Children of the Forest
by Abi Newhouse
In Salt Lake City, I climbed a parking garage in the dark. One that swirls, teenagers would bring their longboards and ride down the ramp. Industrial lights lit the concrete to an unsettling yellow, and I watched my friends’ shadows stretch and shrink as we went on foot the opposite direction, passing the longboarders as they rolled down. We wore light jackets because when the sun sets in a cold desert, the heat fades like an oven unplugged. At the top of the parking garage, all of us breathing heavily, we looked out over the city’s grid-like streets, the pioneer-era building façades, the Walker Center’s neon sign blinking red to blue.
“Children of the forest,” my friend Jack called out. “I love my life.”
Earlier that night, Jack had siphoned gas from his lawn mower to his ’72 Chevelle so he could drive us into the city. He was high, running in circles and leaning too far off the fence at the edge of the garage. He smelled like a gas station in deep summer when he stumbled into me, laughing. The rest of us were stone cold sober, like good Mormon kids, watching him like a television show. But we had learned—we had to learn—how to meet someone at their substance-induced level to feel like we were in on the joke. So, we put on a show with him, stumbling around, laughing and testing the limits of our bodies—running from one end of the roof to the other, flipping off railings, catching each other so we wouldn’t fall.
To the east, mountains. To the west, train tracks. Growing up, we were cradled in the valley; we could venture either north or south on I-15, a straight and narrow path through the Utah desert. So, we put ourselves in the peripheries, the hiding spots the landscape offered us. Here, on the top of a random parking garage in Salt Lake City, no one but God was watching us. And even He was a sort of father figure; disappointed, maybe, but laughing with us, too. No matter where we looked from any vantage point, one of our holy, white temples called us back home.
With friends on the mountain, I felt the closest to myself. Teenagehood was a paradox for me: I sought to belong and also to be wholly original. I felt surveilled by church leaders and parents and bosses and teachers and God, and I also craved their approval at every turn. I hated unsolicited advice but had real trouble making a decision of any kind. In the mountains, not only was I separated from my everyday life, but I was also with people who understood my paradoxical existence—not that we had the words to talk about it at the time. Anywhere could be ours. Even on popular hiking trails, we could be on our own for miles at a time, wandering who knows where, away from who knows what.
My friends and I found these spaces wherever we could. There was Farmington Pond, a basin surrounded by trees, the water flowing from mountain runoff. There were the parking garages deep in the city. There were wetlands west of the train tracks. We set up camp on the edges of the mountain slopes, sitting on rocks and logs that surrounded fires made by the boys. We sat around so many fires, weekend after weekend, looking out at the Salt Lake Valley. Past hundreds of stop lights blinking from green to yellow to red, the Salt Lake looked like a mirage during sunsets. There, the four of us—Jack, Ethan, Lydia, and me—talked about anything except school, work, and most importantly, church.
I remember once lying on top of Ethan’s jeep with Jack, looking at the stars. He kept pushing me to the edge of the roof and then pulling me back on. This was done with complete reverence, neither of us laughing, and neither of us fearing. We tried to invoke rebellion to our extremely guarded lives—some in more obvious ways, like Jack with his weed, which was supposed to be off limits for Mormons. Lydia with her covered-up hickies, Ethan with his paintings and alternative music, me with my infamous derisive attitude towards all things dutiful. The mountains had always been our protectors, these giant walls shielding us from the outside world. Hanging out on top of them put our misfit bodies in a place outside time, outside of our shared reality.
“You’re an honorary bro,” Jack told me. And I liked that. A label. One that put me on the inside of a group I’d never known the right way to access. As a good Mormon girl, I’d be chaste and virtuous, but I wanted to feel wanted, too. I settled, instead, for the tiny sparks of electricity between us as he teased pushing me off the car and pulling me back close to him.
I drove in the darkness, past sleeping houses and into my cul-de-sac, parking in front of our mailbox. I was late. I constantly missed my curfew, and so I was constantly grounded, forced to stay home on some weekends, longing to be outside. I ran across the dewy lawn, clicked open the red front door, and took in the shampoo scent of my home. Down the hall into my parents’ room, where they were already asleep to the sound of my dad’s white noise fan, I gently nudged my mother.
