Several of the towns in Sanpete have festivities. It’s Utah’s own holiday!

Of course, you may feel like I do sometimes. A holiday party might be just parking myself on the front porch with something to read, a couple of Twinkies, and chocolate ice cream floating in a tumbler of Mountain Dew Code Red.

(Hey, I’ve never claimed to make sense or be healthy with what I ingest for private porch parties. Some people consider their body as a temple. Sometimes I consider my body as a laboratory for caloric research sponsored by Alka-Seltzer and Tums)

Federal offices, like the post office, will be open on Pioneer Day. But state and county offices, and some other businesses take the day off. My dad was born on Pioneer Day. He liked to say that he gave his employees the day off for his birthday. He would have been 116 years old this year.

Once again, this year, I’m trying to do a little pioneer attitude adjustment in connection with the 24th of July. I’ve been softening up with my attitude about the pioneers. At my age, it’s about time I made peace with my forefathers. I may be meeting some of them in the not too distant future.

Those of you who know me, or have been long time readers, might know that I have had a bit of an ongoing struggle with a semi-bad attitude in regards to the whole pioneer thing.

I’ve let this attitude show now and then. When I do let it show, I’m often met by shocked looks, wagging fingers, shaking heads and “Oh Merrill, you don’t mean that” sort of comments.

When I say “pioneer thing,” what I mean is the ancestor worship we seem to sometimes practice in Sanpete in regards to our pioneer forerunners. In Sanpete, we don’t have the holy trinity; we have the holy “quad’ity:” the Father, Son, Holy Ghost and Isaac Morley. “Father Morley” led the original party of settlers who bravely first settled Sanpete in 1849.

If you can trace your genealogy through one of the original Sanpete settlers, you are automatically in an upper society caste and shouldn’t mix too freely with the untouchables in lower castes. (Okay, it’s not that bad, but sometimes it almost feels like it.)

It is all right to honor our forefathers, but I just think that maybe we should leave the ancestor worship to other cultures. Our Sanpete brand of the Shintoism culture is regularly practiced. Sometimes it seems like we have pioneer commemorations, reenactment treks, remembrance events, or some “pioneer’ish” thing every time we turn around.

I don’t want to trivialize the trials and tribulations of the Utah pioneers, but we’ve reenacted and proxy tribulated right along with them “’til the cows have all come home.”

Okay, okay – I guess these first few paragraphs don’t sound very penitent, do they? I just had to let it out and establish what I’m talking about. And you can see that perhaps I’m still a work in progress. But, I’m claiming to be making significant progress with my attitude.

What has been helping me change my attitude is that I’ve been getting to know a little more about the pioneers and their lives. The more you learn about them and their times, the more you learn that they were real “people” and not necessarily a race of “near-gods.” The more I learn though, the more I wonder if some of them really did have some “super powers.”

They certainly had problems and had to face them — just like we do. Different times, different problems — but real problems in both cases, just the same.

A few of you, by now, might have wondered about the title of this column. It’s now time to reveal why nine hours, 48 minutes is significant.

Last year, we were invited to go with our daughter, her husband and their three daughters to Switzerland and Germany for a Thanksgiving vacation. We went. It was a terrific and memorable trip including seeing sights and visiting friends.

We flew home on Monday, November 27th with flights from Zurich to Paris and then Paris on to Salt Lake City. As we were preparing to take off from Paris, the pilot made an announcement.

He said that our flight from “wheels up in Paris to wheels down in Salt Lake City” would take nine hours and 48 minutes. I set the stopwatch on my phone. As we hit the runway in Utah, I checked the time. Remarkably, the captain was within a couple of minutes of being right on with his time prediction.

Imagine that! – From the interior of Europe to Salt Lake in less than ten hours on a regular commercial flight. My activities on the flight involved deciding what TV shows or movies to watch, how much to read, or whether to get some nap time.

Contrast that flight to the journey of my 2nd great grandfather William Ogden and his family. They traveled from Lancashire County in England to Salt Lake. Their trans-Atlantic voyage was on the “Emerald Isle” ship with over 900 passengers. They set sail from Liverpool in June 1868.

From an account of my 2nd great uncle: “The first death on the ship was a small girl. They put her in a box and put her over into the sea where it drifted away as far as the eye could see while the mother watched it go. Thirty-eight persons died before we got to the United States.”

They were eight weeks and 4 days on the water. They were able to travel by train to North Platte, Nebraska where the railway ended. From there it was a “pioneer trek” arriving in Salt Lake in late September.

So, on this Pioneer Day holiday, I say let’s honor and venerate our pioneer forefathers. I’m going to do it knowing that they were human beings taking on awesome challenges and doing the best they could. And they did remarkably well.

We are in the same position in many ways here and now. We are human beings with genuine challenges and we need to do the best we can. And hopefully, we’ll do remarkably well too — Merrill