Mutiny on the Bountiful, B.C.

Regarding my sarcastic remark in my previous post about Surrey, and moving to Chilliwack, and at least it's not near .......

.............Bountiful, B.C.
Saturday Night/August 4, 2001
By Daniel Woods

It's a remote town in an idyllic valley where polygamy is the norm and the neighbours don't seem to mind. But are there darker secrets lurking within?

From the remote port hill customs post on the B.C.-Idaho border, the road to Bountiful snakes east and north and east and south and east again, past fields of timothy and towering roadside cottonwoods. It's beautiful country.

At the end of the meandering route, clustered beneath the Skimmerhorn Mountains, are fifty or so houses set amid well-tended gardens and pastures. Smoke from wood stoves curls from nearly every chimney.

Pickup trucks are parked in driveways. The yards are manicured and full of swing sets, tricycles, and children running and shouting and laughing. The yellow buses standing beside Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School are precisely the colour of the larch that line the steep screen slopes directly above the little settlement. The mountains' jagged summits are dusted with snow. Bountiful is, to an outsider, a postcard of Bruegelian activity. The most dangerous thing around, it would seem, is the red-tailed hawk, poised on the branch of a tree.

But a closer look reveals that this is a community unlike most others. A sign along the village's main road reads: " Thou Shalt Not Park Here.

And straight ahead, clustered around a paved parking lot and a stand of weeping willows, sit five buildings. The two largest look more like motels than homes, with a series of doorways along both the ground and balcony floors. But homes they are.

This is where Winston Blackmore lives with his twenty-eight wives and eighty children, give or take a few. Around him in nearby houses live several dozen other fundamentalist Mormon men whose reading of the Old Testament tells them that they, too, should acquire plural-so-called " celestial "-wives in order to increase the number of their progeny.