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When I first got here, I found the breadth of the names of those enshrined on the Walk of Fame unutterably depressing, with its embarrassment of people who are all but unrecognizable. Every step was a cruel reminder of the heartlessness of time and tide. For every Hedy Lamarr to make you recall what a brilliant, patent-holding beauty she was, there is a Barbara La Marr to keep you cognizant that someday you, too, will be dead and the subject of a great, cosmic shrugging “Who?” (Barbara La Marr, “the Girl Who Was Too Beautiful,” best friend of ZaSu Pitts, one of the first in Hollywood to succumb to drugs in 1926. She was already dead more than thirty years before they even started the Walk.) But as the days pass and I spend more and more time with the pavement, I revise my opinion. I suppose the way to think of it is as if the pipe-fitters union was honoring one of its own. It’s just by happy accident that some of its members happen to be globally famous and recognizable. The custom has sprung up elsewhere—on Fashion Avenue in New York, I walk over Claire McCardell’s and Norman Norell’s plaques; in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, that borough’s native-born Ruby Stevens, better known as Barbara Stanwyck, has a paving stone among the greenery; on Toronto’s King Street is Canada’s Walk of Fame, about which ’nuff said. And in each place, the overriding sense one has is of, if not having intruded exactly, then at least being witness to something that ultimately doesn’t involve one. A Walk of Fame by its nature turns out to be a very local phenomenon.

I take one last stroll over to Vine on my last morning on the boulevard. Most of the businesses are still shuttered. The tourists have yet to arrive at Grauman’s. I pass by Dan Avey’s star once again. It is all of four days old but I see that it is patched. No doubt, it left the workshop patched. There, against the salmon
pink of the five-pointed star, is an occlusion of darker red, like a bruise or the small beating heart of a tiny creature. There is an almost animal frailty in that blemish that makes me stop in my tracks for a minute. People have been coming out West with stars in their eyes for so long, and for just as long, some have returned whence they came, their hopes dashed. But if one’s dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder.

“Great swarms of bees will arise. Are you ignoring the signs?”

The fortune cookie is nothing more than a canny History Channel promotion for a special about Nostradamus, but it seems an eerie message to receive mere days before my departure for Utah. Perhaps I am grabbing at straws by ascribing wisdom to a cookie, but the forty-fifth state owes much of its history to fiery-eyed revelation and prophecy, and Deseret—the original pioneer name for the territory—was a neologism Joseph Smith coined in
The Book of Mormon
to mean “honeybee.” The beehive is even the state’s symbol.

If the lobby of my hotel is any indication, the end of October is an auspicious time to visit, with the air abuzz with omen and augury. Arriving past midnight, I am greeted by an elaborate Halloween display of a dry-ice fountain, skeins of cobweb, and cutouts of Dracula and Frankenstein, made all the more ghoulish by overhead fluorescent lighting, like the nurses’ station in a state hospital. My room is cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator
dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats “Stay up! Stay up!” I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint.

Morning banishes the gloom. The air is sun-washed and pristine, carrying only a veil of haze from the California wildfires that have been raging for weeks. The lobby is full of genealogy tourists who have come to trace their family histories at the extensive Mormon archives. Utah, it seems, is where one comes to be found.

I join their happy ranks and follow them the few short blocks up to Temple Square, the spiritual and geographic heart of the city. A bride and groom hop up onto the stone ledge of a planter for the photographer, the better to capture the shining gold statue of the angel Moroni in the background. Moroni is the archangel of the faith, the prophet-warrior who gave Joseph Smith the golden plates that would eventually become
The Book of Mormon
. There are numerous couples in white dresses and tuxedoes marking their big day among the opulent glories of these world headquarters of the Latter-day Saints.

I begin in the South Visitors’ Center, a sparsely furnished, carpeted space as hushed as a high-end rehab facility. The bulk of the displays are about the extraordinary and arduous efforts of the early Mormon pioneers in building the temple. Huge, rough granite blocks were hewn by hand, transported one at a time over miles in wagons that often broke under the weight of the stone.

