I have seen the narrow driveway that leads up from the canyon road to the parking lot carved into the mountainside; I have seen granite boulders the size of buildings split in half, a few neat drill marks remaining at the top where early last century our tireless ancestors dynamited a vault in the ancient gray canyon, a vault strong enough to withstand war, weather, even the end of time. I do not know whether the files are paper, computer tape, or digital, but I know they are there: millions upon millions of names rescued from census records and baptismal registries by Mormon genealogists, saved from oblivion, these names, the names of our ancestors. Wearing all white, we have carried their names on little paper slips through our holy temples. We have stepped into giant golden fonts resting on the back of twelve life-size golden statues of oxen, and we have been baptized, fully immersed in the shimmering turquoise water, maybe a dozen times in a row, for a dozen ancestors, in one day. By our labors, our ancestors are baptized again and married to each other once again, but this time for the eternities: beyond the scuttle of drying leaves, and the clouds of fruit flies, and the musky warmth of bodies in bed in the morning, they are sealed up against chaos and perdition.
