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4– A bit of Utah's urban history, with Dr. Lawrence Culver | Day 6

March 17, 2020 Utah State University Office of Research Episode 4
Instead
4– A bit of Utah's urban history, with Dr. Lawrence Culver | Day 6
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Posted 8 hours before a 5.7 magnitude earthquake centered in Magna Utah, This installment Dr. Lawrence Culver gives us a refresher on our 4th grade Utah History. With an eye on what currently relevant. Wyatt didn't ask about how earthquakes influenced the cities of the American West. But there is a first hand account of getting out of Europe when travel restrictions go up. 

So today is Monday, March 16th, 2020, that is the voice of Dr. Lawrence Culver. He's an associate professor in the history department at Utah State University. He focuses on the history of the American Urban West. And dang it, we cover a lot of ground. In my conversation with Courtney Flint, I had her help me understand what it means to live in the West and to live in Utah. But today you're going to hear about what can go wrong when you don't understand what it takes to live here in the mountains. Ok, maybe a little east of our mountains, but still, we're going to talk about the guy.

Lake Powell is named after Victorian's, being scandalized by some successful settlers, depression, dust, Bureau of Land Management, that streets and wonky intersections. My name is Wyatt Traughber. You could be pretending to lose another round of candy land to a four year old. But you are listening to this instead.

While Lawrence and I were talking, my friend Sidney was traveling to her home in Ogden from a European vacation truncated by Corona. If you want to hear a little from her, stick around after this conversation.

Utah is in the west and there's kind of a lot going on in Utah right now. Can you tell me about a time of crisis in Utah's history?

Utah has gone through crises that are some are localized and some are more. National national examples, of course, would be the Great Depression and World War two, which is actually what I was teaching about right before our classes wrapped up for spring semester, 2020 ahead of schedule due to the coronavirus. So it, of course, was affected massively by things like the Great Depression because it was a state that was heavily dependent on mining and agriculture. And those sectors of the economy were just demolished by the Great Depression in terms of a more localized crisis. Well, the state was founded in a moment of crisis by people who were fleeing religious persecution and had fled out of the United States to get away from it. What was then Mexico. They then, of course, precipitated a crisis for the people who already lived here. So the state sort of began in a state of uncertainty and tumult. And maybe it's helpful to remember that at moments like these.

Yeah, yeah. How has that history of crisis infecting Utah affected the way you talk to crisis now?

Well, that's a good question. I mean, I think well, I mean, one thing that's distinctive about Utah, obviously, is that the percentage of people who do food storage, I honestly don't know the history on that. I've always wondered honestly if that's like a pioneer hold over or if that is a World War two or especially Cold War, a holdover when when people who had previously mainly been farmers moved to cities and were no longer growing their own food. And during the era when we really thought a nuclear war could happen, people hoarded food, although, of course the surface of the earth was going to be radioactive for thousands of years. So the ordered food wouldn't really help. But that's that's an aspect that's locally distinctive for sure. And I think the state's history of being predominantly one religious group means that by definition, in some ways, response to crisis has been more organized, in some ways more hierarchical than the typical American state. One of the things that's interesting about the state now and 2020 is that in an increasingly diverse place, religiously and racially and ethnically in every other sense. So I think in some ways it'll be interesting to see how a more diverse state weathers a crisis in ways perhaps different than the past.

So you said that Utah was hit pretty hard by the depression and stuff because of it decimated the mining industry. Other states that are big into mining, I think they waited for their industry to rebound, rebound. And a recent conversation I had with Courtney Flint, Utah, kind of veered away from mining after that. Do you have any insight as to why?

