Road Trip - Part 5: Nauvoo, IL
This is it! The last documented leg of our road trip between Provo and Raleigh. Our last stop was probably farther out of the way than any of the others, but Drew was eager to add Nauvoo, IL to our itinerary, and I was eager to oblige. The drive into Nauvoo along the Mississippi River was beautiful; it made us feel, really for the first time, that we were back in the east and caused me to develop an immediate love of the mighty M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I. We had reservations at the Willard Richards Inn and headed there first thing. This inn is the only hotel inside the Historic District of Nauvoo (as an original building and the site of what was once history-in-the-making, the inn is actually part of the Historic District), and we couldn't have picked a more convenient or comfy home base for our Nauvoo adventure.
The bed-and-breakfast provided us with beach cruiser bikes for the weekend, and we quickly took them up on the offer. Nauvoo is the perfect town for bike travel - everything is really close together, the weather is warm, but crisp, and the scenery, particularly the Mississippi River, is best experienced with the breeze in your hair. After humoring the innkeeper with a detailed tour of the house and getting our bags into our room, our first stop was dinner at The Hotel Nauvoo. We had to bike up a pretty hefty hill to get there from the Historic District, and, seeing as we were only about five minutes into our first experience with bikes in probably 15 years, the ride was quite aerobic. It certainly helped us work up an appetite for the buffet dinner we were bound for. This was the second buffet of our trip (third, I guess, with our continental breakfast) - so many buffets in one week is pretty unusual for us, but this one quickly took the cake over the Vegas one in terms of taste. It was mostly home cooking - ham and sweet potatoes and butter beans and cinnamon rolls - yum. With satisfactorily stuffed tummies, we left the restaurant (which was, like our hotel, an historic destination in and of itself), and headed out to see what we could see of Nauvoo before the sun set.
After exploring the sites around The Hotel Nauvoo, we headed back down the hill and towards the river to wander around the temple grounds for a while. The majestic building, the view, the little town of Nauvoo - all of it was so quiet and peaceful, perhaps especially at that time of day and at that time in the season (Nauvoo is a busy, happening place in the summertime, but our visit was about three weeks before the rush ensued). Aside from permanent residents and one small tour group (who kindly took a few of the following pictures for us), we had the town largely to ourselves that evening, and I think that made all the difference in our experience. There was no rushing to be next in line onto a shuttle bus or taking pictures over and around other people; it was just the two of us in a new, quaint, little place, enjoying each other and our surroundings at our own pace.
Once the sun had done its marvelous thing, we got our heads out of the clouds and realized that we were standing at the very beginning of the "Route to the Rockies" that the Mormon pioneers took between Nauvoo and Utah. Believe me, the irony that we had just completed much of that route in reverse, heading for our own Zion, was not lost on us.
We took the long way home on our bikes; along the way we passed charming field after charming field, became acquainted with a few oxen, and caught glimpses of the Nauvoo Temple by night.
Since we arrived in Nauvoo after all of the touristy things had closed for the day, we had to wait until the next morning to see the sights any closer than our beach cruisers would allow. We started at the Nauvoo Visitor's Center and a nice, senior couple educated us on how to squeeze the most into the three hours we had before we needed to hit the road, Atlanta-bound. They recommended the blacksmith shop, the brickyard, Brigham Young's home, the Browning home, and the bakery, so that's exactly what we saw. They also suggested riding all the way to the edge of the Historic District to visit the burial sites of Emma, Hyrum, and Joseph Smith and his parents, and we did that, too.
Historic Nauvoo is run almost entirely by senior missionaries, and, aside from the yummy gingerbread cookies we were given at the bakery, my favorite part of the morning was just interacting with the good people that volunteer their time (their years) to teach visitors about the history of a people and a church they love dearly.
After turning in our bikes (Sad day. We just might have to get our own sometime soon...), packing our bags, and bidding adieu to Nauvoo, we drove just a few miles to the town of Carthage, IL to visit Carthage Jail, the deathplace of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. We learned that the namesake of our bed and breakfast, Willard Richards, was there the day the two brothers were killed by a mob, but he was unharmed and survived to travel the "Route to the Rockies" and act as the first Editor-in-Chief of the familiar (to us in Provo, anyway) Desert News.
While it's really neat in some ways to visit the relics of eras gone by, it's ultimately a little uncomfortable for me to be in the places where regular people once lived and moved and had their being. In many of the little brick homes we wandered through in Nauvoo, I imagine there were once marriages and childbirth, personal trials and family decisions, broken hearts and shattered glasses of milk, and tears (the happy and the sad ones) shed over all of it. It's strange to me to walk where that once was. In this last little brick building, there was once misunderstanding and blind anger, mob mentality and the threat of death, spilt blood and raw injustice. It's even more unnerving to stand in a room whose walls tell those kinds of stories.
