Palm Trees in Zion

Some boys run off to join the circus. In Oak Creek you could stay home, and the circus came up your lane in a big gray Packard. That lane was the Crawfords', and the Crawfords lived off whoever came along it. They put crude signs out on the road. They sold chickens and eggs, fruit and vegetables, and Louis Crawford made his own postcards of the peaks and sold those too. His boy J.L. told this one on tape as an old man. The Packard stopped, with people inside it pointing around at the country. J.L.'s brother snatched up a box of pictures and ran out to make a sale. Whether he sold any, J.L. never knew, because the boy came back all but turning somersaults. That was Tom Mix in that car. Tom Mix, the movie cowboy himself, and he wanted his picture taken with the boy who had never seen a train. J.L.'s honest opinion was that they were pulling his brother's leg. Here's a kid at the far end of everything, and to a Hollywood star, he's the scenery. It took two days of chasing. Then, a mile or so up Parunuweap Canyon, that boy stuck to Tom Mix until Mix called his photographer over, and they sent the boys their pictures. Tom Mix and the boy who had never seen a train, on paper, for keeps. J.L. was wrong, and he told it on himself. J.L. remembered one more thing from that day. Mrs. Crawford walked up to one of the extras, all got up in his costume, and asked whether there'd be any shooting today. He told her he didn't know a thing about it. All he cared about, he said, was chuck wagon, quitting time and payday. Hollywood kept coming. In nineteen twenty-seven a crew came up for Ramona, a story set in California, and built a hacienda at the Temple of Sinawava. That's the far end of the road in Zion Canyon, with the walls standing up on every side of you, the same country Louis Crawford had been selling on postcards for years. The crew took a good look at all that, and decided it could use some help. Trucks rolled in for more than a week, J.L. said, with equipment and props. Now, this is the family doubter talking, the boy who wouldn't swallow Tom Mix. You can take it from him what else was on those trucks. Palm trees. In Zion.