Well, a couple of things. Yeah. I mean, Utah was hit really hard by the Great Depression. At its peak, the national unemployment rate was about 25 percent. Among adults in Utah was about 35 percent. Local charities here were completely overwhelmed. The LDS church charity system is in many ways a product of the Great Depression era because the charity system that existed up to that point couldn't handle what happened. And indeed, the church, of course, had huge financial problems at that point because 10 percent of zero zero. So people couldn't tithe anymore. One of the consequences of that was the state. The the church turned over Dixie Snow and Weber colleges to the state of Utah because it can no longer afford to keep them running. So they became state institutions at that point. In terms of mining specifically, a couple of things happened. One is, of course, mining resumes in a huge way during World War Two, especially copper mining for wiring and electrical needs, batteries, all that kind of stuff. But Utah really from the Great Depression really for a generation or so after that, exported people. People grew up here and they couldn't find good jobs. That's why you get a whole lot of people with Utah connections and Mormon cultural ties in, for example, Phoenix and the Pacific Northwest and Southern California. But the local economy began to grow and diversify, I think, especially starting in the 70s and 80s with the still mining and still agriculture, but increasing service industries and especially tourism and outdoor recreation, which is a huge part of the state economy now. And in fact, in many ways, it's bigger than some of those older resource extraction economic components.

So why do you study history? What lights your fire about history?

Well, I. Think history offers above all things perspective. It's not that history repeats itself over and over, but sometimes it rhymes. People in the past have encountered many of the same problems we face today, not identical, but similar. So I think when you encounter history as like, for example, high school students, it's memorizing a whole bunch of dead people's names, which is incredibly boring and like, not helpful.

Now, as I memorize all these presidents, nobody cares. You can Google them, but if you have basic content, knowledge of history, then you can start looking at larger patterns and asking much bigger questions. How to societies respond to economic crises? How do they respond to environmental crisis or environmental catastrophe? How do they respond to increased immigration and diversity? What political systems are more or less resilient over time? How does technology change society over time? How does culture change over time?

You said that we have the science about climate change. That's convincing, but we can't get a lot of the public on board. Do you know of any historical examples of leadership getting the public on board? How did they do that?

If we go back to the 19th century, the federal government of the United States was very interested in surveying and selling Western land. That was the primary source of revenue for the federal government before the civil war. There was no income tax or wasn't anything like that. It was selling land. So during the civil war, while the South was not in Congress, Lincoln pushed for and got, among other things, the act that created land grant universities, the moral act, the act that created the transcontinental railroad and paid for its construction by giving away government land and the Homestead Act, which the Southern plantation owners had blocked because they had visions of stretching their slave and cotton empire to the Pacific and didn't want anyone else to get that land. But the Homestead Act allowed Americans to buy very large tracts of government land for cheap or if they improved it, if they built a cabin, if they plowed it, if they fenced it, if they were irrigated, if they could have it for free. The problem with this is that they were following the same homesteading pattern that had worked quite effectively in a place like Ohio or Iowa, where white rain's reliable, the climate's pretty reliable. You get onto the Great Plains, especially the high plains, the Great Basin. These are places of much more extreme weather, much greater weather variability, places where drought is much more common and last much longer. So some people at the time, one person in particular, a person whose name at least is familiar to residents of Utah, John Wesley Powell, who Lake Powell is named for.

Ok, I'm a little ashamed because I don't know his name, but I'm originally from Idaho, so I guess I could get a bath right now.

So John Wesley Powell was the head of the U.S. Geological Survey. He led the first expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He thought that the Homesteading Act had a big problem, which was that this form of homesteading that had worked in the Midwest was not going to work in the far West. So he writes this very detailed report, a report on the arid lands of the United States. In it, he lays out the facts on how arid most of the West is. And he argues that the Homestead Act and homesteading is going to have to look really different from what it had been before. You need to give people much larger tracts of land. They should graze it and use it for ranching rather than intensive agriculture, because tearing up the soil in times of drought could create all kinds of problems and that the federal government is going to have to pursue large scale irrigation projects, dam building projects to irrigate the West. His model for this actually was Utah was the communal irrigation system that Mormon settlers had created in Utah after they arrived here. He presents that report to Congress. Congress does what it often does when it's presented with science it doesn't like. It pays for science. It does like. So a climatic mess that was popular in the 19th century was the idea that rain follows the plow. That if you plow up the surface of the earth when it rains, the soil will will retain more moisture plowing the earth will release moisture into the air and it will change the climate. This is.