“I’m home,” I said.
She swiped at my face with her sleepy, floppy arm and whispered, “Good.”
My mother once told me she was happiest when my three siblings and I were all asleep, safe in our beds, eyes closed to the world. But I was rarely home—gone to work and school and church activities and friend’s houses—and rarely asleep. The times I remember in my room are lamplit in the dead of night. I stayed up reading fiction and poetry, and then I would guilt myself into reading at least one verse in the Book of Mormon, because I was told it was written by prophets specifically for me, in my era, and so it was important to study. In the early morning hours, when I finally drifted off to sleep, the stories of Jesus faded into moments of my day—friends’ faces, the sound of our feet on rocky dirt paths, the mixture of mirage and sunset.
In the basement, if I opened the curtains, I could only see a small wedge of sky. Our family cats dropped mice in the window well, and the mice would scramble around the perimeter, looking for a way out, rustling dead leaves and stumbling over small pebbles. God was there too, always. I sought for ways to fill this well of longing within me while staring at the sliver of sky—no experience, no pond, no mountain could fill it—and so I tested myself in harmless ways. Screaming into pillows just to see how it felt to let out rage or turning the shower’s temperature up so high that my skin was red all over. Sometimes I put a pillow between my legs, but I didn’t know why. I couldn’t have named my body parts at the time. God was watching all of it, I knew it, and so I couldn’t rationalize in my mind why I did what I did. He knew my thoughts, too. Lydia was less cautious than me; she made out and snuck out with boys all the time. She burned herself with her curling iron on her neck to cover up a hickey—the burn more socially acceptable than evidence of her exploring her sexuality.
Ethan’s room was my room’s opposite; on the second floor of the house, his windows overlooked a quiet tree-lined suburban street. Vinyls covered the walls, his paintings rested on easels all over, and there was a piano in the corner where he’d record music. He slept on one side of his pillow one night, flipped it for the next night, and then washed the pillowcase to start all over. He showered morning and night. I sensed a kinship with him that I could never say out loud—we were the ones in our group who worried most about our purity.
We all piled onto his well-made bed. We had come from the pond, we were cold, and so all four of us crowded together, touching but not touching, a bundle of electric pulses. I wanted to be inside the bundle, to understand who they were, what they wanted, what it was we couldn’t say out loud. Instead, we laughed while watching the glowing stars stuck to the ceiling, flinched when we heard Ethan’s parents walk across the creaky floors downstairs.
Always looking for new places we could claim, we jumped into a sprinkler-water reservoir in the woods. We legend-tripped to find old houses in the canyon that were said to belong to Tim Bundy. We found a stream in a valley in between houses on hills, and we acted like children running around the moonlit grass, swaying on a tire swing hung from one of the trees. We were there for five minutes when we heard a voice: “Time to go.” We looked around, up, down, at the houses lining the slopes, their lit-up windows the only shapes among the black sky. We couldn’t see the source of the voice, and we stood like dumb statues. The voice said, “Now.”
We walked up the hill in silence. I was stewing, wishing to actually claim ownership of these hidden places, wishing no one else knew about them, and that God carved a trail just for me. In my regular life, the consequences were repeated often: do drugs and be forever ruined. Have sex and be forever dirty. Forget church and be forever broken. There was always some voice, external or internal—and often both—telling me what to do. In this valley, I wanted to be unteachable. I don’t know what authority the disconnected voice actually had, but back then any voice from above put me back in my place.
No matter how far we ran, we couldn’t really escape our lives. During senior year, my male friends started to talk more about serving church missions. They were all “preparing,” which meant they were trying to live more responsibly—no more getting accidentally (or for some, purposefully) high. No more getting too close with girls. No more skipping church to sleep in. The boys started existing within two worlds at once: They knew they were preparing, but still wanted to be teenagers, to not be forced to grow up so fast. The girls knew the boys were preparing, so we could judge their every movement. “Time to go,” we all—the church, the parents, the girls—told them. “Now.”
