There are few exits off I-15 into Springville: one leads you directly into “Art City,” where a stellar Spanish Colonial Revival-style museum houses thousands of treasures by Utah, American, and Russian creators; another, author Michael William Palmer’s exit, features numerous dead-end jobs and an assortment of dead people.

Either exit is worth taking if you’re up for spending an enriching afternoon. This time out, I opted for wordsmithing over brushstrokes and bronze. Utah County is a place where I’ve always felt a stranger in a strange land; Palmer doesn’t do much to alleviate this sensation, but goes quite a way toward explaining it – making that paranoia of feeling the perpetual outsider seem justified.

It’s a shame to reveal the title of Palmer’s challenging yet quietly enjoyable collection of alluringly written essays with words and themes that hit you right in the solar plexus; it sets the book up to be something it is not — Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs is not about Mormonism, though it explains some of the elements. It is, rather, 175 pages of reflections: on having a sense of place and abandoning it; having faith and losing it; having close ties to friends who leave abruptly. And then on leaving. Period.

The author opens his chapter, “7-Eleven Clerk” — and his book — with:

“For the first week and a half after Blake, Jen, Ariel, and Scott drowned in a dark cave on Y mountain [this event actually occurred in August 2005], I spent most of my time staggering around my apartment like a wounded criminal, lying down in the dry bathtub, and going outside only to visit the sealed-over cave or to attend a funeral. I hadn’t gone to work once, nor given an explanation for my absence beyond ‘personal reasons,’ so I was surprised when I went back for my paycheck to find out I still had a job if I wanted it.

I was working the graveyard shift at a low-activity 7-Eleven not far from Utah Lake, and that was where I had been the night Blake died. Because of that, plus the actual shudder I felt in my spine at the thought of refilling the nacho dispenser or pretending to clean the grill, I did not want to go back there. But I had rent to pay and was out of gin and groceries, so I re-took the job.”

This book is, primarily, a coming of age tale told through a series of job descriptions ranging from the late-night “7-Eleven Clerk” refusing demands to sell post-1 a.m. beer;  to lawn mower to call-center “dialer” to knife salesman to vacuum “specialist” cleaning public spaces at Utah Valley State College to (cleverly yet sadly) “7-Eleven Clerk, Again.” In between these gigs – and in bright new chapters —  Palmer is a fumbling boyfriend, cockfighting birdwatcher, eviction processor, and Utah Jazz fan who has taken renowned point guard John Stockton as a childhood idol and tells us why in perhaps too much biographical and game rehashing detail. (The only weak section of the book even to this Jazz aficionado and still I devoured it.)

What works structurally and is oddly enthralling is Palmer’s use of an encyclopedic device to make many of his points (also to introduce his gentle Gentile readers to things that otherwise could go right over their heads). Entries such as:

600 Feet into Granite Mountain, A Vault

The mountain is called granite but the rock is technically quartz monzonite. It looks like granite, though – gray and strong and eternal. The same rock was used to construct the Salt Lake Temple, the spiky, rain-colored building in downtown Salt Lake. Inside the mountain vault is a collection of dates, artifacts, histories, maps, possible converts, never-got-a-chances. The vault is said to hold the largest collection of genealogical records in the world. Millions of rolls of microfilm, digital media, diaries, maps. Records of all the living and the dead and where they came from. All the names and stories, sealed in rock where they can’t be lost.

Or:

1820, Spring of

 According to the official version, this is the origin story: A fourteen-year-old boy, struggling to know which religion was true, walked into a grove of trees near his home and prayed about it. At first he was wrapped in unnatural daytime darkness – but a light shone down and two visages appeared. In the cartoon rendition I watched as a kid, young Joseph Smith had to lift his arm to shield his eyes from the light while he listened to the voice of God. See also Vision, First.

Awfulness

This is the word my mother uses to account for any unpleasant parts of a story – whether personal anecdote or family history. She can use it to refer to large-scale events – divorces, disappearances, children born out of wedlock, drownings; or small-scale ones – disobedience, delinquency, crass language, popular music. See also Notes on My Family’s Pioneer Stories.

Ann Poore

A graduate of the University of Utah, Ann Poore is a freelance writer and editor who spent most of her career at The Salt Lake Tribune. She was the 2018 recipient of the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in the Literary Arts.