Complete garbage, but this myth coincided with a couple decades of wetter than normal weather on the high plains by high plains like so we're talking eastern Colorado, eastern Montana, west Texas, really the garden spots of North America.

Right. So they're trying to turn this into really productive farmland without large scale irrigation, following these older home setting patterns and houses says that's a terrible idea. This is a terrible idea. Congress ignores Powell. They want to sell that land. They want to make money. Now, what follows is, first, a series of blizzards and droughts in the 80s that create all kinds of economic havoc. Millions of cattle die on the plains, but homesteading continues. More Americans actually settled on in the West after 1890 than before. For historians, 1890 as a sort of significant year because the census in 1890 at the frontier is closed. It's over. But lots of people were still moving to the rural west and starting farming. OK, well, they do that for a couple more generations. They boom during World War One, when there's a huge increase in demand for food, then the agricultural depression sets in. After World War One, the dust bowl happens. Everything that Powell had warned about comes true.

So was the Dust Bowl just kind of that area returning to its regular climate patterns or know the Dust Bowl was much worse than normal?

So it's much drier and hotter than normal. The problem is, is that people had plowed up prairie grasses that had grown there for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, some of which had root systems that were 12 feet deep so they could handle drought. Now you've planted corn or grain that's died. There's nothing to hold the soil in place. So it gets super hot. It gets super dry. When's had and you get these terrifying dust storms that blow a lot of the topsoil of the region, not only east of Chicago, not only east of Washington, but all the way out to ships in the Atlantic Ocean, they get covered in red dust. So that's a huge calamity, right? When Franklin Delano Roosevelt comes into office, one of the things he pursues and the New Deal is a complete reorganization of how we manage these western lands. So what do they do? They do something called the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which pays farmers not to farm for a while in those regions. It teaches them how to plow along land contours and to plant shelter belts and to rotate crops so that the soil can recover, so the soil will stay in place. They pass the Tailor Grazing Act, combine what had once been the General Land Office, which is what sold federal land into a new agency, the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM, which controls more land than any other federal entity in the United States. So all this land that either had never sold or had sold and then defaulted on was incorporated into the BLM. And from that point forward, the BLM oversaw ranching leases, mining leases, other commercial activities, agricultural activities on that land. But it was a complete transformation in how that land was perceived by the government, because up to that point, it was all real estate. We want to sell it, want to sell it. We want to sell it from this point forward. The goal is we're going to manage it. Yeah.

So is this BLM management system, is this more in line with what Paul suggested?

Yes, definitely. So large scale ranching rather than farming, large scale irrigation and dam projects. So that's another huge competitor, the New Deal, right? I mean, Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, the water systems that make possible the huge populations in Southern California and southern Arizona, Las Vegas, Denver, for that matter. You know, and large parts of Utah, too, are all dependent on these giant federal water projects. So we we only. Let's see, what did he publish at 1870, so, you know, six years later, he said, oh, OK, maybe we should be doing that.

Yeah. So you said that Powell used Salt Lake City as an example. And a lot of people have feelings on either side of the influence, the amount of influence that Brigham Young had at the time. But was that level of influence needed to organize a successful community in the moment or.