At Farmington Pond, the water was as murky as it was beautiful. The pond was big enough for a dock and a fishing boat, and deep enough for a single rope swing. During drier summers, there was no mountain runoff, so the water sat stagnant in the heat. Rumors said the University of Utah studied three-eyed frogs found in the water, that fish with hundreds of teeth swam in the depths, and that a woman wearing a white dress drowned there and her body could be seen suspended in the currents during a full moon. None of this deterred my friends and I from jumping in, swimming among the murk under the sky, suspended in a space of nothingness. At night, the ripples reflected the stars. If I closed my eyes while floating on my back, I could almost forget I existed at all.
I sat next to Jack on a log and watched Lydia and Ethan swing and splash into the water. He broached the subject, in confidence: “I don’t know if I want to go on a mission.”
I was trained to feel uncomfortable at confessions like this—anything that deviated off the path of a good Mormon life. I asked him questions to keep my opinion out of it, an opinion that was ultimately the church speaking for me. The words “It’s what’s best for you” and “It will be the best two years” and “I won’t marry a boy who isn’t a returned missionary” streamed through my mind like subtitles in a silent movie. I tried to concentrate as he told me he didn’t know if he actually believed in the church; this, the non-belief, was an option I didn’t fully realize could actually be an option at all. I pulled at the hem of my shorts, wishing all at once that they could be shorter and longer—to feel free and to cover myself. I couldn’t hold the dissonance for very long.
“Whatever,” I said. “You’re the same to me no matter what you do.”
I wanted him to go on a mission because I thought he was supposed to go. And I also wanted him to run far away—as far as he could—because I could tell that’s what he wanted. I stood and pulled him up with me. We looked at each other for a beat before smiling and heading to the water.
For me and Lydia, the stakes were different. Missions for girls, at the time, were rare. Instead of leaving at nineteen like the boys, we’d have to wait until we were twenty-one—and in Mormon culture, many women were married before they could even consider a mission. We often joked about who would get married first with other friends at our high school, picking out the prettiest girls as the obvious choices, testing their first names with the boys’ last names. Deep down, I was unsure about my future: I wanted to get married quickly and I also wanted to live alone and work as a writer in a big city. We knew nothing of marriage, only that we were supposed to want it.
Lydia was like the mother of our little group; she had seven siblings, and she watched over the younger ones, driving them to various sports practices and church activities. She often said being a mother was the only thing she ever wanted. When we were away from Jack and Ethan, we could talk about our futures in all seriousness; around the boys, any talk of someday being mothers seemed off limits, even though parenthood was supposed to be our sole purpose and trajectory. I imagined the boys getting bored if we took over, and so I did what an honorary bro was supposed to do: I watched, laughing, as Jack siphoned the gas, his mouth full of toxic sap, even though the mother in me was screaming. I climbed the steep mountain face, my feet slipping against loose gravel, even as I wished to be home reading a book. I egged the boys on as they jumped and flipped and dove even as I wanted to hold them and rock them to sleep.
Lydia felt like my sister, and yet she was also a mystery to me. With her, I laughed harder than with anyone else. When a boyfriend broke up with me, the first thing she said, after grabbing both my shoulders and looking me in the eyes, was “You are strong.” But then, a few times when we were at parties, she said she had to leave early. After one such party, when I drove myself home later that night, I saw her car parked at some boy’s house she had never mentioned spending time with. I let her have her secrets—I didn’t want to pry, and she didn’t owe me anything. But I found myself wondering what she wasn’t saying to me—in what ways she escaped her own confines, too.
One of our favorite haunts, a place we could feel like adults, was at a restaurant called Shogun in Salt Lake City that offered half-price sushi rolls from 11pm to 1am. We stumbled around the city streets and sat seiza-style in the restaurant, taking up space from adults around us in their own booths, drinking their sake and eating their sashimi. We were just like them, we thought, but nothing like them whatsoever. This was Salt Lake City nightlife—a group of people who weren’t Mormon and who probably didn’t want to see Mormon kids in their zone. This was the life I wanted, deep down—to exist in a city, to have a place where I’d be a regular, to be a part of some larger human tapestry. There was no one with babies there. My future had two paths: mother or work. I couldn’t imagine a world in which both were available. “Want” was such a familiar yet foreign word to me. What could I want, when my life was already planned? How could I deviate when I was told the correct choice was specific and right in front of me? I looked at my friends and saw them from an outsiders’ perspective: we were loud and young, and we assumed we lit up whatever place we visited. I was approaching a threshold of adult-like self-awareness, and I started to wonder what I was actually doing there at all.
