(So… fare warning… some of what I’ve written below may be a bit strong for young people. You might want to read this before sharing it with children.)
I love the mountains.
I love that great escape–high above the rest of the world, far from “civilization”–an escape where I feel I can at least temporarily leave behind the hustle and the bustle, the feeling of the concrete jungle, the rat race, that place and lifestyle that’s so… foreign to my nature but that seems to invade my life regardless (sigh…).
Anyway…I love just picking a canyon with water running down it and following that water–up, up, and up, through meadows, up steady climbs, and even scaling the occasional crystal clear waterfall in order to keep going higher. Higher and higher.
I love to explore. I love the adventure. I love to pause at the top of a precipice and look back across the distance traveled. I love to see the new vistas that were theretofore unseen.
Oh, how I love the mountains.
I miss the mountains… real mountains.
Living here in Arkansas now… there are things I love about it. The storms are incredible. Best thunderstorms I’ve ever experienced in my life, and soooo many of them! We just had an amazing one today. It rained so hard that our front lawn was a rolling sheet of water, and our dirt driveways and roads became washed out river bottoms. The sheer power of these storms!
They’re awe inspiring.
I love to walk out in them or watch the torrential downpours from our front porch. Of course, when they’re as incredible as they were today, I end up running around frantically with a shovel trying to salvage what I can of our roads and driveways before they wash completely away.
I enjoy that, though. The rain running down my face–soaking wet from toe to scalp. I’m like a kid at a water park. 🙂
You know, despite the main road and our driveway washing out after big storms, I wouldn’t trade the dirt and rock for concrete or asphalt. Nope. Not a chance. Sure it would be easier to take care of, but there’s something about a dirt road. It… it’s…home. It’s soothing. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable in a neighborhood again. Living in the country is just… home to me. It’s where my soul rests. The forest glades, the rolling hills… the wide open spaces.
I’m reminded of the first time I drove a tractor out here… going like 4 miles an hour… I was like “this is where it’s at.”
I had become so tired of the rat race that Utah had felt like to me. Even the mountains weren’t a sufficient escape. But now, living out in the country in Arkansas, it’s not perfect, but it’s wonderful.
Still… I miss the mountains. I always will when I’m away from them for very long, but Utah is a hard place for me to be, not just because of the busy rat-race feel that I feel when I’m there. No, right now there are also just too many painful memories that are all too present when I’m wandering around Utah’s valleys. Pains, regrets, anxieties. We’ll get to that, the present, at some point in the future (ironically). But for now I guess we’ll take another walk down memory lane. This time we’ll travel back to my Murray, Utah years–the first iteration.
I don’t remember much, well… anything of the drive across the country from Ohio to Utah other than a stop at an outlet mall, I think in or near Park City, Utah, to get some clothes. School had either just started or was about to start, and I guess I needed some clothes because, and I’m just guessing, mine were packed away in a box in the moving van.
We arrived in Murray, Utah the summer/fall of 1992, with no place to live but privileged to stay with a friend of my mother’s until we had our own place. I was 10 years old when
we arrived, and we got there in time for me to dive right into Mr. Gray’s 5th grade class.
Utah was… different. My first day of school saw, I want to say, three different schoolyard kids try to assert their dominance over me in one way or another, picking fights, etc. Being so long ago now, I only remember one of the incidents even somewhat clearly. I think I’d just scored a goal playing soccer on the playground during recess, and an angry boy from what I assume was the other team came charging at me ready to tackle me or something. Just as he got to me, I ducked and flipped him over me and onto the ground. If I’m remembering correctly, his name was Jake.
Funny the things you remember. 🙂
I don’t know exactly what changed for me, but I think starting there in about 5th grade, I began to transform from the smart kid in school to the class clown. I don’t think it happened all at once, though. 
I think I started a bit into that class-clown/disrupter path in 5th grade and took a leap forward in 6th grade before finally exploding in 9th grade. We’ll get to all that. 🙂
I have many memories of my time at that first school, Grant Elementary. I remember I had huge crushes on Heather Anderson and Emily Llyons. I was super shy, though, so I didn’t really have the guts to tell girls I was interested in them.
(side note: People don’t really understand why I describe myself as “shy” because I was a class clown for a while and also very outgoing socially in my later years; but here’s the deal… inside, in social situations, I was often tied up in nervous knots–absolutely terrified.
Anyway, my final years in elementary school, as well as my years in jr. high were again dominated by sports as my years in Ohio had been. I again played soccer and baseball and quickly “made a name for myself” as a player you’d want on your team on the playground or in the league. 