Well, a couple of there a couple of different things there. John Wesley Powell thought that communal irrigation was the only way to survive in the Midwest. The Mormons did it and the Mormons were the first English speaking settlers to practice irrigation agriculture. Now, there are other societies that did it already. The Pueblo Indians on the Southwest, Spanish and settlers in what was the Spanish southwest of what then became the Mexican north. They were doing it. And in fact, Brigham Young was quite interested in what they were doing, what their kind of farming looked like. He asked everybody who came back from the Santa Fe Trail to tell him about farming in the Southwest. So even though the Mormons were, quite frankly, reviled in the 19th century because of plural marriage, which completely freaked out Victorian Americans on a scale that we cannot begin to, we can't overestimate how much it freaked them out. Yeah, totally freaked them out. But that was grudgingly seen as a very successful model of how you could create a stable settlement and indeed the first successful American settlement in the interior west on a large scale. So that irrigation model does become a model for other aspects, maybe don't become national models, but they do certainly become regional models. I mean, the the urban planning system that Joseph Smith first created and that Brigham Young that implemented in Salt Lake City became the model for basically all the Mormon towns and cities in the interior west in the intermountain west, and played a huge role in the urban development of this region and really only in more recent decades has been superseded by large scale suburban development, which really is much more a product of, on the one hand, sort of older eastern suburbs, places like Riverside outside Chicago, but especially places like Southern California through mass suburbia created after World War Two.

Yeah, yeah. You've mentioned the Moral Act, which created land grant universities, which Utah State is and also intersects with your research a lot. Can you give me a little bit of a history lesson on the moral act?

I tell you a little bit about the moral act. So the United States obviously had universities that dated back to the early period that were private, like Harvard and places like that. Right. That were mostly religious in origin, that were mostly based on the British university system. But as the nation grew, some states began to found state universities and a way to fund a much larger university system was to use revenue from the sale of land to pay for universities. Right. So the moral act was created with the rationale that it would create colleges that were aimed at a much broader swath of the public, not sort of elite groups like Harvard had been. And that also would be focused initially at least on agriculture, on the applied sciences, on what Americans might like to call a practical education, vocational education, education for farmers and for tradesmen. They, of course, these universities over time are going to expand and diversify and all sorts of other kinds of disciplines, too. But that was the original idea behind them. And the idea, again, was that. All that Western land was an incredible resource for the federal government to pursue initiatives, right land grant colleges are one using that land to pay for the transcontinental railroad as one. Selling that land for homesteading was one, and the idea was on the one hand, this is a stable source of revenue for the federal government. It's a way for the federal government to pursue economic development, social development, long term, but also the idea that this land. Was what made America unique, that we're not a small, crowded European country with teeming cities full of poor people with nowhere to go. Again, this is this is the math, right? I'm not saying this is all real. This this goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, who thought that everyone should be a small time farmer, said a guy who lived in the hilltop mansion with 550 slaves. Yeah, right. Yeah, but that's the that's the myth. Yeah. That's been incredibly powerful in our culture over time.

Yeah. So I'm thinking back to the selling of land that caused the Dust Bowl eventually. And then because people were focused on just real estate and making money off that and the selling of land and like suburbs like California and stuff, the Dust Bowl kind of led to the BLM. Do you see any parallels happening with what might happen in these urban sprawl?

Well, I'll give you an example. That's not a new one, but it's something that's become it's come much more into focus in the recent past. So one of the things is also created in the early 20th century, even before the BLM is the national park system. The National Park Service was created in 1916. The parks go further back all the way to 1872 with Yellowstone. But another example is the Forest Service and the U.S. forest system, which is primarily created not wholly, but primarily by Teddy Roosevelt, who added, you know, millions, tens of millions of acres to the national forest system while he was president. So some of these national forests abutted even in the early 20th century, abutted urban areas. So one example is the national forest that covers the San Gabriel Mountains, which are right next to Pasadena and the other suburbs of L.A. in the San Gabriel Valley. Even that early, even by the 19 teens and 20s, they were having fires which freaked out suburbanites. So one of the reasons the federal government so aggressively tried to put out fires and forest was because some of these were near cities and some urban areas.

That was a local example in the early 20th century. It's now a story about almost every western city, right? They're all surrounded and immediately about national forest land. That's true in Salt Lake City. That's true in Logan. That's true other places, too. So with great effectiveness, we fought and prevented forest fires for all the right reasons. Right. It means you don't have terrorized urbanites. It means you preserve scenery, you preserve timber. The problem, of course, is that Western forests were mostly evolved to burn, to burn periodically. And some of the iconic trees in the American west, the lodgepole pine, which is the main kind of tree in Yellowstone, the giant sequoias in the Sierras, those trees can't germinate unless they burn, unless the cones burn. So in trying to protect early suburbia intervened in a huge way and the ecology of Western for us. And now we're dealing with the consequences of that with lots of dead timber, with trees that are much more dense than they ever were historically, and fires that are much more destructive and much hotter than they would have been 150 years ago when most of these fires would have moved through.

