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Farethewell from Olympia in the Mountains (long!)



Dear List,

Amazingly enough, some have asked me for a last report from
Olympia-in-the-Mountains (a play on the Mormon description of
Salt Lake as "Zion In the Mountains"). So here it is.  It's long so if
you have better things to do stop now and hastily hit the delete
key; otherwise, read on.

I remember the first time I went to New York, in 1985.
For someone who was raised in small-town New Mexico
and who had never been east of Denver, it was pretty
intimidating.  We drove across country and left our truck
in D.C., then rode the train to New York.  As we
approached some big tunnel, you could see the city in the
distance, then the train dropped under the river.  I
remember the feeling: dry mouth, twisted gut, adrenalin
rush.  I no sooner thought "When had I felt this before?" than I
recognized it: At the top of a dozen big rapids: Warm Springs, Big
Drop II, Lava Falls.  It was the same feeling, a sudden rush of
apprehension followed by a sure knowledge that you put yourself in
this position so you might as well go with it.  But then, after a
few days wandering around gawking, it was suddenly time to leave
and I didn't want to go!  I ve always felt the same way visiting L.A.;
even as I breathe a sigh of real relief and my foot reflexively
mashes onto the gas when I see that I-15 North sign, at the back
of my mind is a twinge of regret for the places I didn t have time to
see.

The Olympics were the same.  Before, for years before, it was all
we heard about; and as it got closer I felt more apprehension,
especially after Sept. 11.  I felt resentful of these insecure people
who insisted on inviting the world to my home so they could prove
that Salt Lake was really a grown up place after all, I felt
intimidated by the massive security and inconvenienced
by the barriers and closed roads.  But once they got
here, and I started mingling with all the people from all
over the world, I had a good time and was sorry to see
the flame go out; I shared the general sigh that went up
when the IOC president said "These games are closed."
You definitely had a sense of being in the middle of
something big, like a natural disaster or other life-
changing event.  My life didn't change, but some
people's lives did; the Canadian figure skaters, the
Korean skater, the German/Spanish cross-country skier;
Sarah Hughes, the little Swiss Harry Potter lookalike.
And others not so famous: the staff, the volunteers, the
administrators; by Roy's Law of Historical Inevitability at
least some of them came out of this totally changed from
what they were when they went in.  Some people got
married at the village, some fell in love, some found new
jobs.   So being in the vortex of that was a definite rush,
like running those big rapids.

The last week or so of the games were pretty quiet for
me; we'd seen most of what there was to see downtown
in the way of attractions and I've never been one to
mingle in crowds just to mingle in crowds.  There were
places I would have liked to go, but it's tough to hang out
in a bar or wander around downtown in the cold until all
hours  when you have a couple of kids you are
responsible for; and some of the places I refused to go
to because they charged too much.  We hit a fair
percentage of the free attractions, though.   I did finally
get to go up to Park City with my wife, when she had one
of her rare days off from her  volunteer duties.  We had
breakfast with friends from out of town (another benefit
of the Olympics; people you hadn't seen for a while
returned to town so you got to visit with them) and then
drove up to the huge, muddy park-n-ride on US40.  It
was funny for me, as I've taken that turn off I-80 a million
times to go out to Vernal and go on the river; this was
the first time I took it to take a shuttle bus to an Olympic
party.  But the shuttle busses worked perfectly--as they
did all through the Olympics, one of the real triumphs of
planning and management--and we got up there easily.
It was like the annual summer arts festival, only bigger
and colder, and this time, it didn't do any good to go
early Sunday morning.  The main street of the  town was
pedestrian only, lined with booth and exhibits, with a
band playing at the upper end of Main Street.  We went
to the Coca-Cola pin trading center so she could check
out the wares, and listened to a couple of athletes
speak.   We were in the Norway House when a Norwegian cross-
country skier won a gold medal and it was pandemonium (and that
Aas beer was pretty good, too!)  Park City was totally in its
element, almost like the old days when the silver mines were
booming.  We re all here making money and having a good time,
just don t burn down the town, boys!  The feeling of
bonhommie in the streets isn't that rare in Park City,
being a tourist town; but to have the same feeling in
downtown Salt Lake City was rare indeed.

