Inland Island
Short-term, independent project | Northern UT
This short-term photo series is a meditation on home and a somewhat formal goodbye to Utah. Made in the summer of 2025.
Men have historically embarked out West for a grand expedition. The tale falls the same way each time it is told. There once was a God perched on the highest pedestal of heaven and a divine delegation given to His worldly servants. He pledged to His chosen people a promise of excellence, a covenant to fulfill the path of discovery, settlement and bringing foreigners into His fold. So, with heads raised as high and mighty as their masts, these voyagers boarded their ships and sailed from their seas of rolling hills to a land far out West, an inland island of sorts. There was a biblical beauty in the palatial mountain peaks, the kind that made it appear as if their God had finished creating His masterpiece just in time for it to be seen and interpreted as The Promised Land.
I spent a number of my younger years out West, and the notion of it all was painted with a Romantic’s touch of childhood nostalgia. The same as in a dimly-lit museum, the memories sat mounted behind gilded golden frames and depicted the quiet, yet pivotal moments of my adolescence –– riding bikes down the Lagoon trail, weaving through the cottonwood snowflakes, chalk-drawing hopscotch on the cracked sidewalk, catching clouds in the basketball hoops. Back in those days, I would jump off the top bunk because I really believed I was going to fly.
The real world was the apocalypse. Or so it felt, moving to Green Country from The Promised Land. There were zombie people preaching on the megachurch pulpit, false prophets if I had ever even known what that meant as a kid. Worst of all were the storms. God’s wrath reigned down with the kind of lightning that warned me only seconds before the thunder came to break the news of my holy downfall. Sometimes they would turn cyclonic, and the more vigorously the forces of hot and cold air intertwined and the closer they touched down to my cul-de-sac, the further my corruption felt biblically stone-carved. What I interpreted from this place was that it was not promised, it was cursed. And thus, my imperfect piety could not be remedied until I took my own grand expedition back West.
Homecoming began as I raised my mast, head bowed and legs knelt in prayer because this journey was a covenant with my God. I emerged from the eastward canyons and there things were, the same as ever. Switchbacks and steeples like palm prints. It was the kind of comfortable and alleviating familiarity that felt absolutely flawless and prophetic. It was a reminder of why I slept with the Bible under my pillow each night –– a mound of words that both braced and incited my worried head.
The thing about volition is that sometimes it is illusionary. I realized this back in The Promised Land. It was partially by my own doing, partially by the voices of higher power. Those years of endless, heart-wrenching pining for home led me down this straight and narrow path –– yet, somehow, God’s wrath still found its way in to taunt me. This time it was much quieter and much less theatric, and more like a ticking timer of rumination. At first, it was made known through secret codes, the tug of a shirt sleeve, the touch of a wrist. Then it crept in during fall with a bone-chilling cold that lingered through spring. I saw it on TV through the prophet’s somber warning. It probed me through the discerning whispers of appointed men, superiors who I believed exhibited the truth because they somehow always swindled some version of it out of me. After all of those years of waiting to return home, I suppose I was finally old enough to reach the low-hanging fruit of my predetermined salvation.
I found relief in accepting that my church was sworn into truth by generations of self-proclaimed revelators, right hand placed firmly on the very book that they created. Through swearing itself into sincerity, I finally noticed this place and its people had spiraled into cultural madness –– a tangled mess of rules, regulations and loopholes. Maintaining a manicured image of pressed white shirts and ankle-length skirts. A carefully kept record of the neighbor’s morality. A swift and repetitive motion of nametags, handshakes, veils and ceremonials. A capsule of belief prescribed to and placed under the tongue of the world’s population, dismissing whether the fix would ultimately cure or kill the next person in line.
No grand expedition chasing after or escaping from a godsent purpose will make a place your home. It will, in turn, cause internal sickness or superiority, and isolation on an island of your own making. I am still not entirely sure of what signifies the authenticity of home, but I am inclined to believe it has something to do with a recognized, practiced and complete sense of agency. So, I suppose it was never the fantastical childhood memories that kept me afloat in my time in The Promised Land. Rather, it was the choice to be in it all once again.
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