Undergrowth and brush below the trees and not reach the same degree of havoc in comparing how different communities in the West developed, and we definitely see the California fire location, Californication, California vacation of communities here in Utah.

Is there any ways that Brigham Young planned and the plot of Zion and stuff have continued to influence Utah?

Well, it certainly has, in the sense that I mean, I know the story is that Brigham Young said the streets had to be so wide so that an oxen team could could complete a U-turn in a street that certainly turned out to be very handy for mass transit because you can devote lanes for light rail or buses and still have plenty of lanes for traffic. That's one little example. I mean, I do think. Utah is in most respects, Utah looks more like other states than not, it's usually less distinctive than not. But one of the things that is still distinctive about Utah, even in the 21st century, is there is still more of, I think, more of a sense of.

Communal interest of community focus. You know, here in Logan, we have a free bus system that is not something you would find in an equivalent sized town in the American South, for example. And that's not just an income thing. That's about other choices, too. Now, why would I pay for mass transit for people who are different than me?

So in that sense, Utah is distinctive and and has this communitarian bent that is still here as the state becomes more and more diverse and frankly, just more and more crowded as more and more people move here and there, more and more people here. I think we're sort of playing out a political experiment to see how the state changes and how the state's culture and politics changes over time.

Mm hmm. What things do you think are important for people to keep in mind as this experiment plays out? That's not a question for a historian. Well, I mean, what lessons from the past?

Well, I mean, of a real basic thing is be nice to each other. Right? I mean, you know, I mean, I think problems come when we see other people not as individuals, but as groups and when other groups are different than me. Other groups are different than my group. I think we live in a world that's increasingly interconnected and increasingly crowded.

And the covid-19 coronavirus is one example of many of how increasingly our problems are not local or national or global.

And one of the challenges of modern human society is figuring out how do you manage problems at a global scale. I'm sorry to say the long term historical lesson from that is not particularly positive.

I mean, there have been very large cosmopolitan empires in the past, whether we're talking about the the the Hapsburg Empire, Austro Hungarian Empire, or whether we're talking about Rome or something like that, almost all of us empires were incredibly autocratic. And ultimately, they all fell apart, so can we create a global system that allows for diversity, that allows for democracy, although it may not be our version of democracy? You know, China certainly is providing a very different model for how you manage a large modern society. And I think it's a real question. How can people. How can people deal with things that are a global problem, whether it's pandemics, whether it's climate change, whether it's, for example, what we're about to enter right now, which is pretty clearly a very big global economic downturn. How do we cope with those things on a on a transnational and global scale? And how do we maintain our. Our distinctiveness and our own institutions in the in the wake of those kinds of huge changes and forces does anything.

Make you optimistic?

I know you dig into history a lot, you know, human societies have grappled with some really spectacular problems. The United States did a spectacular job of grappling with World War Two.

Could we come together as effectively as we did in the 1940s? I don't know. I think it's an open question. I think that human societies in some ways are incredibly resilient, humans can survive all kinds of things, even when societies change on a great scale in huge ways. I mean, the the peoples who inhabited North America before European colonization survived on an extremely on a continent with extremely variable climate, with very long droughts, big changes in weather over time and survived and prospered for millennia. You know, a thousand years ago, there were more people living in the Four Corners region than there are today. So societies can survive long term, but we are trying to do so in a world that is technologically connected and quite simply, much more crowded than any society than any version of the world has ever been before. So I think it's a. It's an open question, but I do think that we can return to these earlier moments of crisis and see how people responded to things like the polio epidemic or the Great Depression or even, you know, an environmental problem that we addressed in the early 1970s. We realize that the Freon and other chlorofluorocarbons we were releasing into the atmosphere in cooling chemicals and hairspray and all other things were destroying the ozone layer or the upper atmosphere, which protects us from the sun's ultraviolet ultraviolet radiation. And as a global society, we dealt with it.

