Panguitch, UT

I am eating breakfast in a diner in Panguitch, Utah.  The booth cushion sinks unevenly under my weight.  Four placemats each depicting a map of southern Utah are arrayed on the table along with an arsenal of sauces and sweeteners.  A hefty waitress with a graying ponytail is making jokes about how empty the place is.  Booths along the window offer views of the road and the gas station across the street.  A few seats in front of me and to my left is a bar with backless stools.  It is not a bar for drifters to lurk or for friends to share a drink.  It is a bar suited for locals who order the usual and read the newspaper and drink coffee that is poured without a word from the waitstaff.  This is a place for hardened routines.

While the waitress converses with the only other guest in the restaurant, I wonder how she makes enough money to pay her rent.  Living here must not be expensive, and I don’t feel I need to ask around to verify this.  If rent was steep, then nobody would live here.

“When do you leave?” the waitress asks the other diner.

“Saturday,” he says.

“You’ll have the nice waitress then,” she says and then announces her work schedule before revealing her coworker’s past.

This other waitress who is not present used to live in Phoenix but moved here years ago with her husband.  They raised a daughter who went to school around here.  She divorced her husband but stayed in the area to be with her daughter.

“Panguitch was a culture shock for her at first,” the waitress says.  “It’s a culture shock for anybody.”

The other diner laughs out of politeness and a lack of response.

“This place is so backwards you ought to set your clocks back a hundred years,” she says.

The other diner makes a joke about daylight’s savings, pays his bill and heads toward the exit.

“Have fun at Bryce,” the waitress says.

The bell rings as the door opens and the cold wind sweeps into the foyer.  The diner leaves, and a trio of older men enter.  They sit in a booth to the left of me.  I can see a white-haired man wearing a camouflage vest.  Another man is wearing a cowboy hat, and he says he’s buying.  I cannot see the third man without craning my neck, so I do not look over my shoulder because I already feel out of place. The waitress calls them kids when she takes their order.  She recedes into the kitchen, and I hear her yell out an abbreviated order to the cook. 

The man in the cowboy hat pulls out his smart phone and says, “I killed him up there on that rock.”

“Well, I’ll be darned,” says the white-haired man.

He plays a video on his phone, and I can hear accented voices and the wind blowing and somebody mentioning a good kill. They were hunting deer.  The man in the cowboy hat plays the video again and then puts his phone away.

“Boy, your photography skills sure are gettin’ better,” the white-haired man says.  

“I always got the thing on me.”

In this backwards town where you could set your clocks back a hundred years, here sit three men sharing a kill filmed on a smart phone.  Although this town only has one stop-light, it is still tethered to the vast network of bustling places whose people often move so quickly they don’t consider the existence of towns like Panguitch. Every town starts out this small until enough people like it so that others want it, too.  Some were born here and know no other life.  They like the quiet in the winter when the snows fall into the orange canyons and cover the mountaintops. Others end up here accidentally and find obligations to stay despite their desire to leave.

I sip my mediocre coffee and watch the diner fill up with locals and travelers. A couple ventures in, and the man says he doesn’t need to see the menu.  After he asks the waitress for an order of pancakes, he greets another man sitting on a barstool, and they talk about fishing holes they used as kids. 

A European couple sits in the booth in front of me.  The woman seems tentative to touch anything as though it will poison her.  The man orders two grilled cheese sandwiches with an accent I cannot place. It is clear that the woman would rather be somewhere else, but there is nowhere else to go for miles at this time of day.  She sits here reluctantly.

A fat man waddles past me as the waitress drops off the cheese sandwiches for the Europeans.

“If my wife doesn’t pay for the bill,” he says to the waitress, “make her wash the dishes.”

The waitress laughs and says she’ll be sure to do that.  The European couple eats quickly, and the man places a fifty dollar bill on top of his check.  A Hispanic family wearing burnt-orange Texas gear take up two big tables in the back, and now the waitress is busy.  The European says he is ready to pay.

“I’ll be with you in just a moment,” the waitress says from behind the bar.  She is brewing another pot of coffee while eating and talking casually to a man I assume is her boss.

“I say what I think,” she says with a mouth full of food.

She moves through the dining room while chewing her food and picks up the payment for the Europeans and my credit card as well. She returns with my card and tells me to sign the merchant copy and tells me to have a good day while clearing my plates off the table.  I finish my cup of coffee and the Hemingway novel I had been reading.  I don my coat and head out the door and into the parking lot.

Before I start my car, I screw in my GoPro onto my dashboard mount and film a video while driving through Panguitch.  The town consists of two intersecting roads that feature at least five gas stations, a few motels, a coffeehouse, a burger joint, and an auto repair shop.  I turn left at the single stoplight and pick up speed as I leave the town behind. 

Along the highway flows a creek that glistens silver when the sun strikes the white water trickling through the rocks. The land is dotted with ponderosa pines, and patches of snow are scattered in the grass.  A rusted tractor embedded in the soil is turning into a fossil. I watch as the forested slope gives way to the orange spires of Bryce Canyon.