Polar opposites?

Maren Black moved to Eagle Mountain last year after a disturbing few months in West Valley City. Black grew up in Orem, was married at 20 and moved to an apartment in West Valley City, on a street lined with fast food and strip malls as far as the eye can see. There were five shootings that year in her neighborhood, Black says, and one day she and her baby came home to find their sliding glass door shattered. The only neighbor woman she had befriended worked during the day. "I felt like a hermit in my little space till Brandon came home at night."

But in Eagle Mountain she has found a place where she feels safe and free, a place where she can put on her in-line skates and know that there is nothing — no traffic, no stop lights, no threat — that can stand in the way of her exuberance. Her little girl can walk out the front door, any time of the day and find a playmate. Black feels part of a community that, on a warm summer night, likes to stroll down Sunrise Drive and on around the block, neighbors chatting with neighbors.

Treeless and still under construction, Eagle Mountain looks like a raw frontier town without the requisite saloons. The place is full of stay-at-home moms and pre-schoolers, and in Black's small subdivision there are enough little girls to give three dance teachers part-time employment.

Black gives dance lessons, two mornings a week. In her unfinished basement, where the studs are not yet covered with sheetrock, she places her baby in a swing next to the washing machine, then turns on the music. "And they buzzed and were happy in the old beehive," sings Raffi as the little neighbor girls leap and twirl.

There is no neon in Eagle Mountain yet, and only one incident of graffiti since the town was created in 1996. There are more babies than teenagers. But that doesn't mean the world and its oddities haven't intruded.

Last month, a Scoutmaster from Eagle Mountain was arrested on charges that he sexually molested a 17-year-old boy. Periodically, there are car break-ins. And last year, on the outskirts of town, a dance that organizers had promised was an LDS singles get-together actually turned out to be a rave. Drawing thousands of teens and twentysomethings from outside Eagle Mountain, it resulted in several drug and alcohol arrests.

So, now the Eagle Mountain town council is considering a proposal to require a license — and $10,000 deposit — for all public gatherings of more than 30 people.

The town council still needs to work out the details (is the whole thing unconstitutional, for example?). And Mayor Paul Bond admits he finds himself caught in the middle of competing philosophies, even within his own mind. He's a person who generally likes to keep the government out of people's lives, he says, but he also wants to protect his town from drugs, from teenagers wandering the streets in the middle of the night, from people who dance naked.