Everybody everywhere agreed to reduce the use of those chemicals to find other chemicals to use instead. It's not been a perfect solution by any means, but it was a real intervention that happened at the global level. That is a success as a success story of addressing a global environmental crisis so we can do it. Which is not to say it's easy.

Different cultures have settled in the West, I guess I should say. Different European cultures came over and settled in the West. I know that L.A. is on a angled axis because that's how Mediterranean cities were designed. And here in Utah, you had a lot of Scandinavian immigrants and other communities coming over. How do different cultures interact with the land different?

Well, of course, that's a huge I know the question I mean, to start with your first example, the Romans loved grids, they learned street grids, they built all their street grids at a 90 degree angle excuse me, a 45 degree angle to the cardinal directions. So I tilted. What do Americans looks like? A diagonal tilted street plan. The Spanish borrowed the entire Roman urban planning system imported into the Americas. Every Roman city was on a grid tilted at that angle. All of them had a big open plaza space in the center. Every Spanish founded city, every Mexican town, most American southwestern cities and towns all still have that model. In the case of Los Angeles, when the Anglo American showed up, they literally wrenched the entire city grid outside the core of downtown to go north, south, east, west. So if you look at a map of the whole city, you can actually see the old Spanish angled streets.

And then if you're driving from downtown outward westbound on Wilshire Boulevard, for example, there's a moment where the street curves because you're exiting the Spanish grid and entering the Anglo American grid.

What are the advantages of the Spanish grid versus the Anglo American?

I don't really. You don't know? I mean, I, I there probably is probably had some, I'm sure with the Romans that had something to do with astronomy or the alignment of the sun and moon. I don't think it really matters. But Europeans more broadly, once they get out of the medieval period when they are building cities from scratch, they tend to like grids. And Americans love grids because grids are orderly and grids are easy to divvy up and sell. And the largest example of the grids of all, the largest one is the grid that covers almost all of North America, at least the United States portion of North America, all the way back before we even had a constitution. Right after the United States became independent, we passed something called the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which set up a system to survey and divvy up all land in America and in the United States, all new land annexed in the United States, starting with what was then the Northwest, what we now call Lake Michigan, for example, divvy it up on a grid that starts at the mile square level and then divides down from there. It's a Cartesian plane applied to the landscape of North America. You get an airplane and you see it. Yeah, right. So that's an example of the Enlightenment inscribing scribing itself on the landscape on a huge scale.

If people left grid so much, why did some of the earlier cities like Boston not develop that?

Because Boston is a village that grew. Right. So in order to have a grid, you've got to have urban planning. London's not a grid. Rome itself was not a grid because those were small places that grew big. You can only build a grid if you have the space to do it and the empty land to do it right. So even in Paris, for example, where, you know, they had this really heavy handed urban planning and they blasted through all these boulevards like the Shaltiel is say they had to demolish medieval Paris to build it. So Americans again, because they had all this what to them was open space, obviously, with people who lived there.

It was not open space. But for Anglo Americans, European Americans, it was open space. And that meant they could pursue urban planning on a scale that other societies had rarely had the opportunity to do.

Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. Sure thing.

All right. That was my conversation with Dr. Lawrence over in it. I mentioned mining in Utah and I may have diminished the role that mining and other extractive industries play in Utah's economy. Tried to find some good numbers, but I didn't try incredibly hard. So from what I was able to suss out, about two to four percent of Utah's economy is extractive industries. In Wyoming, it's north of 30 percent. So compared to other states, extractive industry in Utah isn't as significant. But it's still significant and it's very significant to the small communities, many of them far from the Wasatch Front, that depend on extractive industries. So for everyone taking a trip to Moab after coronaviruses over, stop at the pick and roll and help her support that little community, I'd probably pick up a chocolate milk and black licorice. But you might be more of a Mountain Dew and Doritos kind of person. Or you might like to eat healthy like my friend Sidney. I called her up because she just got back from her trip to Amsterdam. It was cut short because of coronavirus. She used her husband's phone to record her end of our call. I'll be summarizing some stuff and recreating my side of the conversation through.

