DOME VALLEY — In the beginning, there was a farmer, and the farmer had a wife, and he loved his wife very much. So much that when her body failed, and the end was near, he wanted to build something in her honor. Something to sit on the family farm. Something that was always open, so anybody driving down U.S. 95 could see how much the farmer loved his wife, how much they both loved God and how blessed they were to live on such beautiful land.

So Loren Pratt decided to build a chapel.

“He never told me how big it was,” his son Cecil said, standing in the dirt outside the chapel.

Twenty-four years had passed, and so had Loren, and now Cecil was the man of the family. He managed the farm. But the chapel had become a family heirloom.

There are no services on Sundays. Nobody preaches from the pulpit. No congregation calls this place home, which is for the best, because the one-room, 96-square-foot chapel can only hold a carful of people. A dozen, max. From the highway, it looks something like a freshly painted shed.

But people come. Thousands of them. “We get people from all over the world,” Cecil said. They come in search of something, curving down the narrow two-lane highway that runs alongside the Gila River, passing family farms and a cotton gin and VFW Post 8242, until the road bends left and that wooden sign appears. The words were meant as instructions. But they’ve become the chapel’s unofficial name: Pause, Rest, Worship.

A thin dirt road leads straight to the front door, carving through sprouts of spinach and cotton. The door never locks. All are welcome.

Travelers stop to use the port-a-potty. Businessmen, sweating in their suits, steal a few minutes of quiet. Tourists come because they saw it on Instagram. The chapel’s seen first dates and weddings and memorial services. A few years ago, a family came to sprinkle their grandmother’s ashes.

And once a year, on Easter Sunday, the Pratts’ tiny chapel holds a church service.

It starts at sunrise, on the squat mountain behind the chapel. Every year for at least two decades — nobody can remember exactly when the tradition started — hundreds of worshippers have climbed up the dark dirt path, joining the Pratt family’s tradition with their own. Some of them swear they’ve come every year. The Pratts consider it their gift to the community.

Now it was Holy Saturday night. There were 10 hours until sunrise.

The chapel door waited open. Cecil stepped inside. His boots clacked against the hollow floor. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness, then dropped onto a back-row bench. The seat wobbled.

“I don’t come here as often as I used to,” he said. His voice was soft. He wore a ranger hat cinched tight around his jaw, dusty blue jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt that said on the back, “No place like Dome.” Under the light of a stained-glass sunset, he looked just like his father.

Cecil believed life was a cycle of seasons, and his was in a period of growth. He held three full-time jobs. First thing every morning, he checks on the family farm, tending to the crops that have supported two generations of Pratts. Then he drives 44 miles to San Luis, where he teaches high school agriculture. Sundays are for sermons at Mohawk Valley Community Church. He calls himself “indefatigable.” Really, he said, that described his entire family.

But he's 54 years old. At some point he’ll have to slow down. He could quit teaching. But the farm and the chapel belong with the family. Those, he’ll pass down, like his father before him.

The sun finished its fall, and light disappeared from the chapel. Nine hours to go.

Cecil walked out and shut the door behind him. He tugged his hat and stood in the valley wind. He turned to the east.

“Home is that way,” he said. He knew this land by heart. His family moved here when he was born, and now he lived in that same house. Someday, he hoped, one of his children would raise his grandkids there.

Then he turned back west, facing the chapel and the blue-rimmed mountain.

“The sun will come up over there.”

On the mountain, everything was ready. A truckful of folding chairs waited in neat rows, exactly 30 inches apart. The speaker system still worked. The steel cross buried in the mountaintop stood tall. Up there, a campfire glowed, the family circled around it, waiting for morning between the cross and the chapel.

'This is my quiet place'

Eight years ago, the heavens opened over Dome Valley, and a microburst swallowed the chapel. Rain ripped through the roof and soaked everything inside: the Bible, the guest book, a framed copy of a Yuma Sun article about the church. A sudden wind pried the chapel from the earth and threw it across the farm.

One wall was destroyed. The pointed steeple broke off. Its cross snapped in half.

Loren and Cecil vowed to rebuild. The chapel could be salvaged. But Cecil told the Sun that he feared the guest book, where hundreds of visitors had signed their names, might be gone for good.

“Dad is disappointed,” he told the paper.