So the next day my eldest and I set out to go to a skiing
event; I  was thinking, as I always do, of Thoreau, that he
went to the woods  because he wanted to live simply
and to see (widely paraphrased!)  that if life was mean
he wanted to know the depths of its  meanness; and if it
was grand then to experience its glory.  Or  something
like that.  I should have read my horoscope before I set out; it
warned me not to scatter my energies the last few days of the
month.  My Olympic karma finally caught up with
me; as we drove up I-80 all the questioning and bad-
mouthing of the Olympic excesses that I had done over
the past years settled right in the clutch of my old
Trooper, and with a puff of smoke and a foul smell it
burned out completely.  So instead of altius fortius
citius, I spent the time dealing with tow-truck drivers and
the highway patrol.  My cynical side said they didn't want
broken down cars cluttering up the highway and ruining
the Olympic experience for visitors; but really they were
just there to help out stranded motorists and they were
very efficient.  We could have just parked the thing and
gone on, but by that point I was feeling the weight of that
karma and my daughter was sure the tickets were
cursed, so we went home instead.  C'est L'Olympique!  I did have
one more Olympic experience, when I scalped the
tickets to the tow-truck driver, who even showed up to
pay me for the tickets a few days later, with cash.  Now
that my Olympic karma is clear, though, (and since they
are on sale!) I think I'll use the money to buy one of those
nifty fleece vests with the SLOC logo on it; before I was
afraid it would burn a hole in my chest but now SLOC
and I are even on the karmic scale.

There's another saying on the river, current among
younger Grand Canyon guides: "You can sleep when
you're dead."  In other words you are only in the canyon
for a limited amount of time, so push yourself to the limits
to experience as much of what it has to offer as you can.
 The same can be said of Salt Lake City.  In fact I kept
thinking that the unofficial song of this whole experience
should be the current one by Pink: "I'm comin' out  / so
you better get this party started!"  Downtown has been
absolutely frenetic the last couple of weeks, after a slow
start.  Once the residents got over their initial shock and
realized that no, the streets weren't jammed with
armored cars or PETA protestors, and you could
actually make your way downtown; and no, the
foreigners, their pockets stuffed with free condoms,
weren't going to drag your sons and daughters off to
satisy their foreign, carnal lusts  (that fear was actually
expressed on the eve of the Opening Ceremonies by
Gayle Ruzicka, our self-appointed right-wing watchdog,
leader of the ultra-conservative Eagle Forum); and that
there was something very different going on at night in
the streets by Temple Square from the usual echoing
silence, or the suited-and-tied and Best-Sunday-
Dressed crowds at the semi-annual Mormadan (the
Mormon general conference) they showed up in
increasing droves.  Especially as the weather warmed,
people from all over the Wasatch Front ventured into
downtown Salt Lake City to stare and be stared at; to
trade pins that they suddenly realized they absolutely
HAD to have; to stand in long lines for those silly berets;
and found that people from foreign countries and
different cultures--even people who smoke in public and
swig beer from bottles--are just people like everyone
else.  Like I said, the good feeling among strangers is
usual in Park City but it was a new feeling for downtown
Salt Lake.  I'm usually a pretty reserved person but I
found myself being more friendly and talking to
strangers, not just downtown but in my daily rounds, at
the grocery store or on the bus to work.

And it seems like the world felt the same way about Salt
Lake that Salt Lake did about the world.  So far the
reactions seem to be  very favorable, from all quarters.
One of the newspapers  had a headline the other day
that read  THEY LIKE US, THEY REALLY LIKE US.
Granted, we did sweep a lot of crazies under the rug: the
whole Utah State Legislature took the month off, so no
one could ask them about their rabid support for any and
all pro-gun  legislation, or how they never met a
developer or lobbyist they didn t like, or the time they
wasted making Jell-O the state food; the state Porn
Czar, Paula Houston, was nowhere to be seen, although
rumors abound that the latest collectible pin will depict
her on an olive oil bottle as the "Extra-Virgin Porn Czar"; the
polygamists got together before the Olympics and decided to keep
quiet, lest they get the same treatment as Tom Green, now
doing five years in the slammer for going on TV and
embarassing the governor by introducing all of his plural
wives, several of whom he married when they were 13
and 14; and the afore-mentioned Gayle Ruzicka, head of
the Eagle Forum and Utah's self-appointed moral
watchdog, seems to have disappeared.   After her gaffe
about the sex-crazed foreign athletes chasing after our
sons and daughters (and a devastating Pat Bagely
cartoon about her in the SALT LAKE TRIBUNE) she
shut up; whether she left town or not I don't know and
don't actually want to know.  According to all I've heard, it
was actually the opposite, with our sons and daughters
lusting after the foreign athletes (wouldn t it be
interesting to check the vital statistics nine months from
now and see if there s a spike?), but Gayle was never
one to let facts get in the way of her moral certainties:
Often in error but never in doubt.