Voiceover We were actually debating on if we wanted to go on the trip or not, that I really believe in tourism and I've been supporting, you know, like and not letting fear.

The reason why we canceled it, we had a red light on March 10th and we landed on the morning of the 11th, so at this point in the conversation, I was judging Sydney a little bit for still going to Amsterdam despite covid-19. But then I remembered that she left on the 10th, three days before all of Utah schools closed. Two days before USA, you announced the shift to online classes and one day before I abandoned everything I was doing and started working on instead. When Sydney left, I was editing some awesome videos about urban planning in Utah for the March 17th Research Landscapes event, which would have been held today. The day of this voiceover and the day of my conversation with Sydney. So while I had heard plenty about covid-19 before March 11th, 2020, there was a distinct moment when business as usual ended. After being in Amsterdam for a few days, the U.S. announced travel restrictions to Europe, Sidney's family was starting to get concerned and the other country she was planning to visit were shutting down. So Sydney called up her airline.

So I was on hold for about 50 minutes. And then a customer service rep came on and she was able to get me on a flight the next day. We didn't have to pay any change fees. And then when we got to the airport, it was rather empty, like we were advised to get there three hours early and we got through security in minutes.

Overall, Sydney was pretty lucky she didn't get stuck in Amsterdam. She got tickets home pretty easy. Luckiest of all. Her plane out of Amsterdam was pretty empty. So Sydney and her husband Andy, both had a row of hard airplane seats to themselves. Flight out of Amsterdam, landed at JFK in New York City, one of 13 airports set up for CDC screenings.

And so as we got off the plane, there were two police officers and then two representatives from the CDC there to greet us. And they took our temperature and then they gave us a health alert card, maybe an extra 20 or 30 minutes to get off of the plane because they have a low key layover where they try and keep their distance and not breathe on anybody.

And then they get on a plane for Salt Lake, which isn't a designated CDC airport. Their temperature was not taken. They get home late, go to bed, and they wake up this morning, March 17th.

And this morning I called the Weber County Health Department. And, you know, because we're wanting to be proactive to this and reactive and we don't you know, my my biggest fear is being a carrier and not showing symptoms. And so we called Weber County Health Department actually was able to get through right away with them. And but the person that I talked to on the phone, I said, can we get a test done? Like we just got back from Europe?

Can we can we get a test done just to make sure that we're OK and planning on being quarantined for two weeks? But you know what are so we can do to be proactive? And she said that unless we are feeling any symptoms, that they're not handing out tests that they have a not enough.

All right. So they're sitting in a story. I have a little better understanding of what's going on at the moment, and it feels good to know a little more. One more thing about my conversation with Dr. Lawrence.

So the parts of L.A. that were set up by the Spanish are 45 degrees off of the cardinal directions. I brought that up because I listen to it in an episode of 99 percent Invisible in reviewing the article about that episode, Mediterranean style cities that are turned that way do it so that they can get more shade in the summer and more sun in the winter. I'm not exactly sure how that works. I haven't wrapped my brain around it yet, but I'll figure it out. But remember to support your local podcast by subscribing to instead and sharing this episode with a friend who had their plans cut short. This installment of Instead was edited by Nick Vasquez and me, Wyatt Trava as part of our work in the Office of Research at Utah State University.

History offers, above all things perspective. It's not that history repeats itself over and over, but sometimes.


How we respond to a crisis
Looking at historical patterns
The father of Lake Powell
The Morrill Act and the birth of USU
Utah has a unique sense of community...
A connection between Ancient Rome and Utah
Sydney and an empty Amsterdam airport