Fundamental Church of Latter Day Monotones.

Hay is one of the preeminent types of freight I typically pickup and deliver on my chosen routes of operation with my company.
Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico rural farms are typically where I go to get it.
Today though I was given a load assignment for a hay pickup going to just outside of Compton from a farm in Atlanta NV.
Atlanta NV is basically a town that sits not too far from the NV/UT stateline and lies along the pristine and lonely highway of US-93.
Took me about 4 hours give-or-take to get there from Vegas.
After driving 3 miles down a dirt road to the farm, I noticed it more closely resembled the headquarters of an ultra-religious cult, sort of like the Branch Davidian thing in Waco TX from long ago.
From speaking to a person on this farm last night, I could tell there was something odd about her voice, very monotone and withdrawn. Tired perhaps?
After pulling up to the scalehouse and engaging my park brakes, I walk over to the main offices located near a large warehouse on the main farm quad.
As I walk up to it, I notice most of the men wearing buttoned, long-sleeved shirts with no particular design and very uniform in appearance.
The few women I saw walking about looked almost as if they were auditioning for Little House On The Prairie.
I get to the receiving/shipping office and a young, blonde-haired woman comes to the window.
I ask her who's in charge of the hay-loading and she refers me to a man named Luke.
As she was talking, I knew she wasn't the same person I talked to the night before, but spoke with the same withdrawn, monotone voice.
Judging by the way she was dressed and the way she spoke, it was as if she was either raised to be very cautious towards outsiders, or groomed to be subservient to men.
In some case, probably both.
I soon meet up with this Luke character and he weighs the truck, then proceeds to get the trailer loaded.
After all of this got done and he was getting my paperwork together for delivery, I finally asked him the big question of, "So are y'all Mennonites or some derivative of it?"
Luke responds like he was just waiting for me to ask about the peculiarities of their farm and themselves. "We're actually members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints."
He goes on to briefly explain their customs and the differences between the men and women.|
He does this warmly and without any guff, presumably due to myself being of noticeable rural upbringing as well.
After hearing all of this I remembered the news stories about that Warren Jeffs character and the ongoing debates over polygamy.
As I drove on, I was a bit stunned to learn that's who they were after to being to farms like this a few times over the past year.
But at the same time, I'm a bit more comfortable knowing what's it all about now.
Despite the media and government backlash against them, they're a throwback to some simpler times, if one could call it that.