Almost didn't get into the blog again... my computer had me logged in to one email account, and none of my vast series of passwords worked on it. Meanwhile, I had a "mystery" account that I couldn't figure out what I had it for. Now I know -- it belongs to this blog. It's bizarre, but I've made a note to remind myself for the future, and I think I can get back in if I log out again.
Last weekend I scooped up the Emperor of the Garage, made him the Potentate of the Front Passenger Seat, and headed due east-ish to visit the land beyond the Mississippi River. We visited the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, and on the way back spent a day in Hannibal, Missouri.
When I was a kid, Mark Twain and his stories loomed large in my library. I'd read almost everything Samuel Clemens had written by the time I was twelve, and I grew up watching Twain programs on television, from the Disneyfied versions of the Huck Finn tales to biographical documentaries and movies. I've always wanted to visit Hannibal. I was enchanted by the reality, although it was a quiet weekend right after and right before some epic rain.
We stayed in a hotel in Quincy, Illinois because we could get a totally non-smoking room (as opposed to a room that has been a smoking room in the past). We drove into Quincy in the dark, at the end of our first day on the road, and even though intellectually I knew that the Mississippi River was to my left because we'd crossed it, but I thought it was a good mile or two away. However, I could mysteriously feel the pull of all of that water as we approached Quincy, and imagine our surprise the next morning when we found we could see the river from our hotel window, just two blocks away. The road had angled toward the river as we traveled north.
Hannibal is all Twain, all the time. It's a neat little town that celebrates a famous son at the same time that it commemorates a time gone past, and recreates a literary landscape right there on Main Street. At a little park, you can descend a path and stand right on the bank of the river. Here's the view looking south -- that's a riverboat, moored and ready to take tourist passengers for a one-hour cruise on Twain's Mississippi.
And here's the river, looking north. That's the bridge we crossed on the road to Quincy (which is about twenty miles north from there, if that many). I marked the odometer as we crossed the river at that point, and it's four-tenths of a mile wide. I marked the Missouri River similarly, and it was three-tenths of a mile wide. That's a lot of water.
And here's the man of the hour, visualized by the artist as being in his river-boat-piloting youth.
We were checking out the local historical society museum when the woman behind the counter called out to ask if anyone could help push a Linotype machine across the street. I didn't think either the Emperor or I could be of much help pushing, but we went outside to watch the fun, and for the rest of the day we kept returning to the scene to watch the progress of the pushing. They had plenty of hands available, and more leadership than was actually productive to have on hand.
Here's a link to a story about the machine and the problems they were facing when it came time to get it out of its original home and over to the museum. When we were there, they had it up on a pallet, and were moving it by placing iron pipes under the pallet as they pushed, like Egyptians moving stones to build the Pyramids. When we started watching, they had the machine balanced on the threshold in a doorway and were trying to move it down two stair steps without losing control of it. By the time we left for the evening, they had it at the end of the block and ready to push across the street. Out of curiosity, we took a little detour the next morning on our way home, to see if they'd gotten any further -- and the machine was gone.
Our second detour on the way home was to take a peek at the Daniel Boone Home near Defiance, Missouri. Boone is another one of those figures that I spent a lot of time thinking about when I was a child -- according to my dad, one of our ancestors traveled with Boone "over the Cumberland Gap," although I've never been able to confirm this or really understand what it meant. But I grew up believing that we had some connection with Boone, so when I found out that there was a real Boone site not far off of our beaten track, I had to go hunting for it.
The actual Boone home is really interesting. It's a stone building overlooking a pretty valley, not far from the road -- I'm not sure what the area was like in 1807, when they began building it. Today, the land belongs to Lindenwood University, and they've used the site to create a false village with authentic buildings, calling it Boonefield Village. I'm not sure what they're trying to do with the site; their interpretive focus wasn't clear. Most of the rest of the buildings had nothing to do with Boone, and some were brought from as far away as the St. Louis area. But somebody was happily leading a tour group around the "village" and telling stories. I think I'm spoiled for life by being a historian who specializes in the study of historic landscapes, real and imaginary.
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