I'm selling my eighty acres in southwest Utah, which is located about fifty miles north of St. George, and forty-one miles from Cedar City. I spent a few nights on my land before the most recent heat wave drove me to a hotel room. I'd been living in a suburb of Seattle; triple digit temperatures are anathema there. A few days ago it was 109F in St. George. It's like climbing in a hot dryer
and shutting the door. Combined with low humidity, summertime weather in southwest Utah sucked the life out of me. I don't think I could ever get used to weather in Utah. I need humidity; I'm not from a land inhabited by reptiles.
Yesterday morning, as I dressed in the tent, a flock of about twenty blackbirds landed on the tent. I paid attention; I've heard of bird omens; perhaps this was one of those things. Or maybe strange things happen in desert lands, like a dry wind that comes out of nowhere. Most of the flock flew off after a few minutes, but one lingered and alighted on a tent tether by a screened window and watched me. It was as if she were telling me everything's going to be okay now that I've made a deal to sell the land. The second time I visited the property I spoke aloud to the sky and complained about the land. As I walked to my Nissan Pathfinder I found a Native American arrowhead. The artifact appeared from nowhere, as if the ghosts of Native Americans had heard my disappointment.
Water rights are not cheap in Utah. It has one of the lowest rainfalls in the United States. Water is like gold. Only eleven inches of rainfall falls on this area of Iron County. More rain falls in Seattle in one month than falls all year long in Utah. But there is water beneath the ground in Utah. On my land there is an aquifer, as evidenced by the many farms south of me who regularly irrigate their crops. In Utah, if a landowner digs their own well without owning water rights, they are fined. It's even illegal to construct a water catchment system. The selling of bad water rights is an ongoing problem in Utah. It's up to the buyer to make sure the rights are still legitimate. I only knew this because I'd investigated two listings and found one had lapsed due to lack of use. This sounded illegal to me, but the water rights office told me that no one is being arrested for selling bad water rights.
In Utah, a land owner can buy water rights from anyone within a certain distance from their property within the same county. The cost of rights were in the five-thousand dollar range. After acquiring water rights I would have to hire someone to dig a well, at the cost of around ten-thousand dollars. It is illegal for a well digger in Utah to dig on anyone's land who doesn't own water rights. In other words, I would have to invest fifteen thousand dollars to have what most property owners in America take for granted.
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| Dale Melbourne, a theatrical actress, in the 1950s. |
I'm relieved to be selling my land, but the mysteries remain. The one person who could tell me why the land was purchased, died nearly twenty years ago. I was given the land by my employer; John Herklotz, of American Happenings in Orange County, CA. It was his wife, Dale Melbourne, (nee - Mary Huleyard); a theatrical actress from Melbourne, Australia, who'd bought the property, and owned it since the late 1960s. Why, is the big question. It is within two miles of vast circular fields of alfalfa, in a remote area of southwest Utah. Herklotz had no reliable information about the land, which Dale bought before they met in Los Angeles, in the1980s. By that time, Dale was thrice widowed, and she and her sister had long retired from being actresses. When I worked for Herklotz he once had me organize files in the office closet. I came upon a stash of CDs that included footage of Dale when she was married to a cattle rancher in Illinois. I only know this because Herklotz mentioned it. The strangest part of the footage showed Dale doing various things. In one clip she is outside combing her long blonde hair. She is very Nordic looking, in her late 40s or early 50s. Then the footage segues to showing Dale in a leopard print bathing suit inside a grassy pasture surrounded by a white fence. She leads a 3,000 lb. Black Angus bull by a rope into the frame, ties the rope to the fence, and begins washing the enormous bull with a garden hose and what looks like a bottle of dish soap. The bull is nonplused by the attention. Maybe Dale raised that monster, and it isn't aware of its enormous size. After she lathers the bull on this strange summer day she kisses it on the nose, and proceeds to wash her own hair with the hose and dish soap. She has a towel hanging on the fence, and she squeezes the water from her hair as she bends over and wraps it in the towel and stands. Then she unties the bull's rope and leads it, stopping