Bob and I had just had a sasquatch leprechaun foot race down at the Rockport Reservoir, he being the large lumbering winner as my short steps could not keep up. Driving home I asked him about a building, was it a pumping station?

He began a dissertation on how it was built, how it worked with the station on the hill, how many pounds of pressure and dollars of energy per year it took to pump that water up from the Greek named Weber River, that flowed by God’s gravity down by his house, up and over 30 miles and 2,000 feet to Park City for the rich folks to consume.

The man is an encyclopedia, with an attitude, a book with steely eyes grown weary divining the crazed intent and dazed progress of of an insensible gaggle of rootless people. We drove through the rock cut to Peoa, a tiny community, and I wondered out loud about the security of the water supply in case of disaster.

The previous day, Sunday, a water operator had called Bob to ask him some questions about valves and pressure in a building that antedated his employment, checking in on the man who antedated the building’s construction. Bob has not only operated pumping stations and filtration plants in three locations on the Wassatch Back, he has spoken with geologists and operated with a number of scientists. He has a mental map—though incomplete and filled with wonder—of the liquid underworld in his family’s second homeland.

“If the power grid fails, Park City is in trouble. Our water sources are gravity fed [snow melt and rain] and artisian. Artisian sources are springs, the water that seeps down from the surface over the years. There is so much pressure, eight pounds per gallon, to force that water up thousands of feet to well up as a spring. There are also under ground rivers and lakes we but barely understand.

We pass a small, shaded lane and he notes my continued curiosity over Woodenshoe Lane, which I have yet to stroll down as his big white Ford F-350 Diesel rumbles around the bend.

“Woodenshoe, where the Dutch settled. People used to settle in ethnic blocks. Up ahead, on the left, is Little Norway, where my family settled, the Norwegian half that is. I recently met one of my cousins, a geneologist from Norway. I took him around and showed them where the Johnson’s first settled, where our grandfather put down his roots. He informed me that I had some relatives I didn’t know about, the Stonebreakers. We were masons, quarry men. The Mormons needed us, our skills, to settle the upper valleys. So they prostiletized to us and those who came to Utah took the name they suggested, Johnson. But some kept Stonebreaker. I’d like to meet some of those folks. This man has a sea going fishing boat he takes to the Arctic Circle every year. He has done well.

The first Mormons were English. They needed the Pace Clan from Appalachia for armed me, to deal with Indians and persecutors. That was my Dad’s side of the family, the Paces, the fighters. Mom’s side, the Johnson’s they lived up on this bench that was called Little Norway. My Grandmother always said that they chose to settle here because it looked more like Norway, the timber, the rock—they were timber men too—than anywhere else in America she had seen, despite this being a thousand miles from the sea. So up here we settled. Most of its sold off—hell and bad times are coming, these billionaires bringing their problems and even their Section Eight welfare people with them. My son and his friends have done well. I tell them that they will have to be the old hands to rebuild after whatever comes.”

Grins harshly.

“My cousin told me, you know, you have relatives in the Orkneys, Iceland. What does that tell you—that our ancestors did not get along with the neighbors!

The truck rumbles east along the bench of Little Norway, the horse farms running two miles flat to the North Hills on our left.

“I’ve learned in this life, not to trust—like you learned it in the city. A lot of people here, they were born when there weren’t ten percent of the population in this valley—they are too trusting. So things will be taken out from under them by the rich newcomers. The rich folks voted a tax to build a fire department when our volunteer department was doing just fine—they have to have the best and can’t do anything for themselves. So we get pinched some more—costs me $480 more a year to appease the rich on that one count. It is ironic, don’t you think, that the people the Mormon’s brought here because they were self sufficient, the rebels and Indian fighters on one hand and the Norwegian masons and timber men on the other hand, that there descendants are being driven from this very land by men who can’t change the oil in their car, apply a wound dressing or even grow a potato? And to these people we are supposed to bow our heads—and we are! That is the sad fact!

The road veers south as we merge right, bringing the South Hills of the five mile wide by 20 mile long, east-west valley in sight ahead and to the right. To the left now, is the towering Uinta Range, that boxes this valley in to the east with a soaring dominance that is sometimes awful. Far to the right, in the west, over the dry shoulders of the South Hills, can be seen the back of the Wasatch Mountains that tower over the Great Salt Lake. Way down there, at about 3,000 feet, in the Great Basin, in the lowland Bob despises, English Mormons from new England, Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley settled. To serve as a buffer against the wild mountain tribes, harvest it’s timber and mine it’s minerals, slaughter its buffalo and elk and run dairy herds, families from Norway and Tennessee were recruited to provide these sustaining frontier needs as the lot fled from America. America caught up quickly.

Now, one looks to the west and sees mountains scared brown in summer with the ski slopes of the sterile rich. But, further south, one can still glimpse Tipanogas, the mountain shaped like a woman lying down to die in grief. The mountains still remain, and the families of the Stonebreakers, timber men, miners, dairy men and hay farmers continue to breed in that lisping shadow.

After we pull in to the driveway, Bob’s youngest grandson visits the house; a towering 6 feet 4 inches with blond hair and blue eyes, smiling as he declares softly, I won my lunch today, wrestled [name forgotten] for it.”

His grandmother, instead of admonishing him over violence or gambling, asked, “Did you pin him?”

“Yes Grandma—and lunch tasted good!] smiling softly. This 17 year old already works as a mechanic as he finished high school.

Shaking my hand and towering in the doorway, the young man looks over me to his Grandfather and smiled wryly, “I drew and Elk Tag.” Even there, in the living room as grandma recovers from foot surgery and Grandpa ices his artificial knee in his recliner, plans were discussed for hauling the elk off whatever mountain it is taken on, with three generations lending varied hands.

Bob grins a he winces in pain, “You see, James, why we stayed—though the winters are a bitch!”