The group of players that comprised our soccer team ended up playing together for years and years and became quite good, many playing together all the way through high school, I think.
As far as baseball was concerned, I remember feeling slighted when, as the new kid in the league, I didn’t make the all-star team my first year, even though I had played superbly. I remember a conversation I was either a part of or overheard where the conversation referenced me not making the team because of politics and me being the new kid in town. 
As far as academics in school were concerned, school was a bit of a challenge specifically because it wasn’t a challenge. I had been used to being catered to, to some degree, the schools in Ohio finding ways to challenge me in my favorite subjects, pushing me to higher levels. Unfortunately, the school and school district I was now in in Utah didn’t have any classes for kids who were advanced in a given subject, and I ended up getting super bored. That might have had something to do with why I started going the class clown route–what else was there to do?!?!
I do remember winning the spelling bee, I think a couple years in a row, only to lose at the district level each time. What else… let’s see… I remember losing a fight to Eric. I remember getting punched hard in the eye by David. I remember Michael being bullied a lot, and I don’t think I ever stood up for him, just sort of let it happen. That’s one of those childhood regrets. I remember seeing him years later walking down the street, I think wearing all black. I hope life turned out better for him than those early years that were probably quite painful for him.
Another regret I have of those early years was having a young girl, probably somewhere between 8 and 10 years old confide in me and a friend of mine that her brother was raping her. Though she shared that, she made us promise not to tell anyone about it. I wanted to, but she was my friend’s cousin and my friend told me not to say anything.
I never did.
I don’t remember her name. I wish I did. I wish I knew what has become of her since. I wish I could go back and change what happened. I wish I’d had the courage to say something anyway, despite the promise. Like with Michael, I hope that little girl was able to overcome such horrific childhood experiences.
As the years went by, my life did mirror what it was in Ohio in many ways (I went from wanting to earn every arrow point in cub scouts to every merit badge in Boy Scouts. I continued to be obsessed with sports, baseball and soccer mostly). Though sports and scouts remained the same, my perspective on school changed. I went from loving learning in Ohio to hating school in Utah. Similar to what I mentioned before, I think it started with boredom, and then I began getting into trouble, and eventually, I just didn’t care much anymore.
Then there was that pesky pornography problem, or whatever you want to call it. It followed me to Utah as well. As a ten year old, I remember coaxing a mentally handicapped girl into going to the bathroom in front of me. At this point, it was all still just curiosity, wanting to see the female body. Later, by age 12 or 13, hormones started to rise, and what was once curiosity, turned, as it does for nearly all of us, into sexual interest. I think it was probably about that same time, 12 or 13, when my body started to be physically aroused by the female body, and I discovered masturbation. At that point, the available pornography was still the underwear sections of the huge Sears and JC Penney’s catalogs. I also found a pornographic calendar in the dumpster of the church parking lot while unloading the trash after a boy scout camping trip, and I continued to try to spy on people in our house changing/showering, etc.
Moving on…
Not only was I more than a handful for my teachers to deal with, I also started being dishonest in school–cheating and whatnot. I want to say that started in about 8th grade. I don’t think I cheated often, but I can remember at least a few times where I cheated–all in math class, I think–ironic because at one time it had been my best and favorite subject.
The episodes I had with behavioral problems began to increase in frequency and intensity. I had briefly mended my ways in 6th grade, going from second worst in the class to winning the behavior competition that Mr. Reynolds instituted. The first prize was a portable CD player, and the person who had the fewest marks for bad behavior by the end of the quarter would win the CD player.
I won. I went from second worst, to best–boy did that teacher have me pegged! I’m sure I played right into Mr. Reynolds’ brilliant plan. 🙂 Just give little Stephen a good, stiff competition, and he’d fall right for it!
So… there was the 6th-grade behavioral hiatus before starting to slide again in 7th grade. I remember losing it in my 7th-grade English class. I got a D+ in the class one quarter, I think. I was the straight A student for so many years. Then, after what I imagine was probably a failing grade on a paper, I got mad, and as I walked back to my seat, I started throwing things off the top of the shelves onto the floor–full blown tantrum style.
By 8th grade, I’d “blossomed” into full-on class-clown mode. 
My poor math teacher… I think I remember purposefully walking into class late one day (I think I did similar things many times, actually) singing loudly (on purpose, so as to cause a scene). She just told me to get out, and I turned right around without batting an eyelash, and walked out.
