This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
On a solitary mound in the Great Salt Lake, a child has ruled an island kingdom.
She has walked every windswept contour. The quartzite crags are her bartizans. The tan cheatgrass is her carpet. The bison go by names she gave them.
But now the Mud Princess must grow up.
Until this weekend, one kid lived on Antelope Island.
She leaves home today.
--
'They call me Mud' » Nikel Taylor has never paid much heed to boundaries.
"That ... " she taps a Do Not Enter sign as she climbs over a fence at the island's Fielding Garr Ranch "isn't meant for me."
Being the boss's daughter has its privileges; Nikel's father, Ron Taylor, became manager of Antelope Island State Park eight years ago and moved his wife and daughter, then 10, into a small, white house on a dusty hill behind the bison corral. It took Nikel about a month to realize that "off limits" means very little on a 28,000-acre island inhabited by three people.
Also, once you've survived a buffalo mauling, you go where you please.
Nikel vaults over the Do Not Enter sign to an elm grove that grows in a viscous substance Nikel has dubbed "Awesome Black Mud."
"It's sticky and thick, and you can play in it!" she cheers with enough glee to eclipse all signs that an 18-year-old is talking. "It just completely stains your skin."
This is Nikel's favorite place on the island -- "the secret spot," she calls it. She leaps over the stumps of fallen trees and scampers up the trunks. There are remnants of stick forts, which she's never considered herself too old to build. Her moccasins, which she sewed herself, squish through the Awesome Black Mud, dragging the cuffs of her jeans through the sludge.
"Every day, covered in mud," Suzanne Taylor sighs. She doesn't bother wondering if that's something her daughter will ever outgrow. Ron had to talk Nikel out of a puddle swim just a few weeks ago.
He came up with the nickname Mud Princess. The park staff spread it around.
"A couple of people don't even know my real name," Nikel says proudly. "They call me Mud."
--
A succession of Grumpies » But a princess is nothing without subjects, and one faction on the island is famously hard to conquer.
Not that Nikel didn't try.
Ron Taylor remembers coming home from work one day in the first year to find a suspicious trail of hay leading behind the house. Inside, he found the back door open next to a haystack on the floor.
A bison's head filled the door frame.
It was munching its way into the kitchen.
Taylor heard giggling from the basement stairs.
"I said no pets in the house!" he bellowed.
Thus began a series of tragic attempts to keep pets outdoors. First was Scrappy Cornelius Doo, the schnauzer that yapped at every passing bison until one would charge the dog run, knocking it over. Then Scrappy would chase the beasts.
He was sent back to the mainland.
Next were the ducks: Norbert and Dinky. The Taylors came home from a vacation to find nothing left but a pile of feathers.
"Probably the bobcat got 'em," Nikel says.
The rabbit named Stupid ran away. Nikel finally gave up after Ménage à Trois, the lone goldfish that someone forgot to feed.
So she returned to the bison. There they were, milling around the yard, smushing her mother's plants. The Beastie Boys, she calls them -- "the old poopers who got kicked out of the herd and banded together."
If you look at them closely, you can tell them apart. There's Double Green, who has tags on each ear. Crazy Horn was maimed in his younger days. Big Boy and Little Boy were actually girls. Diego was a "huge pain in the butt."
And there was Mr. Bones, "full of personality -- a great guy," Nikel says sadly. "He died because he was old. He was my best buffalo friend."
Also: Grumpy I, Grumpy II, Grumpy III, Grumpy IV, Grumpy V, Grumpy VI, Grumpy VII and Grumpy VIII.
These are the former top bulls, Ron Taylor explains. The old kings. Eventually, every herd leader is replaced and abandoned.
On Antelope Island, loneliness is the price of sovereignty.
--
'You're the only kid?' » In May, Nikel invites three of her friends from Syracuse High School for lunch on the island. Small groups work best, she says. Her last big party on the island was in middle school.
"Two hours. That's how long it took everyone to hate each other," she grumbles. "They brought all their drama. To my island."
Nikel insists she needs her alone time on the island. When that retreat isn't available, she feels claustrophobic.
"I'm not a big fan of living next to people," she says.
But she can hardly contain herself when her friends come out for lunch. She's serving her specialty: Ramen noodles on toast with ranch dressing.
"Ranch?!" the girls balk. They huddle in the kitchen corner while Nikel fiddles with her iPod, trying to draw them back out with what she calls "the ultimate girl song."
The Spice Girls fill the speakers with a song that was popular more than a decade ago.