Loren Pratt died in 2015. Without a founder, a pastor or a congregation, guest books now hold the chapel’s history. Most visitors come and go without anybody else ever seeing them. But some leave traces in the thin journals that always sit open on the pulpit. They sign their names and tell their stories. Just married, they write. #CancerSucks. Or, Pray for us! Some notes are confessional. Others sag with sadness. One visitor wrote that they planned on crashing their car to end their life. Then they saw the chapel, and felt their heart rest.

Thank you for this place, they wrote. God is here!

The books are one part travel log, one part diary and one part Pratt family history. Woven among the strangers and their faraway hometowns are familiar signatures. The entire family still lives near the farm. Most still stop by the chapel. Cecil's 21-year-old son, Caleb, left a letter to his grandfather. His sister, Joanna, signs every time she comes.

“This is my quiet place,” she said.

Joanna reads them all.

She visits a couple of times each month to clean and collect donations. The Pratts don’t put out an offering plate, but people leave rosaries and dollar bills on the pulpit. She takes everything to church and tithes it away. When she sees that a journal is on its last pages, she swaps in a new one, then takes the old book home and reads every entry.

By now, the names fill stacks of books. They’ve kept them all, and even found the water-logged journal from the storm, though that one’s hard to read.

A few hours before Easter sunrise, Joanna stopped by to prepare for the rush. She swept out the purple bougainvillea petals that covered the aisle and rubbed tiny fingerprints off the windows. At the pulpit, she left the Bible open to John 3:16, and turned the journal next to it onto a fresh page.

Have a Happy Easter! somebody had written. Love, The Pratt Family.

On the next page, in smaller writing, they added another note:

Love and Miss you Moms and Dads.

On Easter, a gathering in the fields

Morning came by moonlight. Cecil, who always slept on the mountain, awakened in his truck and drove home to shower. The year’s first worshippers arrived an hour early and milled about the empty chairs, refilling foam coffee cups and circling around the campfire. They were waiting for sunrise.

Nobody knew how many people would come. The Pratts didn’t advertise. Cecil used to run newspaper ads, but he stopped once he realized it cost $10 to fill each seat. Now the closest thing they had to a billboard was the yellow banner along the highway that said, “Easter Sunrise Service.”

Mostly, people came because they always had.

“It’s kind of a tradition,” a woman named Mavis McCombs said from the front row. She and her husband, Denzil, lived in Washington state and wintered in Yuma. They brought everybody who visited to the chapel, and joined their first sunrise service 15 years ago. It reminded them of home.

They’ve come back every year since.

Half the chairs were filled when Cecil’s truck crawled back up the mountain. The service started in 20 minutes. Sunrise was in 15. He parked behind everybody and stepped onto the dirt, adjusting the outfit he’d negotiated with his wife the night before: A light gray suit over a mint-green shirt and striped tie. Underneath his arm, he tucked a thick leather Bible.

“It’s a beautiful day,” he said. He wandered through the crowd like the country preacher he was, shaking hands and offering refills of coffee. A young couple hugged him. They’d just come back from their honeymoon, and thanked Cecil for his guidance. An elderly man asked how the boys handled their night on the mountain, and Cecil smiled. When he reached the picnic table that held the coffee, a man shivering in shorts stood next to him and frowned.

“No donuts this year?” he said. He looked disappointed.

“Well, we’ve never officially had donuts,” Cecil said.

The man shook his head. “I think they used to,” he said. “A long time ago.”

Now it was Cecil’s turn to shake his head. “I’m pretty sure I’ve been here the whole time,” he said.

The man trudged away. Cecil hugged his wife and moved to the front row. On stage, a three-piece family band strummed the morning’s first song, as if they were nudging the sun from its slumber. Morning light spilled over the mountains. Worshippers held pamphlets over their eyes. Cecil tapped his Apple Watch: just past 6 a.m.

“Cecil?” the band leader said, and the preacher took the stage.

A sermon took shape in his mind. He never wrote them down. He was a careful thinker, a student of theology who could spend hours debating how to interpret a single line of Scripture, but he preached off the cuff. He’d learned long ago that he couldn’t follow notes and hold eye contact at the same time. Forced to choose, he gave up on perfect sermons and focused on delivering authentic ones.

“Well, here we are again, in this beautiful place that God has blessed us with,” Cecil told the crowd. He turned his back and faced the valley, staring across the place he’d spent his entire life. The fields were covered in new life. A haze settled between the mountains. In the distance, a train rolled past, and in the space below, his father’s chapel gleamed.

Cecil turned back.

“Another beautiful sunrise,” he said.

Reach reporter Alden Woods at awoods@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8829. Follow him on Twitter @ac_woods.

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