But it's important, too, isn't it? To stand where both average folks and great people stood. To learn that, like me, they were all mortal and fallible and breakable, but also that they were human (and by that I mean human, not only human), with stories and feelings and fears and beliefs, just trying to do right by them. Being in Nauvoo and Carthage provided ample opportunity to get toe-to-toe with those people and places at the foundation of this church I've adopted and reflect on my relationship with them. And, since we're being honest here, it's not all peachy-rosy. Like a teenager seeking a culprit for life's angst, I attribute blame for some of the most painful and confusing parts of my late teens and early twenties to the man Joseph Smith. Whether simply because he's a man (I recognize that I tend to display a general mistrust of unfamiliar members of the opposite sex) or because he and his story have been shrouded in controversy since the beginning, I've never really trusted him and never really forgiven him for establishing an institution that more than once has made me feel like I had to sacrifice either one half of my heart or the other on the altar of truth. Not fair, I say. My teenage inclinations scream it's not fair that I was made to feel that way (or that I allowed myself to feel that way). But my older, wiser, more logical self knows it's also not fair that I've projected blame for those feelings onto the person of Joseph Smith. Although my attitude sometimes indicates otherwise, I can say with confidence that Joseph Smith wasn't a villain trying to ruin my life, mwahahaha-ing as he formulated just the thing to agonize and antagonize me 170 years later.
At the end of the day, I think I was a little too enamored with the geography of Nauvoo (did I mention how pretty that part of the Mississippi River is?) to internalize very much of the history sitting on top of it, but I did carry a few things with me as we left, heading closer and closer to our own idea of Zion. In addition to a memory made of a marvelous evening on the banks of the Mississippi with Drew, I now have a fondness for the lovely community that once existed in old Nauvoo; an appreciation for senior missionaries and conviction in their convictions; awareness of the difficulties endured by many in the pursuit of truth and happiness; and faith in the fact that whatever Joseph Smith saw or did in his too-short lifetime, he truly believed that he had encountered God and couldn't fathom "why the world [would] think to make [him] deny what [he had] actually seen. For [he] had seen a vision; [he] knew it, and [he] knew that God knew it, and [he] could not deny it, neither dared [he] do it" (JSH 1:25). Joseph remains the originator of some ideas and practices that trouble my head and heart and continue to add complexity to my life, but he now sits in my mind as an individual with a place in time and space, not a frustratingly abstract concept (or super-villain). I've spent some time where he lived and stood where he died, and, if nothing else, I know that he was a human who found God in the woods and did his best to live up to that experience. And I can thank Nauvoo for that.
The bed-and-breakfast provided us with beach cruiser bikes for the weekend, and we quickly took them up on the offer. Nauvoo is the perfect town for bike travel - everything is really close together, the weather is warm, but crisp, and the scenery, particularly the Mississippi River, is best experienced with the breeze in your hair. After humoring the innkeeper with a detailed tour of the house and getting our bags into our room, our first stop was dinner at The Hotel Nauvoo. We had to bike up a pretty hefty hill to get there from the Historic District, and, seeing as we were only about five minutes into our first experience with bikes in probably 15 years, the ride was quite aerobic. It certainly helped us work up an appetite for the buffet dinner we were bound for. This was the second buffet of our trip (third, I guess, with our continental breakfast) - so many buffets in one week is pretty unusual for us, but this one quickly took the cake over the Vegas one in terms of taste. It was mostly home cooking - ham and sweet potatoes and butter beans and cinnamon rolls - yum. With satisfactorily stuffed tummies, we left the restaurant (which was, like our hotel, an historic destination in and of itself), and headed out to see what we could see of Nauvoo before the sun set.
After exploring the sites around The Hotel Nauvoo, we headed back down the hill and towards the river to wander around the temple grounds for a while. The majestic building, the view, the little town of Nauvoo - all of it was so quiet and peaceful, perhaps especially at that time of day and at that time in the season (Nauvoo is a busy, happening place in the summertime, but our visit was about three weeks before the rush ensued). Aside from permanent residents and one small tour group (who kindly took a few of the following pictures for us), we had the town largely to ourselves that evening, and I think that made all the difference in our experience. There was no rushing to be next in line onto a shuttle bus or taking pictures over and around other people; it was just the two of us in a new, quaint, little place, enjoying each other and our surroundings at our own pace.
After seeing how beautifully the sun was setting, we rode like the wind to get as close to the river as we could for the rest of Heaven's public display of affection for us. Sunset over a river. You just can't beat it. And I couldn't stop photographing it.
