Torrey

It's best to pay attention when you're driving into Torrey, a tiny Utah town where the lovely, overarching cottonwood trees that line State Road 24 can easily distract the most careful driver.

Torrey, encircled by red-rock palisades and framed by Boulder and Thousand Lake mountains, has all the amenities and worries of a small town, progressive in some ways and traditional in others.

Within town limits, there are art galleries, book and jewelry stores, bed-and-breakfasts and more. Such amenities appeal to the hundreds of thousands of visitors to its neighbor, Capitol Reef National Park. They stop for a bite to eat, a cup of coffee and a freshly made pastry or a handcrafted chocolate bar.

Farther out, there are still working ranches and the wildlands, rivers and lakes that outfitters and fishing guides know by heart.

Torrey's mayor is Adus F. Dorsey II. He got the job in 2009, when an incumbent challenged him to run and Dorsey took him up on it, filing as a last-minute write-in and winning.

"I know most of the people in this town, and I asked them what their interests were, what direction they wanted the town to go in," he says. "I know them well enough that they'd be honest with me."

Many longtime residents wanted to maintain the town's ways and culture, rooted in the Mormon pioneers who settled it. Those who arrived recently wanted preservation but progress.

Dorsey got to know Torrey and its people over many years of being a plumber, electrician and handyman, fixing one broken-down Maytag wringer-washer at a time.

Born in east Texas, he lived in Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri before joining the Marine Corps, which took him to Vietnam. There, he helped with the evacuation of Saigon when the city fell to the North Vietnamese Army in 1975.

Dorsey started coming to Torrey in the mid-1980s while working in Salt Lake City, and decided he could make a living there just as well as he did up north. So he bought a sawmill in Oregon, brought it down to Torrey and dreamed of "all this logging and stuff."

That didn't pan out, so these days he does custom work with salvage timber during the winter months, when he'll "go down in the evening, spend a few hours cutting logs."

As mayor, Dorsey backed a failed initiative to establish a nondiscrimination ordinance, similar to those in Salt Lake and other cities, that would ban housing and job discrimination against gay people.

But many longtime residents opposed it, much to the disappointment of Dorsey and the ordinance's sponsor, Councilwoman Jen Howe, as well as other more recent arrivals.

But there are other things for town officials to think about. As is inevitable in most small towns, Torrey and its environs have undergone a growth spurt.

Torrey itself has only about 170 residents — 200 on a Saturday night, Dorsey says — but maybe 300 or so people who've built homes both grand and modest in the swells and vales outside town limits.

Just up the road are motels and restaurants — outside town limits, so their taxes go to Wayne County, not Torrey.

So these days, Dorsey, Howe and other townspeople are pushing an annexation plan that would encompass those businesses and the outliers. It's a way, Howe says, to bring new voices and voters to the civic discussion and expand the tax base.

"There is sometimes a misperception that new people move to this area and want to change things," she said. "But change is inevitable, and the only way to manage it is to be ahead of the game."

All the while, she adds, while preserving the "things that brought us all here in the first place."

One of those newcomers is Dayanna Varney, who immigrated to the United States from England in 1963 and settled in Torrey several years ago. She bought just shy of an acre on what was called Poverty Flats and put up a yurt she's turned into a lovely and inviting home.

Outside, she's created a garden of hollyhocks, California poppies, sagebrush, natural shrubs and 200-year-old trees, all nurtured by pure spring water.

She's all for the annexation proposal; her property was made part of Torrey a few years ago, and the town will eventually pave the dirt road that leads to her property.

It's natural for those born and reared in a small town to want to preserve it as it was. Doug Howard first saw Torrey in 1946 on a fishing trip and fell in love with it. He and his wife spent years camping, fishing and exploring the territory. In 1980, they built a vacation home in town.

"I've been there for 60 years, and they've finally come to accept me," he says. Still, Howard says, "the people who were there, it's their town. They do not want to see change."

Calls to a couple of longtime residents were not returned.

Years ago, a mayor wanted to pave some roads, and the townspeople said, " 'No, it'll ruin our town. If it was good enough in the 1800s, it's good enough now,' " Howard recalls.

Dorsey is keenly aware of the division, and has for years studied the history of the area back to the days of cowboys, bootlegging, early filmmaking, ranches, sawmills, cheese factories and milk runs.

He's also filmed the older people telling their own histories in Torrey and read the old books people have kept in their homes for many decades.

"It took a long time to get to know them," Dorsey says. "That's when I started going in to fix their washing machines. Sometimes it would take me all afternoon to do a 10-minute job."

And that's how a newcomer gets to know an old town.

Peg McEntee is a news columnist. Reach her at pegmcentee@sltrib.com and facebook/pegmcentee.