"Soooo, tell me what you want, what you really really want!" Nikel sings along, bopping around the kitchen as her friends' eyes widen. When they do not join in, she is undeterred. "Make it last forevah, 'cause friendship never e-e-e-ends!"
She ends her performance with a flourish and a disclaimer she'll repeat twice that afternoon: "Hi, I'm socially awkward."
Her friends keep their hands in pockets; she gesticulates broadly. They are gently affectionate with each other; she sits on top of them. She talks twice as loud, eats twice as much, walks twice as fast.
They're used to her energy level -- "Yes, she's always this hyper," says fellow senior McKenna Gardiner -- and they know they cannot keep up with her. Before they leave her house, she will turn somersaults on the trampoline, wrestle each girl to the ground, attempt karate, write a song about McKenna and demonstrate her tomahawk target-throw.
But her Mud Princess identity stays on the island. The kids at Syracuse High know Nikel is "extremely tomboyish," confirms senior Morgan Thurgood, but they didn't know she climbs into bison pens to separate the calves from the bulls at the yearly roundup -- or that one of them charged into her, bruising her ribs. They didn't know she once walked with her dad all 15 miles from Ladyfinger Tip to Unicorn Point.
Sophomore Rachel Sorenson didn't even know Nikel lived on the island until she got the directions to the house.
"She says to turn left after the causeway, and I'm like, 'After the causeway?' " Rachel says.
"I didn't know anyone lived here."
Nikel mentions that another park employee has moved to the island with his wife, so the Taylors are no longer the only locals.
"Wait," Rachel says. "You're the only kid out here?"
Nikel nods. The others fall silent, understanding her more.
If Nikel had been more shy, her mother says, they would have thought twice about moving her onto the island.
"Some kids I'd worry about, but not Nikel," Suzanne Taylor says. "She makes friends no matter where she is."
Nikel keeps a little society of island people, apart from school and church. She chats up tourists -- even the hard-to-impress Germans go nuts for the bison, she says -- and she tackles the park workers with bear hugs.
"I can't believe you are graduating," wails Connie Wilkinson, who works the park gate house at the end of the causeway.
Assistant park manager Chris Haramoto says the island will not be the same.
"She's always been entertaining everyone out here," he says. "It's gonna be sad, is what it's gonna be."
--
'That's just how it goes' » Moving day has arrived.
To graduate with her class Friday night was "not a sure thing at all," Nikel says. "Meltdown" is the family term for what happened junior year: angst, depression and a resistance to sitting still, to which Nikel responded by skateboarding out of her geometry class.
"I screwed up a lot, I'm not gonna lie," Nikel says. "I probably gave my math teacher an ulcer."
Digging out of the hole meant visits to the guidance counselor, a few dropped clubs and a remedial geometry class that started at 6:15 a.m. -- after the 11-mile commute.
On Friday night, she surprised her parents with honors in three classes.
"I'm not proud," Nikel says. "I'm flipping proud."
For now, she isn't applying to college. She leaves today for Dutch John, where she has a job with a forest fire crew.
"I'm really into trauma," she confesses. For her 13th birthday, she asked her friends to bring little toys, which she donated to Syracuse police officers to help distract children at intense crime scenes. She started taking EMT courses as soon as she was old enough and was the first high school student to treat patients as a medic intern with the Syracuse Fire Department. A photo collage of local firefighters hangs above her pillow. "It gives me inspiration, so I wake up every morning to this."
She says she has always been fascinated by the human body ("Your intestines kind of look like noodles"), and disaster response is exciting and physical work.
"But mostly it's to be able to help ... in a traumatic situation," she says. Later she wants to study paramedic and fire science in college, but that seems a long way off.
First she has to move off the island, and while Dutch John (population: 250) is hardly a booming megalopolis, Nikel is nervous about living among other people for the first time since fourth grade.
It's hard to sleep on the mainland, she says. "There are so many weird noises."
And there is a lot here to leave behind: her parents; the Beastie Boys loitering above the empty corral; Buffalo Point, the island's unofficial snowboarding hill; the ranch and its Awesome Black Mud; the fiery sunsets over the west desert; the rolling topography, which she knows like her own knuckles.
It's hard to think that all of this will eventually become something she can only look back on.
"Deep down, I really don't want to leave," she says. "But every kid needs to grow up. That's just how it goes. Hopefully I'll find a new adventure."
So today the Mud Princess heads east on the 7-mile causeway, beyond a moat of supersaline muck and brine flies, to a mainland that doesn't recognize her title.
But she knows who she is. That's what the island can give her now, and it's enough.