Polygamist Bus Tours

Add this to the Haight-Ashbury hippie bus tours of the Sixties, and last year's LA cholo bus tour. But if they have an ATV portion, I'm off the bus (I'm pretty wishy-washy on polygamy, but I hate ATVs with a passion):

We slow down to allow for a group of playing children to run away from us. They’re beautiful, rosy-cheeked, towheaded kids, the girls all in prairie dresses and the boys in long-sleeved plaid shirts and jeans. The oldest among them, a teenage girl, ushers them across the street and up the driveway to a walled-in home. It’s vaguely safari-ish: I stare from the truck window and say, “Oh, they’re so precious!” to my driver, who charged me $70 for this tour, “The Polygamy Experience.”

...“I’ve had thousands of people ask me about (the polygamist towns) since I moved to St. George,” he says. “I always shied away from talking about it. But then it seemed the time was right, there was a business aspect here, an opportunity.” So he and another apostate brother bought a 29-seat bus last year, took out some ads in nearby newspapers (including the Review-Journal), created a Web site offering “stories of growing up in this unique religion, a picnic set in the beautiful Vermillion Cliffs of southern Utah ... and intimate views of markets, parks and cemeteries,” and began trucking people through the land of assigned multi-wife marriages and prairie dresses.

...“I came and talked to the mayor of Hildale and bought a business license,” Holm says. The mayor was not thrilled. “He told me, ‘If you start doing this, you’re going to find that people will start building walls around their property,’ ” Holm says. “And I told him, ‘You’re going to find that the more you build a wall, the more people want to see behind it.’ ”

...“I feel like people need to know they’re not gun-toting, sly, sinister, wicked, evil child molesters out here,” Holm says. “They’re hardworking and honest.” In this light, I envision tourism as some army of light, dismantling misinformation and stigma, or breaking open tightly closed communities and providing insiders with a view of the outside: Fundamentalists here do not watch TV or movies or troll the Internet, but now they can associate outsiders with a short-haired woman in a park interrupting their picnic to take their picture.

...Holm says, “Our long-term success is really going to be from Vegas and Zion and the touring buses that come out here. We’ll probably go through our market in St. George rapidly. One of the things we want to do eventually is develop an ATV part of the tour, too. The scenery out here is fabulous.”