Long Before the Lights: Dallin's Oldest Coyote Crossing Story

Written by Birdie Sorensen

DALLIN. Before this month's lights, before anyone in the checkout line said the word "aliens" out loud, Vernon Teague's family already had a story about Coyote Crossing. He's ninety-one, he's lived on the same stretch of land his whole life, and he says the mystery out there isn't new. Only the name for it is.

"My grandfather used to say the hoodoos keep count," Teague said, sitting on his porch a few miles from the crossing itself. "Said they're old sentries turned to stone, and once a season they'd let something through that didn't belong to daylight: a light, a shape, a sound that wasn't quite a coyote's. He'd tell it to scare us into finishing our chores before dark, and it worked every single time."

Teague's father told a slightly different version: lights instead of shapes, a hum instead of a howl. And Teague admits his own telling has drifted too, shaped by sixty years of retelling it to grandkids on his own porch. "That's how these things work," he said. "Every generation swears they've got the true version, and every generation's a little wrong, and a little right, same as the one before it."

What hasn't changed, he says, is the place, and the fact that something out there has never fully explained itself. "Now everybody's got a phone and a theory. My grandfather didn't have either one. He just had the dark, and the hoodoos, and a story that made you come inside when he called you." Teague isn't ready to call it aliens, exactly, but he isn't ready to call it nothing, either. "Whatever's out there has been polite enough to leave us alone for four generations. I don't see a reason to go looking for trouble by giving it a name."

Birdie Sorensen's continuing coverage of this month's sightings can be found in Are Aliens Invading Dallin? Readers with a family story of their own about Coyote Crossing are encouraged to write in. This paper is collecting them.