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walked with him back toward the altar, my mind was churning with emotion. I could not continue as if nothing had happened. Why would I want to have anything to do with a church that would humiliate me? I walked out, and I did not set foot in another Mormon church for twenty-six years.
    I grew up as a Southern California kid bent on enjoying life.
    My dad told me that everything I wanted to know had been written down in a book somewhere, awakening my curiosity and probably giving me a bit of an edge growing up during a very tumultuous period. During the summer when I was eight, I read Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey ; plowed through the library’s shelves of biography, autobiography, and history; and then turned to the thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica .
    Still, I was swept up in the counter-culture madness that was California in the 1960s, and I tumbled from gifted pupil to troubled youth. Out of school, out of church, and out of luck at eighteen years old, I drifted from coast to coast, always looking for the next party as I earned a living in the building trades. My motorcycle was my best friend. It had a special sheath in which I kept a pair of crutches, which I needed from having been in so many accidents. But the worst mishap came in 1979, when I was a passenger in a pickup truck that slammed into a huge rock on a mountain road. The collision broke my neck and jaw and a lot of other bones, leaving me in a body cast with steel plates in my head and face holding me together and a future of reconstructive surgeries. The doctors expected me to die. I spent several weeks in traction while undergoing multiple reconstructive surgeries and five months in a “halo,” a medieval-looking metal band that encircled my head, with bolts tightened into my skull with a torque wrench to keep my head immobile. My neck was broken at the C2 vertebra, an injury commonly referred to as a “hangman’s break.” The purpose of the halo was to make it possible for me to move around, instead of being immobilized in a special bed that kept me in traction. The problem was, I had been in bed so long that my muscles atrophied to the point of uselessness and I had to learn to walk all over again. It took two long years to finally get my legs back under me and start feeling whole again.
    That close call allowed me to believe I had been given a second chance with life, a rare opportunity to start anew, and I decided to change course. I started to really grow up, got married, and settled down to start a family. But when our kids were born, my wife and I began to realize that Southern California probably wasn’t the best place to raise them. For a variety of reasons, none of them having to do with religion, we decided to move to Utah. I still had no religious affiliation, and my wife knew little about Mormons.
    But when my partner in a construction business in Riverside, California, learned of our decision to relocate to Utah, he was bewildered and concerned. “Be careful,” he warned. “The place is full of polygamists.”
    â€œWell, we have Crips and Bloods out here, Gene,” I said. “The cops just found the body of an eight-year-old girl who had been brutalized and tossed alongside the freeway just a few blocks from my home—and you think I should be afraid of a few polygamists?” I was sick of hearing remarks about polygamists and Utah. Polygamy hadn’t been practiced for more than a hundred years out there—or so I thought.
    So we headed for Cedar City, a place that now seems to have been picked for us by fate. When we pulled up to our new house, people we had never seen before came over to help us unload, bringing food and instant friendship. There were Mormons and non-Mormons alike. One introduced himself as Brig Young. My wife, holding a plate of cookies that had just been brought over, blurted out, “Oh, come on—!!” Brig chuckled and said,