once to kiss it again on the nose. It is the tamest, most gigantic bull in the world. This is the woman that bought my land. Why? No one knows. She was only married to Herklotz for seven years. At most they'd known each other for a decade. I showed that footage to Herklotz and he said he'd never seen it before. This was when he told me Dale had once been married to a cattle rancher in Illinois. Herklotz had a number of fanciful ideas about the land. He said he thought it had been leased out to a farmer who raised alfalfa, and presumed it had geothermal potential. He never explained where he got his information. He sent me to investigate the land in early 2016, because he'd never seen it. He'd been paying property taxes for years. It was a bleak place, without obvious value. He seemed surprised by that news. I made a video titled My Utah Land, while a Utah surveyor named Doug Grimshaw and his young assistant did the first survey since 1910. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLe9vHEhHUo
I let John know what the land was like and he shrugged. He said he'd assumed some things about the land; if I didn't want it he said I could give it back to him. He was a mercurial man, well versed in the arts of business double dealings. Maybe he simply gave me the worthless land as a way to play with my head; to elicit gratitude and get me to do more work for him, promoting his various interests in film. I was already doing a lot of work for his associate in Maryland, who ran America's Mock Elections. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9wjf54XlAc
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| Fires were everywhere this past week in southern Utah. |
Perhaps Herklotz gave his wife's actual land to someone else, and had one of his many lawyers do the switch. Perhaps he honestly didn't know someone in Utah had swindled him. Maybe no one swindled anyone. Maybe there is something buried on the land, like Dale's last husband, or a trunk full of cash. It's like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive storyline fused with that of The Big Lebowski. John was ninety-four in 2016, and not the business tycoon he once was, when he wheeled and dealed in telecommunications when it was in its infancy, and broadcast towers were popping up everywhere. He owned broadcast towers on Tesuque Peak near Santa Fe, New Mexico, which sold for about five million dollars in 2017. He'd retired from the Chicago Tribune, as a CPA. Herklotz died in December of 2018. Though the world remembers him as a great philanthropist who had a habit of suing people over entertainment issues, I knew him as a partially disabled old man who liked Svedka vodka, which he often asked me to buy for him behind the back of Lucy, his crazy, domineering, bipolar Mexican housekeeper. It was the love of vodka that resulted in my finding him on the floor of his bedroom one morning in 2016. He'd passed out and spent the night there, and was too obese to get back into bed. He gave me the land because I called the EMTs, worked hard on every project he gave me, took him to lavish charity events in L.A. and Orange County, such as the Gary Sinise party, and visited him while he was in the hospital in Irvine, and the care center in Lake Forest. One day when I'd brought his mail and reported about business matters, he said he'd decided to give me the Utah land. I said thank you.
Herklotz died broke. He gave away all his money to universities, and many noteworthy causes. So kudos to him. Most people don't make in their lifetimes what he gave away. He was a complicated man. Many rich people are; many philanthropists are. He promised me fifty-thousand for helping him sell Tesuque Peak., and twice that to a longtime mutual friend, Dan Wilkins, with whom he'd had some battles. We never got our promised monies. Herklotz funded Wilkins' film, Have You Seen Clem. It's the quirky story of a man who loses a chain of restaurants and seeks to wreak revenge on a banker, only to discover in his travels across America in an RV that there are many hurting people in this country, and so he decides to forgive the banker. The story is mostly true by the way, because Wilkins lost a lot of money and a chain of Duff's restaurants in Tennessee due to foreclosure.
Now that I'm selling the land, I regret never having the truth told to me about it. I'm not ungrateful, I just wish I knew more about it. If it is the land his wife bought, I suppose there are only a few explanations. One - she was exhibiting the first signs of Alzheimer's, the disease that eventually killed her in 1999. Or two - she buried something on the land she didn't want anyone to find, like her third husband, or a chest of money. But these are just the writer in me trying to develop the plot. Some secrets can never be told, and mysteries will always remain about my Utah land.