Yep, 8th grade was a step further down the path of bad behavior, but it was 9th grade and the summer following where things really exploded. We’d moved (perhaps during 8th grade?) just a couple streets over where my mom had bought a house. The new house was between an elementary school and my jr. high (Riverview Junior High School). At that point, I’d grown my hair out long (long enough to have a good-sized pony tail), and I was a thorn in multiple teacher’s sides, although I was probably more of a big annoyance than anything significantly problematic (such as violent, etc.).
One somewhat humorous story that illustrates a bit of the tone of my… craziness:
I got in trouble for something (I don’t remember what), and my punishment was not being able to talk for an entire day. The whole school was in on it (not a small school either), and they gave me a marker and a small white board to carry with me to communicate with since I couldn’t talk.
By the end of the day, I believe they voted me more annoying while only having a marker and whiteboard than when I was allowed to speak. I guess that one backfired on the teachers. 😉
I mean… who didn’t want to turn from paying attention to the teacher to looking to see the next creative thought I had scribbled on my board and was holding up for all to read. Right? 😉
It was during those Jr. High years that I also started really getting into music. I’d learned a tiny bit of the piano as a little child, but in 7th grade I learned how to play the trumpet. I stayed with that instrument only briefly before switching to the Euphonium for the rest of Jr. High. I had a lot of fun in our symphonic band class period, both with music and with… well… goofing off.
I also got an electric guitar and started learning to play–starting with Jimi Hendrix Star Spangled Banner, I think. 🙂
Music became quite a big deal to me. I was a Classic Rock nut, 60s and 70s, apparently following my brother Richard in that. I had a huge record collection (the old vinyl originals). My room was filled with speakers, and my walls were covered in the names of my favorite bands.
Anyway, in 9th grade, despite my craziness in many areas, I was totally serious in one area.
Baseball.
Baseball was still huge for me. In 9th grade I tried out for and made the JV baseball team for the local high school. I’d finally come to the point where I had to choose between baseball and soccer, and I chose baseball.
Anyway, despite my craziness and seeming apathy for school, I still did fairly well. I did cheat a little bit in one math class. I remember that. I was waaaaaaay behind in class assignments, and my teacher let me make them up. I think I had a friend do some assignments for me, and I scribbled numbers all over sheets of paper because my teacher required us to “show our work,” so I pretended to show it. I turned int the assignments and the gazillion scribbled pages, and I was never caught.
So… a funny story involving cheating… In 9th grade, we took some kind of a state math test, and the top two scorers would get to go to the state math competition. Well, during the test, I sat next to the smartest kid in the class (Spencer), and I just copied all his answers. As I sat there waiting for him to work through problems, watching what he was doing, I noticed that he made a mistake on one problem. Catching his mistake, I figured out the correct answer myself, got the problem right, and ended up getting a better score than he did on the test and being the top of the grade–top of the school!
I know right?
At the state competition, I was terrified that I was going to be exposed as a fraud, so I glued myself to Spencer, and did everything I possibly could to sit next to him again for the next test.
The hard work paid off, and with an unseen sigh of relief, I took my seat next to Spencer again, and guess what?
Deja Vu.
The exact same thing happened! Seriously!
I copied all his answers, caught him making a mistake, got that particular problem right, and came home still the top of the school, having gotten a higher score than him again!!
Years later, I found him on social media and confessed that he really had been the one to get the highest scores–both times. I don’t know if he cared, but at least he knows now. Not only was he a very smart kid, he was also just simply a very good kid. He deserved to be top. 🙂
So… on a different note… I don’t remember being super unhappy in 9th grade, not like I would be in the following years, but I must have been unhappy to a pretty significant degree at one point because I made at least one attempt at suicide (good thing I was ignorant enough not to know that taking a bajillion ibuprofen tablets wouldn’t kill you), and also one day in the middle of the school year (and I don’t remember why) I packed my things and was going to run away. Before leaving town (or wherever I thought I was going) I stopped off at a friend’s house to say goodbye. The friend had started smoking pot I think not too many months earlier, and he had invited me to join him once or twice before that day, but I’d declined. This time, though, I guess I was already unhappy or something, and though I declined again, he invited me to “watch,” which I did. But once he’d taken a hit, he just handed me the pipe, and I went for it. I took the pipe and took a hit.
That first attempt resulted in coughing and sputtering, and I blew the pot out of the bowl and all over the ground. I tried again, succeeded, and ended up getting myself high as a kite. I still remember one part of the experience clearly. I was in my friend’s room, and I opened a soda can, and the sound was so… encompassing! It was like my senses were super heightened. That one little can sounded like I was in the middle of a stadium and every single person in the stadium had, all at the same time, just opened up a can of soda. It was a nutty experience.