Once the sun had done its marvelous thing, we got our heads out of the clouds and realized that we were standing at the very beginning of the "Route to the Rockies" that the Mormon pioneers took between Nauvoo and Utah. Believe me, the irony that we had just completed much of that route in reverse, heading for our own Zion, was not lost on us.
We had a conversation here with a nice, elderly couple from Orem, UT (who had also come for the sunset) about how so many people had managed to cross such a large, fast-moving river so quickly with so much stuff. Who knows? we said. Who knows? they said. Then we stumbled upon the answer and a plaque explaining it: wagon barges. Now we know.
We took the long way home on our bikes; along the way we passed charming field after charming field, became acquainted with a few oxen, and caught glimpses of the Nauvoo Temple by night.
Since we arrived in Nauvoo after all of the touristy things had closed for the day, we had to wait until the next morning to see the sights any closer than our beach cruisers would allow. We started at the Nauvoo Visitor's Center and a nice, senior couple educated us on how to squeeze the most into the three hours we had before we needed to hit the road, Atlanta-bound. They recommended the blacksmith shop, the brickyard, Brigham Young's home, the Browning home, and the bakery, so that's exactly what we saw. They also suggested riding all the way to the edge of the Historic District to visit the burial sites of Emma, Hyrum, and Joseph Smith and his parents, and we did that, too.
Historic Nauvoo is run almost entirely by senior missionaries, and, aside from the yummy gingerbread cookies we were given at the bakery, my favorite part of the morning was just interacting with the good people that volunteer their time (their years) to teach visitors about the history of a people and a church they love dearly.
After turning in our bikes (Sad day. We just might have to get our own sometime soon...), packing our bags, and bidding adieu to Nauvoo, we drove just a few miles to the town of Carthage, IL to visit Carthage Jail, the deathplace of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. We learned that the namesake of our bed and breakfast, Willard Richards, was there the day the two brothers were killed by a mob, but he was unharmed and survived to travel the "Route to the Rockies" and act as the first Editor-in-Chief of the familiar (to us in Provo, anyway) Desert News.
But it's important, too, isn't it? To stand where both average folks and great people stood. To learn that, like me, they were all mortal and fallible and breakable, but also that they were human (and by that I mean human, not only human), with stories and feelings and fears and beliefs, just trying to do right by them. Being in Nauvoo and Carthage provided ample opportunity to get toe-to-toe with those people and places at the foundation of this church I've adopted and reflect on my relationship with them. And, since we're being honest here, it's not all peachy-rosy. Like a teenager seeking a culprit for life's angst, I attribute blame for some of the most painful and confusing parts of my late teens and early twenties to the man Joseph Smith. Whether simply because he's a man (I recognize that I tend to display a general mistrust of unfamiliar members of the opposite sex) or because he and his story have been shrouded in controversy since the beginning, I've never really trusted him and never really forgiven him for establishing an institution that more than once has made me feel like I had to sacrifice either one half of my heart or the other on the altar of truth. Not fair, I say. My teenage inclinations scream it's not fair that I was made to feel that way (or that I allowed myself to feel that way). But my older, wiser, more logical self knows it's also not fair that I've projected blame for those feelings onto the person of Joseph Smith. Although my attitude sometimes indicates otherwise, I can say with confidence that Joseph Smith wasn't a villain trying to ruin my life, mwahahaha-ing as he formulated just the thing to agonize and antagonize me 170 years later.
At the end of the day, I think I was a little too enamored with the geography of Nauvoo (did I mention how pretty that part of the Mississippi River is?) to internalize very much of the history sitting on top of it, but I did carry a few things with me as we left, heading closer and closer to our own idea of Zion. In addition to a memory made of a marvelous evening on the banks of the Mississippi with Drew, I now have a fondness for the lovely community that once existed in old Nauvoo; an appreciation for senior missionaries and conviction in their convictions; awareness of the difficulties endured by many in the pursuit of truth and happiness; and faith in the fact that whatever Joseph Smith saw or did in his too-short lifetime, he truly believed that he had encountered God and couldn't fathom "why the world [would] think to make [him] deny what [he had] actually seen. For [he] had seen a vision; [he] knew it, and [he] knew that God knew it, and [he] could not deny it, neither dared [he] do it" (JSH 1:25). Joseph remains the originator of some ideas and practices that trouble my head and heart and continue to add complexity to my life, but he now sits in my mind as an individual with a place in time and space, not a frustratingly abstract concept (or super-villain). I've spent some time where he lived and stood where he died, and, if nothing else, I know that he was a human who found God in the woods and did his best to live up to that experience. And I can thank Nauvoo for that.
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