Almost everyone that's asked by a local reporter looking for
something to do says "Oh yeah, let's have the Olympics here all
the time!" or "I'd do it again in a heartbeat.  I have to suspect that
they are the ones who partied out at Bud World or went to a ski
jump; not the ones who actually put it all together, who are
exhausted.  When we went to take down our exhibit, we ran into
the woman who was in charge of the media center; her face
sagged with fatigue and she said "I sure don't want to do it again!"
My wife just about wore herself out, as did many of the volunteers.
Now people here are saying how the O s will change
Utah forever; headlines like  Utah will never be the same
after  the Olympics  dominate the papers.  Somehow I
doubt it.  Utah has had invasions before; Johnston s
Army in 1857, the California Volunteers in the Civil War,
the huge influx of labor to defense plants during World
War II, but things didn t really change, and I doubt they
will now.  If anything, those of certain mindsets, on either
side of the aisle, will be strengthened in their beliefs.
Good conservative Mormons will use the O s to show
that we really are the chosen people and we need to
keep those fur nrs and heathens out; while those that
disagree will use the same facts for the opposite
conclusions.   The SALT LAKE TRIBUNE has a humor
columnist named Robert Kirby, sort of a Mormon version
of Dave Barry, who was set free by the paper during the
games to be the humorist-at-large, along with his pal,
Pat Bagley, who is the TRIB s cartoonist.  All of Kirby s
columns were hilarious, as they usually are, but one in
particular struck a note.  He wrote about how when you
are a kid and company comes over, how you can get
away with a lot more; stay up late, sit on the couch with
the adults, eat the table, tease your sister; but then when
the company leaves and Mom and Dad turn their
attention back to you, watch out!   During the O s the
rules were relaxed downtown and in the state in general;
you could smoke in public, walk around with an open
container, stay up late and eat at the table with the
adults, but there s talk that the forces of righteousness
are just waiting until the afterglow leaves to clamp back
down on the social scene in Utah and set everyone on
the straight and narrow again.  Who knows?

One group
who have definitely been changed are the volunteers.
They were everywhere during the games; you quickly
learned what the color-coded uniforms meant: Mountain
Shadow Blue (periwinkle by any other name, but the real
men in SLOC apparently didn t like the name) meant
administration; Green was for venues; red for EMS and
rescue services; and yellow for event control and police.
And they were unfailingly helpful, save for one or two
here and there, including the famous  Mitt Fit  when Mitt
Romney his-own-personal-self chewed out some
officious traffic control guy during one of the few traffic
snarls.  They had a surfeit of applicants and so
rigorously weeded out those who were not smiling and
helpful, and just as rigorously drilled those who made it
with the motto CHARGE: Cheerful, Helpful, Alert,
somethingsomething, you get the drift.  Volunteer
training was thorough and like a NuSkin sales meeting:
You Will smile!!  Now you still see them wandering
around, wearing their now useless credentials or their coats, their
smiles a bit wistful at best and at worst replaced by a
forlorn look.  You know they are belatedly realizing that
they were part of something the likes of which they might
not see again in their lifetimes, and the knowledge
weighs on them.

We were quiet at work for the first week, but then it
picked up, like it always does during breaks.
Researchers and locals ventured out, didn't get
accosted by police or foreigners, and came up to the
library in pretty respectable numbers.  Despite what we
thought last year, though, they didn't come to see ski
archives photos, they came for all the usual reasons: to
use the Sanborn maps, to look through Polk directories,
to  look up some obscure thesis, to do research on their
family past.  So I was glad that I didn't take any time off
for that reason as well.  Anyone who works at a
university knows that the best time to be there is during
the semester break, and that's just what this was.  Now
the students are back, a sign as sure as the swallows
that the season has changed and the Olympics are over.
 On the bus this morning I overheard lots of
conversations about the O s, about venues and events
and parties and bands, so it seems the U community at
least that slice that rides the #13 bus took advantage of
the Olympics.

The whole thing is disappearing remarkably fast; we
went to take down our Ski Archives exhibit at the Utah
Media Center and were surprised to see that the place
only took one day to clear out.  Boxes of brochures,
mouse pads, promotional videotapes were left, and we
looted them for our vertical files here in the library.  In
fact, I ve been grabbing brochures, from the Park City
restaurant promotions to the  Jesus Hates the
Mormons!  pamphlets passed out across the street from
Temple Square by the Baptists, and just gave the
person in charge of the VF collections about 3 cubic feet
of ephemera.  But downtown the banners are coming down,
the trash cans are being put back in place (the SS
asked the city to move all the trash cans out of downtown
as security risks), the rings are coming off the Delta
Center, Bud World is no more, much to the relief of the Salt Lake
Police, no doubt.  Up here on campus it hasn t started in earnest
yet, as we re still the home for the Paralympics until just before
the Vernal Equinox.  In fact the streets won t be clear up
here until the middle of April.  The same at the venues;
those that aren t hosting Paralympic events are tearing
down fast, getting on with their lives and business.
Those that raked in the dough are counting the swag,
while those that were on the outside looking in are
wondering how to survive into the summer.