Smoking pot that day was an interesting step forward/backward/sideways, whatever it was. I didn’t end up running away. I just went home. I don’t know what would have happened had it gone some other way. Perhaps I would have run away and worse things would have happened. Perhaps I wouldn’t have made it far before I realized I was being stupid. I don’t know.
In addition to all my other antics, I also began sneaking out at night, wandering neighborhoods and places. My brother and sister and their friends would sometimes go out at nights and jump on trains as they came rolling by, riding them for however long before getting off. I started doing the same, though they weren’t aware of it. I would sneak out either on my own or with my friends. I almost ended up getting one of those friends killed as she tried to jump a train but fell off and nearly got cut in half. I remember seeing her body roll over the tracks not once, but twice, finally managing to be back on the right side of the tracks before the wheels cut her to pieces.
Yeah, so you’d think that would have been the last time we jumped trains, but no. Nope. We just kept doing it.
Moving on again. Just as I’d taken a step forward toward poorer behavior at school, my pornography/ voyeurism issues took another step farther down the wrong road as well. I moved outside the confines of spying on people in my own house and started going house to house looking in people’s windows trying to catch women changing or showering, etc. I think it started with me seeking out classmates I had crushes on. I went all Peeping Tom on them. I’d try to spy on them (nearly always unsuccessfully). I was too shy to ever actually express my interest in them in person.
I think I might know the reason(s) why I was so scared of girls.
As much as I had a million crushes (I could easily rattle off the names of a bunch of girls I had crushes on in jr. high), there were at least two major hurdles for me with the girls. One, I was super shy and afraid of rejection. That in and of itself was paralyzing and probably was enough by itself to keep me from being active in the “dating” scene.
I think there was another, though, that I didn’t really think as much about but that I think had an impact on me. It was this: I was embarrassed and terrified about my body. Specifically, I was afraid of being seen naked. Why? I was given a nickname as a little boy, “Stubby,” that I believe referred to the size of my penis. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s what I believe I associated its origin as having come from. Then, in I think 7th grade, while standing at a urinal going to the bathroom at our Jr. High, a couple of older boys spun me around while I was peeing, looked at my penis and just laughed at me.
I’ve had a complex ever since those years–even to this day.
In some ways, that’s probably a good thing, honestly.
I’m disease free. 🙂
(it’s hard to get STDs when you’ve never had sex).
And hey, if I keep it up long enough, I may even qualify for a part in a movie, being fewer than three years shy of 40 and still in virgin territory. 🙂
I remember one night I had an experience that a lot of boys probably wish they had, but being the terrified boy I was, almost certainly because of the latter reason above, I didn’t “take advantage” of the moment (which I’m actually grateful for at this point). I was with a couple of girls, and while I had my back turned to them, they both stripped down to their underwear, and I turned around just in time to see them both coming after me.
I freaked.
I was like “what are you doing??!?!?!?!!!?!?!”
The encounter stopped. Yeah… I sort of killed the moment by freaking out on them, but the night went on, with all of us fully clothed, and… that was… decades ago now.
Anyway, to this day I’m still afraid to be seen naked (the communal showers that used to be at the LDS Missionary Training Center were brutal. I was too proud to shower on my own and be that guy, so I showered with everyone else, but I was super anxious, self conscious, etc.).
My wedding night (yes, I still plan to be a virgin until that point) terrifies me.
My self consciousness has been an issue for so long that even just a month or two ago (It’s June 2019 right now), during a relapse with my pornography and masturbation addiction, and in my insecurity, I measured my penis again. I remember having read, during multiple similar experiences over the years, about what was normal and average for male genitalia, but this time I was like, well, how do they actually do the measuring. I looked up how they did it in the studies, and I was a bit shocked. I won’t go into it, as it’s not important, but I did come away with a very different perspective than I’d had prior to that moment. Unfortunately, I think regardless of what I learned, I will probably never overcome that fear of what my future wife will think when she sees me naked. It’s absolutely terrifying to me. And the poor woman won’t have any control over that insecurity. I’ll probably worry regardless of anything she says or does.
The 9th-grade year and the summer following were the timeframe of my greatest behavioral crash. There were regular peeping tom activities, I smoked pot–a lot of pot–on a daily basis. I starting to buy it in bigger quantities, so I could sell enough to my friends to pay for my own habit. I stopped going to church. I stopped going to boy scouts, giving up my quest for all merit badges and for earning my eagle… I started stealing again from local stores… a CD player, candy, beer for friends (funny that at that time I didn’t drink it myself… not sure why), cigarettes, soda, vinyl records, etc.