In church, I sat with all the young women in my congregation. Our teachers told us that often, in the scriptures, when Jesus Christ refers to the mountain, he’s actually referring to the temple. He went to the mountains to pray, and he was transfigured on the mountain, and he fasted in the mountains for forty days, withstanding all of Satan’s attempts to get him to renounce God.
Before our lesson, we had stood to repeat the Young Women’s theme, one that reminded us we were daughters of our Heavenly Father, who loved us, and we loved him. We were supposed to stand as witnesses of God, and to emulate character traits like divine nature and faith and knowledge and virtue. It was like the pledge of allegiance, but about women’s roles, recited to God. I pitched my voice an octave or two higher than the girls around me, because I didn’t like adding to the drone of recitation. Several girls turned around to see where the higher voice was coming from, and I looked around too, feigning ignorance.
I considered Jesus Christ in the mountains. He went to escape the city, but he also went to become closer to God. I didn’t pray while in the wilderness, but maybe I was supposed to. My English teacher from high school wrote an essay I happened upon in a magazine, and he said that for a while, he and his wife would ask each other each Sunday, “Should we go to church church or mountain church?” For them, there was no mixing of church and nature—one was a respite for the other. Eventually, the mountains won out, he wrote. It was where he felt true peace.
I sat back in my metal folding chair. To the right, there was a window of frosted, translucent glass. The light came in, but I couldn’t see out.
We sat with Jack in his Chevelle, and he told us he’d changed his mind; he was going to go on a mission. His dad had given him a priesthood blessing, in which God speaks through him, and the blessing told Jack that his duty was to serve. He was excited about it; the experience had felt profoundly spiritual, something he hadn’t quite felt before. I was proud of him but wanted to change the subject. We were in the mountains—this was where we forget.
“Did you hear someone drowned in the pond last month?” Lydia asked.
I got out of the car and breathed in the mountain air—pine and dirt and sun-soaked breeze. I wanted to build a fire and talk about anything other than death and missions and responsibilities. Jack and Ethan felt like my brothers but also like boys I could love. I opened Jack’s door and pulled at his arm and said, “Don’t go.” He’d be gone for two years, and within that period of time we would only be able to email each other. He could talk to his family twice a year on the phone, once on Mother’s Day and once on Christmas. The end of high school was looming—and we weren’t just losing each other to college and adulthood where we could keep in touch and maybe even go to the same university, we were losing each other to completely different worlds. Ethan was also headed on a mission, Lydia was headed to Snow College in Southern Utah, and I’d go to Utah State in Northern Utah. We were splitting up and we all accepted it because there was no other option.
The periphery was starting to blend into the rest of my world. The barrier of trees at the pond usually blocked out the houses on the other side, but as the seasons went on, I started to see lights shining through. From the mountain benches, I could point out my neighborhood near the train tracks. I was closer to God up in the skies, whether I admitted it or not.
“I have to,” Jack said.
I didn’t know then that in a few months, Jack would meet a girl while driving down I-15 to go to a Utah Jazz game in Salt Lake City. They would catch each other’s eye, and she’d write her phone number on a piece of paper and hold it up to her window. For the rest of senior year, they’d date, and then he’d propose, and they would get married in the fall of the next year. He would be a nineteen-year-old groom. Lydia, Ethan, and I would wait outside the temple—the one we could see from the parking garage in Salt Lake City, where we acted like maniacs running around the concrete—and Jack would hug us and whisper, “I’m married” and we’d stare at each other like we did at the pond, and we’d laugh, because it was finished, there was nothing to say, and he’d turn towards his new life.
