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Show MARCH 1997 The FABULOUS AND AFFORDABLE... View from Moab Moab’‘s Park City Obsession or Adventure Learning for Adults from the Park City University of Utah | Was Happier When I Ate With My Fingers By Jim And so, for better or worse, our two communities are inextricably linked. You are our not-so-distant future. We are your recent past. We are Stiles Ss years ago, I made my one and only trip to Park City. An aspiring real estate broker invited me to join her for a weekend a low-rent Park City with a lot of dust. You are an upscale version of Moab at one of the com- 8-Day Bicycle & Camping to the Grand Canyon ne 300-mile, (Organizational meeting: May1 van-supported trip from Ephraim munity’s most exclusive hotels. I can’t recall the name though I keep thinking it was the Leif Erikson Lodge. I could not understand why a high-rent hotel would be named for a Viking explorer. I-had a lovely dinner, although I still cringe when I remember my date chastising me for using the wrong fork. Trip 17-24 bs the North Rim. June 17-21 Not-for-credit, fee $249. RV Caravan Focus to Cody, Wyoming (Organizational meeting: June 12) on western history in Buffalo Bill's old haunts. I had marginally conquered Not-for-credit, fee $75. ly bewildered at the sight of three. Call the Park City / U of U now for details 645-UofU (8638) or 585-7313 from the Salt Lake area CONTINUING EDUCATION UNIVERSITY Geert OF “Look,” I said, “I live in Moab. We're still eating with our fingers down there. And we like it.” She shook her head. “Just don’t embarrass me any more than you already have.” My date had never looked lovelier. Her eyes sparkled like the champagne. Her smile was as bright and fresh as the mountain air. Later she got a migraine and suggested I find a way to entertain myself without her participation. I spent the rest of the evening wandering from one room of our 4,000-square-foot suite to the next, in UTAH Rivers FLYFISHER SALT LAKE CITY + UTAH search of a television. I found it hidden behind the well-polished oak doors of PATAGONIA 20% THE FINEST OFF IN FLYFISHING the two- forked flatware meal but was absolute- an armoire. No one who pays that kind of money for a room at the Leif Erikson Lodge wants anyone else to know they SALE AND ACTIVE watch TV. They all watch TV. WEAR I left the next morning and never returned to Park City. And yet, here in Moab, we talk about Park City all the time. We are obsessed with Park City. You are part of our mantra: “What the hell is happening here? Another five years and we'll be just like Park Cit)\” SST’s JACKETS $ 195.00 (REG 260.00) SHORTIE FISHING VESTS $79.95(rREG1 15.00) LADIES SWEATERS $66.50 (REG 95.00) RANGE COAT $ 133.0O0(REc 190.00) HEAVY FLANNEL SHIRTS $52.50(REc 70.00) (All Sales Final, Supplies Limited) “You know that new condo develOpment going up by the golf course? escapees from think they've urban found nightmares paradise who on the day they arrive. And then they set out to change the town so it’s more to their liking. The other day I was chatting with one of Moab’s newest arrivals - a refugee from the Bay Area, this time around: “Oh God! We are so glad to be out of there! It was just killing us! The pollution, the crime! We just love the pace down here in Moab. The beauty. The serenity. The simplicity. But my God, you people need a Wal Mart. I had to go all the way to Grand Junction last week, just to buy a garden hose.” “Didn't our hardware store have garden hoses,” I asked. “I wasn’t going to pay those kind of prices,” she sniffed. And so some day, sooner or later, we will get our Wal Mart and cheap garden hose and the local hardware store will be unable to compete and he will close his store and sell his Main Street property to some rich out-of- town investor (probably some guy from Park City) for a million bucks and move to the island of Funafuti and drink Cuba libres for the rest of his life. And the rest of the old Moab population who didn’t own Main Street property will get clerk jobs at Wal Mart. I don’t know, maybe that’s the way things have to be. Maybe, as one of your former residents and now a Moab developer insists, “that’s progress.” For the harried humans that flee their troubled homes in Los Angeles or Oakland or Chicago and arrive on Park City’s or Moab’s doorstep tomorrow, they will, by com- a McDonald’s... it was only a matter of didn’t know what to do with that third time until we got one, too.” “Why don’t these damn people go back to Park City where they came fork. @ from!” Moab’s Canyon Country Zephyr and is not real certain why he is a new regular columnist for The Mountain Times. who owns it? Some guy from Park City” “Well, Park City has ‘Ym so disgusted with Moab, I sold my house to some rich weasel from Park City.” PAGE Our populations increasingly represent parison, think they’ve arrived in Paradise, too. But they'll never know the way it was. And I’m not so sure they’d understand. But I was a lot happier when I Guess 867 E. 900 S., SALT LAKE City, UT 84105 (80 1)521-6424, (800)545-4312 with hotels named after Vikings. But mostly, we are refugee towns. 4 Note: Jim Stiles is publisher of |
