Satirizing Gentrification in ‘The Curse’

Our car smelled of the sulfurous hot springs. We spent the night on the side of a cliff, woke before sunrise and hiked six miles, soaked for an hour in water the color of a neon-blue milkshake, and then drove south to the Timpanogos Caves. Our tour guide was a white man from Boston who spoke with a thick accent: Every time he said “cave bottom,” we heard “cave bottle,” and imagined our headlamps tipping sideways in the vertiginous darkness. The cave bottle was shaken; only the nominal difference between stalagmite and stalactite gave us any sense of direction. The guide’s voice told the story of a curse that beset those caves: the legend of an Indigenous woman who fell in love with a settler. The star-crossed romance was opposed by the two lovers’ communities; the settler was killed by the woman’s tribe, and, heartbroken, she took her own life in the depths of the Timpanogos Caves. But first, she sang a curse into the caverns, warning visitors not to disturb the natural formations lest tragedy befall them just as it did her.