I didn’t know then that I would also serve a mission, that the prophet would lower the age requirements so I could leave at nineteen instead of twenty-one. Many of my friends, girls and boys alike, would also disperse across the world—Japan, Bolivia, Ghana, England—and we’d get even more lost in our sacred and noble calling to bring the Truth to the world. We would come back and look at each other, wondering who we were before the mission, who we were during the mission, and who we were now. We couldn’t talk about our experiences—not really—they were shared in that we all followed the same mission rules and schedules, but they were foreign in that how we coped with our individual scenarios would not make sense to anyone but ourselves.
Ethan would come back home and cry over Italian food. He and Lydia had finally dated before his mission, but she wrote to tell him she had married another boy while he was gone. She would finally be a mother. Ethan would also cry about how closed off he thought he was in high school. He would cry about his love for God. Many friends would get married young and have children right away. I would try to look Jack up on various social media sites a decade later and there would be no digital evidence that he ever existed. The smog would cover the mountain tops in a white haze.
Towards the end of high school, I was grounded because I kept coming home many hours after my midnight curfew. My whole family was gone, and it was just me at home. No one would know if I left, and so I did. I drove past Lydia’s house, slowing down to see if she happened to be outside, but she wasn’t. I ended up at the Bountiful temple, and sat in my car in the parking lot, basking in the light of the Lord’s house. The temple was the Mormon church’s ultimate escape from the world—separate from a regular church building, members made sacred promises with God about life and marriage and afterlife inside. I thought maybe this space could mesh all that I wanted, similar to Jesus’ mountain experience: a world above my own, away from regular life, but also still filled with the gospel.
I did feel peace while sitting by the temple looking out over the valley. I’m sure of it. But I could never tell whether it was the mountain air or the temple shine that brought on the feeling. In the waning light, I put on a jacket Jack had left in my car, and I wandered to a canyon trail, climbing up and up, losing myself in the trees, leaving the valley behind me, wishing for my friends and also feeling them slipping away no matter if I was with them or not. I felt desperate, a kind of panic, tripping over roots and grasping at branches, the leaves falling away in my hands. The dusk was deep enough that what was left of the light actually made it harder to see. The path was warped, and purple blue, and the dirt looked like ash.
I drove back home in the dark, my radio blasting music I’d stolen from Ethan. Back in the valley, I got out of my car and stood in the middle of my cul-de-sac and looked up at the stars. I could see my breath in the chilly night air. Cars rushed by on I-15. The steady pulses of things coming and going.
“I hope you’re there,” I said to the sky. And for a beat, there were no cars, a rare break in the stream of traffic. Me and an empty road.
Right before senior year was over, we headed to the pond one last time. It was late spring, and the water had only recently thawed after the winter froze it over.
In the darkness, my friends stripped to their underwear while running across the dock. One fluorescent light lit our pathway, covered in cobwebs and gnat bodies. I kept my shorts and tank top on and followed them into the freezing murk. We brought inner tubes and floated through the starlit ripples. We wouldn’t really see each other that summer because of work and family and relationship obligations. No one knew it would be our last trip to the pond, just the four of us.
They swung from the rope while I watched, cheering on the boys’ slick forms and Lydia’s graceful drops. I realized most of what I knew about my friends is what I’d observed in the details of their lives: Ethan’s fresh pillowcase, Jack’s poster of a car driving towards the horizon, Lydia’s scarred neck. Our words were more elusive, because there was copied and pasted language from the church in every sentence. We piled onto beds, huddled over fires, and swam around each other hoping our physicality could speak for us. Look at me, know me, hold me, stay with me; all communicated in tiny touches. I swung into the water with barely a splash.
The night felt like it had already happened while it was happening. I couldn’t cling to them—we were slipping into the rest of our prescribed lives as if we had no choice in the matter. We treaded water around each other, until I stopped moving my arms. I let my body drop deep into the murk, sinking through the cold currents, until sound was bubbles, and starlight was darkness, and I stayed there, a girl suspended, until I couldn’t stand it—the only way to breathe was to get out.
Abi Newhouse is a writer, editor, and podcast producer based in Washington, D.C. A graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program, her writing can be found in The Rumpus, The American Scholar, and Psaltery & Lyre, among others.