One of the best Pat Bagley cartoons came near the end
of the games, and was titled  Winners and Losers.
Winners were depicted as the athletes; the volunteers;
the visitors from around the world; the people who went
downtown and traded pins or thronged the venues; the
 old geezers who first thought of this back in the 1960s.
The Losers were shown as a guy peeking out from
behind drawn curtains in a dark house, asking  Are they
gone yet?   So how to sum it all up?  Was I a Winner or a
Loser?  Even though I enjoyed a lot of the events and
atmosphere, I can t say I m sorry to see it all end, to see
us finally, after seven years, have something else to look
forward to.  I don't know what the future holds but I'm glad it's not
the Olympics.  Personally I'm glad to be able to carry a
pocket knife again, and not to have to wear my ID
around my neck.   I ll be really glad to see the fences
come down all over campus, that was one thing that
bothered me all out of proportion.  I m glad to see all the
police leave town and the sky free of F-16s and black
helicopters; I know, they were here to protect us and they
did a danged fine job of it, but there s just something
about an armed guard on every corner that gives you
pause.  Interestingly, it didn t bother my wife at all.  She
grew up in Germany on military bases during the era of
the Bader-Meinhof gang and said this was nothing
compared to what it felt like then.  Speaking of, I'm glad to have my
wife back, even though it's only a break before she goes to work for
the Paralympics.  I'll be glad when the temporary seating is gone
and the bus goes back to its regular route, so I don't have to walk
halfway across campus to get to work (although the walk, with the
empty  campus like something out of an episode of Twilight Zone,
wasn't bad.)  While the Olympic bus system worked great for the
visitors, it put huge demands on the local bus service, which
suffered in places.; it was too cold to take a chance that the bus
wouldn t show because it was ferrying people downtown
from the park-n-rides.   And I have to admit I drove to
work just for the novelty, the guilty pleasure, of having not only the
parking lots but the whole road practically to myself.     I still
question the expenditure of $2 billion on what was
essentially a big party, when there are a lot of hungry
kids and homeless in the world.  I still question the
environmental decisions that were made early on there
are a lot of scars on a lot of hillsides, and our air
certainly didn t benefit--although I have to say that the
recycling was well thought out and seems to have
worked pretty well.  SLOC is donating all the building
materials to Habitat for Humanity, and even better, just
gave back a check to the state of almost $100 million,
that were contingency funds t hey didn t need because of
the beautiful weather, and funds to keep the venues and
facilities up.  And if nothing else, the O s were a great
diversion for February.  February is usually a bleak
month in Salt Lake City; the old snow is cruddy and
spotted with last fall s trash, the month is famous for
inversions, and the legislature is in session; any of those
are enough to cause depression in the sunniest
disposition.  But this February flew by, and personally I m
grateful for that.  So I have to say that like running Lava
Falls in a 14-foot boat, it was something I m glad to have
done but I m not sure I would want to do again.

Last weekend we went to the annual RV and Sport (i.e., HUNtin'
and FISHin') show
down ta the Southtown Expo center.  Mom was on a late
shift up at the OV (the Olympic Village; I ve noticed the
volunteers using their own acronyms, like OMP; take a
guess at that one!) and we needed something to do.
Talk about bad karma; I would never buy an RV after all
the bad-mouthing I ve done at them over the years, but
the kids like to run in and out of them and I always see
people I know at the travel booths.  It was a regular Eu-
taw crowd, not a Canadian beret or Belarus jacket
among them. The men wore baseball caps and
leatherman tools on their belts, the women had big hair
and too-tight pants.  In a way it was comforting, knowing
that the regular rhythms of life had started back up, or
had never really gone away; but at the same time I can t
say I didn t look for a Swiss coat or someone in those
silly mascot bunny ears.  Then later that weekend I was
looking at the old, crusty snow on my back deck, snow
that had first fallen in November, before the Olympics;
snow that probably held ash from the World Trade
Center tragedy.  Suddenly it had to go, and I started
shoveling it away, smiling as I tossed the old chunks of
ice into the back yard.  I was well into it before I thought
about the symbolism of the act.  Out with the winter, in
with the spring.  Out with the Olympics past, in with the
blessedly uncertain future.  My eldest, the committed
*N Sync and Destiny s Child fan, has recently
discovered that she likes some group from Daddy s
antediluvian past, what was their name, the Beatles?  So
I had to play for her one of my favorites, a silly song with
a great refrain that goes like this:  Obla-di, Obla-dah, life
goes on...

And that s it from Olympia.


Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
295 South 1500 East
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

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