Today marked the 100th anniversary of Utah’s statehood. We’ve been bombarded with TV specials and commemorative products for over a year now. But it wasn’t until tonight that the events penetrated my thick skin.

I was sitting in a steamy car on Capitol Hill with my wife Terry, waiting for the fireworks to begin. It wasn’t my idea. Terry makes us observe these rituals. Her family was parked nearby along with a thousand others. The heater was on high and the centennial program blared from the car radio. The sound of Donny and Marie Osmond and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was on the air in the Great Basin Kingdom.

I thought back over the essays I had written for Utah: A Centennial Celebration, a commemorative coffeetable book. The photographer, Tom Till, and I wanted to expand the focus of the celebration from our pioneer past to Utah’s entire history. One of my essays dealt with the usual suspects, Mormon pioneers like Brigham Young and my great-grandmother, Clarissa or Clicky, as we called her, Young’s sixth daughter by his second wife. In the other essays I tried to dig even deeper in time, all the way back to the billion-year-old rocks in the bottom of Westwater Canyon, a whitewater tributary of the Colorado River.

When the finale came over the radio we joined the pilgrimage into the night. The roar of a thousand voices announced the first fireworks bursting in the black sky. The chills I felt had nothing to do with the temperature.

Church and state. The Constitution says keep them separate. In Utah, they are one and the same. But there are two Utahs. One Utah is the buildings, the government, the wide clean streets, and hundreds of small communities that would not exist without the church and state. The other Utah—the rocky canyons, tall mountains, clear streams, salty lake, deep snow, deer, elk, mountain lion, spinedace, tiger beetle, falcon—was here before and would exist without the church and state.

We have two histories. I have two histories. Tonight, I realized for the first time that my two histories don’t have to fight each other for the same space in my life.

March 26, 1996

Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ) led a filibuster to kill a bill that would have designated official wilderness areas covering 1.8 million acres of Bureau of Land Management lands in Utah. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance successfully organized national opposition to the bill, which was backed by the State of Utah. SUWA says there are at least 5.7 million wilderness acres.

Most Utahns believe wild Utah is somewhere in that range. But wildness is hard to pin down with numbers. Maybe that’s why official Utah is finding it so hard to control the other Utah, the wild one.

July 21, 1996

Paul Shepard died last week. His funeral was today. A long line of family, friends, former students, and people like me, whose lives were affected by Paul, walked behind the hearse carrying his coffin down Second East to the Church.

Paul’s books have their own shelf in my library. Nature and Madness, Man in the Landscape, The Tender Carnivore, The Others, Thinking Animals. Tonight I read sections that I’d underlined on earlier readings.

Paul wrote that civilization was a “veneer” beneath which “lies the human in us who knows the rightness of birth in gentle surroundings, the necessity of a rich nonhuman environment, play at being animals, the discipline of natural history... the metaphorical significance of natural life....”

Paul believed that in all of us there is a “secret undamaged person” who is aware of these things.

August. 6, 1996

My nephew Seth, one of my brother’s four children and one of my father’s fifteen grandchildren, earned his Eagle Scout badge today. The entire family went to the ceremony. The Eagle Scouts in the audience were invited to sit in a special section at the front of the hall.

I sat in the audience with the women and children. I was never an Eagle Scout. I only made it to Life Scout and hated most of what that required.

Not only did I never become an Eagle Scout, I didn’t go on a mission, we don’t have children, I don’t go to church, and I don’t work in the family construction business.

“You didn’t do anything you were supposed to do, did you?” Terry said to me this evening.

September 18, 1996

America got a new national monument today—the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. I was sitting in Louise Liston’s living room in Escalante when President Clinton made the announcement on TV live from the Grand Canyon.

Louise is a county commissioner. Escalante is one of six small towns along Highway 12, which is the northern boundary of the new 1.7 million acre monument.

We were trying to talk about sustainable economic development and community-based conservation projects that might work in this region of remote redrock canyons and small Mormon communities. Louise was angry about the monument because it forecloses the possibility of local control of the land.

Terry was at the Grand Canyon celebrating with the president, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, and Mike Matz, director of SUWA.

I wanted to be alone. This afternoon I went for a hike in the Gulch, now part of the new monument. I have been there many times before, but something about it felt different.

A torrential rain had washed away footprints and soaked the sand. Maybe it was the smell, so fresh and clean. Or maybe it was because the canyon is no longer under siege. Its wildness is no longer in question.

Oct. 13, 1996

Between their acts and ceremonies is the world and in this world the storms blow and trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God made go to and fro. Yet this world men do not see.

—Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

Could it be that acts and ceremonies make up our official history, and our other history is the world where trees twist in the wind of storms that “men do not see” ? I have felt that world. It pierces my veneer, strikes me to the core, and makes my soul glow.

December 11, 1996

Another journalist is writing another article about the new monument. He called to tell me that Louise Liston told him that she and I agree on everything.

This made me a little uncomfortable. Louise and I talk mostly about solutions, such as helping working ranches survive and protecting open space. We talk about new forms of economic development. We don’t talk much about monuments and wilderness areas. Louise and I share our cultural history. Within that history we are making progress on issues that we can agree on. We have decided not to waste time arguing over those issues on which we disagree.

But saving ourselves and our land will require more than culture. Saving ourselves will require going deep into our core, our biological history, and getting to know more of the wild world where storms are blowing and trees twisting in the wind.

My hope is that Utah will some day learn to live with its complete history and the next century will teach us how to live with each other in this wild world.

Brooke Williams is author of Utah: A Centennial Celebration (Westcliffe Publishers). He is married to writer Terry Tempest Williams. They live in Salt Lake City.