Polar opposites?

Jacob is there with his wife, Pino. Both are dressed in black. The Bogedahls, you soon discover, are Goths and also Mormons. Mormon Goths. It turns out, in one of those coincidences that prove what a small town the state still is, that Jacob and Pino live in Lehi — and the building that houses their ward is the very one attended by the people of Eagle Mountain.

Jacob has a Web site in which he features information about Goth music and fashion, as well as information about the LDS Church. He says he sometimes gets e-mails from people who can't understand why a person would want to be either a Goth or a Mormon. Sometimes, he says, people who aren't familiar with Mormons think they're "extreme fanatics." What Jacob tells these people is that there are people all around them, maybe even their neighbors, who might be Mormon.

As for the Utah Goth scene, Jacob points out that there is a Goth group devoted to community service. They crochet scarves for the homeless. They have both an adopt-a-bat program and an adopt-a-highway program. On a recent Saturday evening they put on orange reflective vests over their black T-shirts and helped clean up I-215.

Trying to understand Utah, hoping to find the state's statistical and philosophical extremes, you might drive to Eagle Mountain some morning. You might, on a summer night, wander into a club that promises fetishes and fog machines and a naughty nurse fashion show.

But whenever you try to box a community into categories — the innocent vs. the worldly, let's say, or the ordinary vs. the shocking — you run the risk of coming away disappointed.

In Utah, what you find is this: The edges tend to soften toward the middle. A whole church once considered an underground subculture has become mainstream. A town that wants to isolate itself can't. A subculture of Goths ends up having family values, an elemental sweetness, a need to belong and serve. What you thought was a fixed boundary turns out to be a semipermeable membrane through which the outside eventually seeps in.

---

E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com; susan@desnews.com