W = F × D × COS (Θ)
By Shawn Bliss
Photography: Faun Jackson, for MUSE magazine, Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement
I drive a bookmobile through juniper and sagebrush hills to Vernon, Mona, Birdseye. Through my windshield, the limestone strata of Cascade, Timp and Nebo mirror the accumulated millennia of human labor in this place. Lifetimes of sweat, kinetic effort stacked in temporal layers. Hunting, gathering, planting, harvesting, cooking. We build, fix, hustle. Indigenous? Immigrant? Saint? Sinner? We all do the work.
Utah is pretty damn large, it contains multitudes. Smokejumpers, coders, welders, kindergarten teachers, large-animal vets. Brewers, editors, apple pickers. Midwives delivering life, hospice nurses watching it dissolve breath by breath, excavators digging graves in the snow. A continuum of exertion, connecting this generation to all previous. We rub salve into calloused fingers and pass our hammers down to our daughters and our sons.
Shawn Bliss is a bookmobile librarian who talks about books to readers in four central Utah counties. In a previous life, he participated in spoken-word and poetry communities in Colorado and New Mexico. He splits his time between Provo and Smithfield.