“The Latter Day Saints labored with faith for forty years to build the temple. A flawed initial foundation, the arrival of federal troops in 1858 … caused major delays.” (An oblique reference to the skirmish known as the Utah War when Washington, D.C., alarmed at the subversive and un-American practice of
polygamy, sent soldiers in, replacing Mormon leader Brigham Young with Alfred Cumming as territorial governor.) Reading further, apparently the chief mason had his leg amputated and still managed to hobble the twenty-two miles to Temple Square and then climb the scaffold in order to carve the final, consecrating declaration
HOLINESS TO THE LORD
in the stone façade.

In his 1873 novel,
Around the World in Eighty Days
, Jules Verne sends Phileas Fogg and his valet, Passepartout, through Utah by train. There they encounter a man, dressed in the severe dark clothes of a clergyman, pasting flyers up and down the train. “Passepartout approached and read one of these notices, which stated that Elder William Hitch, Mormon missionary, taking advantage of his presence on train No. 48, would deliver a lecture on Mormonism in car No. 117, from eleven to twelve o’clock; and that he invited all who were desirous of being instructed concerning the mysteries of the religion of the ‘Latter Day Saints’ to attend.” Passepartout takes a seat among thirty listeners. The elder William Hitch begins his heated oration “in a rather irritated voice, as if he had been contradicted in advance. ‘I tell you that Joe Smith is a martyr, that his brother Hiram is a martyr, and that the persecutions of the United States Government against the prophets will also make a martyr of Brigham Young. Who dares to say the contrary?’ ” Hitch’s outrage is understandable. Verne was writing less than fifteen years after the Utah War. Brigham Young had been imprisoned by the U.S. government for polygamy just the previous October. By the end of the jeremiad, Passepartout is the only one left listening.

Nearly a century and a half later, the Mormons remain objects of suspicious scrutiny, a reputation stoked by the likes of lunatic-fringe polygamist leader, convicted rapist (and, it should
be noted, non-Utahan) Warren Jeffs. Or by the fact that blacks were only admitted into the Mormon church in 1978 (a divine revelation of racial inclusion that coincided a little too tidily with the recruitment needs of the Brigham Young University football team, I am told). A sampling of some of the other things about the Latter-day Saints mentioned to me over the course of my time in Utah:

• Polygamous houses are identifiable by the screening stands of cedars out front.
  
• Mormon housewives will “accidentally” throw a red item of clothing into the washing machine, thus changing their garments—the ritual underclothing that comes in standard-issue white—pink.
  
• There is a growing social problem in polygamous families where the patriarch—also known as the father—like a silverback gorilla whose sexual dominance is threatened, casts out the male children upon their reaching puberty. This is particularly common in households where some of the wives are young teenagers themselves. Facing homelessness, these adolescents fall under the care of the state or live in group homes, eking out livings as carpenters and cabinetmakers, part of the traditional LDS skill set.
  
• The usual proscriptions against caffeine do not apply to Coca-Cola, since BYU’s board of trustees has a financial interest in the beverage company.
  
• There is a higher-than-average incidence of homosexuality among Mormon men. (This tidbit was always accompanied by a hyperlink to a calendar of shirtless missionaries and, like many theories in the “Who’s gay?” phylum, almost invariably followed up with the
  super-scientific assessment that “Mormon boys are the hottest.”)
  
• The best place to see polygamous families is at Costco, where the competitive pricing and mayonnaise in jars the size of fire hydrants makes it the obvious choice for a household with eighteen children. Perhaps I went to the wrong one. I see nobody resembling sister wives. But far more miraculous are the free eats. Unlike the eagle-eyed young foodies who dole out the samples in New York, where they essentially memorize your face, thus making going back for seconds nigh on impossible, Costco SLC employs a (barely) standing army of the geriatric, the halt, and the mentally not-all-entirely-there, who man stations in their red uniforms and hand out free pizza, chiles rellenos, penne with chicken in “a quattro formaggio sauce,” and never once give you the fisheye, even if you return in under a minute for another pleated paper cup of those excellent canned Indian River grapefruit segments.
  

Some of this is demonstrably true (Warren Jeffs
was
a polygamist and he
is
in jail; if social services is taking case histories from boys being thrown out of their homes, then QED), and some of it is essentially unverifiable (without proper LDS identification, you cannot even see the garments for sale in a Salt Lake City department store, white or pink). But it is the tenacity of and the pleasure taken in disseminating the whispered chatter that is remarkable. Prior to my trip, I did not fail to receive a joking “Don’t let them get you!” warning from everyone I spoke to, as if I were marching into the waiting maw of a cult.

