronize? If they're not allowed to talk to outsiders, how will they treat me? (Yeah, I know. Live and let live. There are enough polyamorists in San Francisco that I'm not really shocked by Mormon polygamy, although the part of it that resembles institutionalized child molestation is pretty tough to get over.)

So into town I drove, greeted by a little sign announcing Hildale as I approached from the northwest. There's a drugstore, a gas station, and a lube-and-filter place. Some farm equipment, construction equipment, tanks and silos. And the houses are big. Very big. Like, eight-bedroom houses, with small parking lots instead of driveways. It's a town of unusually large houses in a region of unusually large houses. Extended cab pickups and minivans sit in the yards. I cross into Arizona on the main highway, and see that just beyond the gas station is the Merry Wives Cafe. (Coffee? They can't drink coffee here.) And so I turn left, off the drag and into town, with a red pickup on my rear bumper. He turns into the dirt driveway of the first house, and I am now unaccompanied.

It's windy and a little cold with a storm on the way, and no one's out walking in the wide streets. Most of the houses are at least two stories high, have hastily-constructed additions, and are surrounded by wooden fences so you can't see much of what's going on. I turn left on Center Street, and approach a tiny business district, and there they are.

There's a sad little Food Town, with a small parking lot full of large vehicles. Loading groceries and packs of children in and out of their vans are women dressed in nineteenth-century-style ankle-length dresses. All the women and girls look like Melissa Gilbert on Little House On The Prairie; the boys have their shirts tucked into neatly pressed pants. I settle into a parking space before losing my courage. I can't do it. I can't walk into the weird polygamist grocery store, not even to buy a bottle of water and leave. Am I already being watched? Is there some guy in a pickup, eyeing me, packing heat? Shit. Must move.

I turn the car around and pull back into the street. What's across the street? Radio Shack! (I guess polygamists need coaxial cable too, although the community leaders have banned television, newspapers, and other means of contact with the outside world.) There's something that might be a private school or day-care center, a little florist-type business that seems to cater to kids' birthday parties, and an inauspicious pizzeria (five stars!). I make sure to stop completely at all the stop signs, and move back toward the Hildale side.

I see more ankle-length dresses. Three people, possibly including a teenage mom, are riding around on bicycles. A girl crosses my path on horseback. A child of about eight pushes a mower around his family's lawn. Two blocks later, two more equestrians cross my path. I remember to take photos, but can't bring myself to snap shots of them. Not wanting to be seen waving a digital camera around, I inconspicuously snap two poor shots of people's houses. (This guy got some pictures too.) I see a crappy old blue Pontiac Sunbird approach and slow down, and the driver looks me in the eye. (I'm glad I'm not in my gray Honda Civic at this moment.) This is the same car that was behind me on the twenty-mile journey from Hurricane. It's time to go.

Whew. Colorado City creeped me out completely in the roughly ten minutes I spent there. In the eyes of the state, the town is mostly populated by single mothers with out-of-wedlock children. They're all collecting welfare, and sharing the money in something called the United Effort Plan, which owns all the land and is managed by a prophet who assigns and re-assigns wives and children to various men. (Part of the Taliban-like situation in town involves kicking out teenage boys who misbehave, thereby reducing competition for young brides.) Although Krakauer mentions that most people in the town live below the poverty level, it wasn't until I got there that I realized the obvious: The place is a fucking dump. It's a never-ending construction site, with shabby little businesses. The backyards you can see all seem to have rusty little swingsets and rotting toys. Somehow, Colorado City manages to be highly unsightly, despite the majestic cliffs rising behind it.

On the way out of town, I spotted a sign for something called Barlow University. That's the name of a large clan in town (how could they not all be related somehow by now?), which includes the mayor and one of the defendants in the current prosecution of various polygamists/molesters in the town. Right near it was a billboard for Mohave County College, whose north campus is located in Colorado City. But the spirit of the billboard implied something else: Get an education, and find a way out. Hope some of those girls do.