FAMILY BUTTE
“It was probably ’82, and we went to Yellowstone. It was damn cold.” My dad takes off his ball cap to scratch his head, stretching a shoulder that’s had a recent labral repair surgery, brought on by decades of rowing and paddling. He turned 70 this year. “It was eventually decided to try someplace a bit dryer, a bit warmer in November.”
In my parent’s sitting room, sleeping bags, ammo cans, and kitchen boxes are staged. My mom listens from the kitchen as she monitors a hot pot of cranberry sauce, almost ready to store in the cooler. The smell transports me west to the desert.
In the heart of Utah’s San Rafael Swell, a towering group of sandstone pillars has seen a recent rise in popularity thanks to internet road trip blogs, features in rock climbing and bike-packing magazines, and Instagram. It was named Family Butte by the Swasey brothers, early cattlemen who explored the Swell in the 1800s and 1900s, after they saw themselves in the rock formation. These sentinels in the desert have borne witness to Native Americans, early settlers, wild horses, cattle drivers, dirt bikers, climbers, and countless others. They have also served as the backdrop to a family gathering that has been occurring in this high desert for the last 25 years.
It started with a band of boaters living on 10th Street in Knoxville, TN. Young men and women who spent the modest money they had on beer and supplies to build fiberglass kayaks, which they paddled on as many rivers as they could. Originally named the 10th Streeters, they became lovingly known as The Boat People around the time a core group of them moved to East Street in Golden, CO, where they added more friends to their group. While the Rockies provided a unique change in scenery from the Appalachian Mountains of the East, the beer drinking and river running remained the same. The Boat People cite a long and storied history; featuring many debaucherous parties, complicated dating histories, but most notably more laughter than should be legal for any group of friends.
The way my dad tells it the Boat People opted to take advantage of the 4-day Thanksgiving Holiday and head out to the wilderness. For most of them, their family was across the country, and the temptation to be under the stars and away from the city lights was too great. First it was Yellowstone. Too cold. A small band of them tried various locations in New Mexico and Utah before someone pointed a finger to the Swell on the map and declared it the meeting place in the mid-to-late 90s, back when it was a swath of hardly known BLM land.
As the years passed, the sounds in the Swell at Thanksgiving began to grow. Raucous laughter around the campfire always remained, but the small voices of children and the barking of dogs joined in. The group grew as Boat People brought their new Boat Children, and what started in the 80s with 3-5 young men and women now fluctuates between 30 and 40 people, coming from all over the country.
On Thanksgiving morning, three to four turkeys are carefully placed on a spit and ceremoniously carried to a rock oven, built over 20 years ago for this singular purpose. The wood chips and charcoal are hot and the birds slow cook for hours. Everyone else feverishly prepares their side dishes, all the classic ones you’d expect at a relative’s dining table: green beans, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and stuffing. The only difference being without conventional ovens, they must be prepped in Cast Iron Dutch Ovens, buried and shrouded in coals.
Shouts echo in the camp, “10 minutes on the turkeys!!” and exasperated cries follow from the others as they make final preparations. The savory smell fills the desert air as the birds are carefully lifted from the oven by men ready to defend against any rogue dog with a swift foot. Once on the table, all 30-40 of us gather in a circle to give thanks for friends, family, and the desert.
Most of my Thanksgivings have been here, and I’ve had the privilege of watching the camp change through my growing eyes. As a young girl, I would sprint out of the family minivan to climb a large hill of weathered sandstone and shale, getting a head start on dirt under my fingernails and spend the evenings trembling as the dads took turns telling us ghost stories. The uneven and jagged shadow of Family Butte in the moonlight inspired us to rename it The Bloody Fingers. Entering my teens and early twenties meant speculating which Boat Children would put their new girlfriends or boyfriends to the test in this crazy tent city in the dirt, watching the friends I was born into transition from high schoolers to college students.
We now come to the desert marveling at who we have become; we range from philosophers to physicists to engineers to ballerinas to everything in between. As the first kids get married, I wonder how soon some of us will be bringing our own babies, creating a three-generation spread. While it’s customary to alternate holidays between in-laws (this year with my parents, next year with your parents), Thanksgiving in the desert is as uncompromisable as the stone pillars in the distance. We feel the pull to come to this place without fail, to see these friends who may as well be family, and opt to concede more generously with the other holidays.
Amongst all this rapid change and growth, Family Butte still towers over us, seemingly never changing. The same wind and sun that has been working on the sandstone for millions of years shows on the faces of our parents, now seasoned with evidence of lives well lived. Despite the sun worn skin and the gray hair, they still make fun of each other whenever anyone has too much to drink (be it from the community bottles or from my dad’s stiff martinis), and they play the same spirited games of bocce ball and horseshoe in the sand. The jokes, the stories, the howling laughter. The same as it was in their twenties and thirties, albeit a bit stiffer in the joints.
The years start to blend, smoothed over like a river rock. Above the crackle of the campfire, it’s not uncommon to hear questions like “Is that the year that Ford fell in the fire? Is that the year the rogue firework landed in the Van Family’s tent? Is that the year we built the Boba Fett Rocket?” Though the timeline is peppered with memories of the few times it snowed significantly and reached single digits, or the epic slot canyon hikes, the way our minds fail to put exact years on them would have you thinking that this gathering is rather unremarkable. To us, it is simply that the repeated practice of our most remarkable and sacred tradition creates a constant presence in our lives that can’t be bracketed by years or dates.
It started as just camping for me. I didn’t know how great I had it. The Thanksgiving Holiday often elicits memories of sweating over an oven, watching football, and even arguing politics with an extended relative for most. Thanksgiving at a dining room table is a foreign concept to me. To have memories like mine, that come flooding back at the smell of campfire smoke, the feeling of cold sandstone under my hands, I am forever grateful. Beyond that, I consider myself one of the luckiest people alive to witness friendships that hold strong even when the paddles are collecting dust in the garage, and the days of river running are more seldom than ever before. I bear witness to these Boat People who make a yearly pilgrimage to those sandstone pillars, picking up right where they left off the year before.