To understand why the Mormon faith might be routinely
tarred with the weird brush—and also why it should not—one need but visit the North Visitors’ Center. The lower level is an unassailable and impressive testament to present-day Mormon initiatives, both local and global, for fighting hunger and doing good works. There are the requisite photographs of beautiful third-world children enjoying some all-too-rare nutrition or inoculation, although it is an unassuming pallet of canned food labeled
DESERET INDUSTRIES
, stretch-wrapped and ready for airlift, that packs the poignant punch.

Then, not twenty feet away, are interactive dioramas of scenes from
The Book of Mormon
, dealing with the prophet Nephi, a sojourn by the Nazarene Himself to the New World (there he is, blessing the Indians), and the Golden plates of runes revealed to and translated by Joseph Smith. In spirit, the particulars of the narrative are no more preposterous than the sagas that make up the cornerstones of Western society. This is not Scientology. Still, given this added liturgy and its narrative, found nowhere in the New Testament, it can be difficult to remember that Mormonism is a Jesus-based, Christian religion. (Over dinner, Morris Rosenzweig, a twenty-year resident, a composer and professor of music at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, tells me of the time he was teaching a seminar on Bach and mentioned in passing the kyrie eleison only to be met by blank stares. A fairly observant Jewish man, late of New Orleans and New York City, he then had to stop and teach the components of the Christian mass to his Mormon students.) But Christ remains the fulcrum, as evidenced when one walks the circular ramp to the upper level of the North Visitors’ Center. There, an eleven-foot-tall statue of Jesus stands in the center of a domed atrium. The walls and ceiling have been painted in a hallucinatory rendering of the universe not all that different from the backdrop of the Segway course in the Innoventions building at Disneyland. The lurid
planets and surging nebulae may well reflect the Mormon cosmology, but they will also appeal to anyone who has ever been sixteen, attended a laser-light rock show at their local planetarium, or used
Dark Side of the Moon
as a rigid surface upon which to pick out stems and seeds.

The original, pioneer-era buildings of Temple Square—the Tabernacle, Assembly Hall, and Temple itself—are festooned with gold-rush frippery. With their Gilded Age flourishes and frontier-striver opulence of faux-marble columns and polychrome-plaster flowers, they are reminiscent of the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colorado. At the northern extreme of the square, on the other hand, are two buildings that call up less benign associations. One is an imposing structure of white stone with square columns that would not be remotely out of place in Fascist Italy. Diagonally across from this Mussolini edifice is another huge LDS headquarters, this one a near parody of Cold War–era brutalism, with huge relief maps of the globe on either side of the massive doors. A Cheneyesque building that broadcasts an agenda of world domination. Neither do the church any public-relations favors.

A shame, and often not true. For decades, Mormon boys (and some girls) have spent two years overseas on missions as a matter of course. The undeniable facts of delayed black membership and an over-representation of LDS influence and funding behind California’s Proposition 8, the state’s anti-gay marriage amendment notwithstanding, there is also a cultural value placed on learning other languages and encountering other people, a concomitant lack of xenophobia, and a focus on the often-forgotten Christian notion of welcoming strangers into one’s midst. On my way to the public library—an impressive Moshe Safdie–designed atrium for which the taxpayers dropped some serious coin—I am approached by an African American
man who mistakes me for a resident and wonders if there wasn’t once a building at a now-empty corner. He hasn’t lived here for twelve years. He is back in town to find work as a cook, and is off to the library to work on their computers. “Oh, you’ve moved back,” I say. “Not really
moved
back. Washington State didn’t work out. California didn’t work out. I’m back at square one.” And Salt Lake City is about the best square one he can think of. That’s a bit of a surprise, I tell him, given the church’s only recent admission of blacks into its ranks. “That’s
why,
” he says, citing Mormon guilt as an explanation for the kindness. He has Mormon friends all over the country. The Mormons are good about treating people of color very well, he tells me. If they are so friendly and benevolent, has he himself become one? I ask.