With the peeping tom stuff, I was actually “caught’ twice. They were both girls I had crushes on. The parents of one saw me leave their property. They didn’t know who I was until they watched me as I went from their house to mine. They saw me duck back into my garage. The other saw me in the act, which I didn’t know until a police officer came by my house later to confront me about it.
I denied it with the first girl, and we never had really talked anyway, so there was no confrontation or anything. With the second girl, I tried to deal with it the next time I saw her, but she literally ran away from me at school. I had planned to lie. One option was to say I was stoned and didn’t know what I was doing (I wasn’t stoned and did know exactly what I was doing), but I didn’t even get that far because she ran away from me.
Incredibly, I don’t think either girl ever mentioned the incident to their friends at school. I was terrified they would and what kind of backlash I’d get at school, my reputation shattered, my social standing…
but nothing came of it… that I ever knew, anyway.
(Side Note: A few years later, I visited my old stomping grounds, and knocked on the door of the first girl, and I apologized to her. I don’t remember anything she said, just that she was super cool about it. With the second girl, my apology wasn’t planned. I ran into her, so it was more spontaneous and off the cuff. I tried to give her a more formal apology later like I’d done with the first girl, but she wouldn’t give me the opportunity (which I can understand).
Anyway, back to my spiraling downhill…
One night, after my paper route money that I used to supply myself with pot had been severely depleted because I smoked more than I sold, and after pre-paying for some shrooms, I went out to the local “Snow Shack” (snow cone building) in front of the grocery store with a friend… and some bolt cutters.
My friend waited behind the grocery store for me to break in and steal the money out of the cash box in the Snow Shack. However, my attempt was thwarted as the bolt cutters broke, so I went back empty handed and sat with my friend behind the grocery store.
As we sat there, I spotted a police car heading our way, so I quickly hid behind a bush. My friend, on the other hand, who I think was stoned, just sat there. I think I tried to get him to hide, but I couldn’t. As soon as the cop’s door opened, I bolted. My friend? Well, he just sat there. As I ran, I think I heard the cop say, “we’ve got a runner.”
I bolted down the grassy alley behind the store, but when I got to the other side, I saw two cop cars waiting for me, so I turned back around, jumped a fence, and ran through yard after yard until I got to a friend’s house. I ended up staying with them for a while and getting high before eventually going home.
When I got home, my window wasn’t open as I’d left it when I’d snuck out earlier that evening, and the front door was unlocked, which meant my mom had found out that I’d left. I went inside and went to bed but was woken up probably not too long later by a cop pointing a flashlight at my face standing in the doorway to my room. I don’t remember what he said, but I’m sure it was probably pretty scary.
The next day, as a spiraling 15 year old, after smoking pot and while standing in our dining room, I saw men in red polo shirts starting to surround the house. I instinctively knew that they were there for me, and I briefly thought about running, but I didn’t.
The men turned out to be employees of a facility for troubled youth, at the time known as the Utah Boy’s Ranch. They grabbed me, drove me out there, cut my long hair off (which brought tears to my eyes), and assigned me to a “home.”
I’ll write more about the Boy’s Ranch in my next post. This will suffice for now.
That first period living in Murray was hard for me. I was still much the same as I was as a little boy. I was sensitive and caring. I was the friend that people would go to with their problems. I was on good terms with just about every student (though obviously not on such good terms with some of my teachers). I was one of the kids who everyone knew. I still did relatively well in school, and I think was honest in the vast majority of my school work, but I was on a very dangerous trajectory, starting to get into serious trouble, and going downhill fast.
I still look back on those Murray, Utah years, longing sometimes to go back and re-live them, missing the experiences, the fun, the people… perhaps wanting to have the opportunity to live the life that I was snatched away from, but also wanting to go back and change things, go back and be a different person, go back and make it better.
Facebook has made it a lot easier than it was in decades past to find those old people I knew and to re-connect or to just see what they’re up to nowadays. I temporarily reconnected with some many years later, but I’m not really friends with any of the friends I had from those days.
Those years in Murray are a confusing period in my personal history. In the end, I think I might see those Murray years, or my leaving at least, as sort of a lost chapter in my life. I wonder sometimes if maybe part of me is actually still stuck there–in 9th grade–wanting to just continue where I’d left off instead of being torn away, unable to say goodbye… It sounds funny, but I think it might be true, part of me still longing, still wanting closure, still wanting to live out that lost life… I don’t do well when I lose connection with people who are important to me. But that’s what happened in Murray. One day I was there, the next day, without warning, I was gone
*** more pictures coming 🙂 ***
Lift the World 