Friday, July 3, 2009

Huck and the Hucksters

STATE VISITED: Missouri


The last time I went up the St. Louis Arch was the year after it opened, when I went with my junior-high church youth group. Needless to say, I hardly remember anything about it, except that I took a picture of the old Busch Stadium with my new Polaroid Swinger camera and it looked like a tiny slide-projector carousel. I think it was just the Arch back then -- just a ride to the top and a look around -- although I could always be wrong.



Now there's a whole complex of things to do at the base -- riverboat tours, two different films, a mock-up of a period general store, and a whole "museum" telling the story of America's westward expansion. I put "museum" in quotes because there aren't many real artifacts, just glossy reproductions and loads of wordy plaques. I suppose if you read all the displays it could occupy you for hours -- but we're on vacation! Who wants to read all the displays? It's enough just to listen to the sonorous speeches delivered by the animatronic characters:








Okay, okay, so the bison didn't talk. That would have been too awesome, wouldn't it?

My favorite bit was the reconstructed sod house. That's like the ultimate frontier dwelling -- "Oh, you think it's cool living in a house made of logs? Well, I live in a house made of dirt." (Hint: Look in the window and you can see Hugh...)

The reality is that this "museum" is just there to occupy you while you're waiting to take the tram to the top. It's crowd control, pure and simple. Once you've been checked in with your time-stamped tram ticket, there's a string of other displays to distract you so you don't get restless while you're waiting in line some more. They're very educational and all that -- but the real reason you're there is to go 600-plus feet in the air, higher than the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument.

The "tram" (a chain of enclosed 5-person pods that are a real challenge for claustrophobics) takes four minutes to reach the top. I think we spent about six minutes looking out the windows and then we decided to go back down. (The ride down takes three minutes -- gravity helps.) There just isn't that much to see once you're up there, at least if you're not from the area and none of the landmarks mean much to you. But just for the record, here's what we saw: (left to right) the old courthouse, Busch Stadium, and the Eads Bridge.










The Eads Bridge is cool because it was St. Louis' first railroad bridge across the Mississippi, and had an innovative cantilevered arch design. The arches of the Eads Bridge are what inspired Eero Saarinen to design the Arch. (See, those time-wasting videos while you're waiting for the tram really do teach you something.) When all is said and done, you have to admit that the Gateway Arch is still a breathtaking monument, that minimalist immense sweep of silver glinting in the sunlight. Nearly half a century old and it still looks post-modern and cool.

I have to admit I was a bit distracted by the presence of dozens of teen-age beauty pageant winners who were swarming around the Arch, all dressed in matching blue T-shirts, white short-shorts, and rhinestone tiaras. I don't think I could ever wear a tiara without giggling, but these girls were completely unself-conscious about it. These girls were born to wear tiaras, apparently.

My kids said not to take pictures of the girls, but I couldn't help it. I figured these are the sort of kids who don't mind having their pictures taken.

We pulled out of St. Louis around noon and headed north, up the river, to Hannibal, Missouri. It was good for a change to get off the interstates and do some blue highways. As we drove through a string of tiny sleepy river towns, Bob remarked that they had "seen better days." Tom begged to differ -- what "better days" had these towns ever seen? I suspect he's right.

Hannibal was worth the drive, though. As a charter member of the Huck Finn Society, I'm a huge Mark Twain fan, and I'd already been twice to the quirky mansion in West Hartford where Clemens -- by then already celebrated as a national literary treasure -- lived at the time he wrote Tom Sawyer. I just had to see the town where Tom Sawyer grew up.

The historic downtown of Hannibal does what it can to capitalize on the Twain connection -- the Becky Thatcher Ice Cream Parlor! The Mark Twain Diner! the Tom Sawyer Dioramas! -- there's even a mustachioed gent in a white suit and a wild gray mane standing on street corners for photo ops. (Signs proclaim that he is not affiliated with the official Mark Twain Boyhood Home organization -- some local dust-up no doubt.) Maybe I should have taken his picture, but it just seemed too obvious.





The old Clemens home is pretty much what you'd expect the local justice of the peace to own: a square white frame house two blocks inland from the ferry landing, just off Main Street. Justice Clemens' law offices (also part of the official site) are right across the street. Note the white board fence to the right of the house -- that's the fence that Tom Sawyer swindles his friends into whitewashing for him in that early chapter of the book.

There didn't seem to be many authentic Clemens possessions inside, so the curators tried to distract visitors with white plaster figures of Twain, posed in the sparsely furnished rooms, as if he were visiting the place in his memory. It's a cool idea but not 100% effective.



Behind the Clemens house, they've built a house that's supposed to be where Huck Finn lived, a copy of the home where young Sam's pal Tom Blankenship, son of the town drunk, grew up. Photos of the old Blankenship shack look appropriately ramshackle, but this place was just built and hardly looks decrepit. They haven't put any furnishings inside yet, either. Huck being one of my favorite characters in all of literature, I did feel a little let down that they haven't yet done him justice here.

I still thought Hannibal was a great side trip to make. It's a fine window into the past, when the Mississippi river was the great artery of the middle of the country. All those neat brick shipfronts lining the main street, the frame houses on side streets climbing the hill -- no village green, no great shade trees, just a fair and open little town clinging to the river. As Bob remarked, it felt distinctly Southern -- Missouri was after all a slave state -- much more so than the hustling port of St. Louis two hours' drive south.

Leaving Hannibal, we cut southwest through a wide swathe of farmland and small county seat towns. One thing we noticed -- this being July 4th weekend -- was that every town had at least one, and often two or three, open-air tents set up selling fireworks, for the local Boy Scouts or Elks Lodge or cancer society or whatever. Tables stacked high with rockets and sparklers and Roman candles of all kinds, and from what we could see, they were doing a brisk business. It seemed impossible to imagine that so many fireworks could be sold in one weekend, but hey, it's the Fourth.

And once we got back on I-70, from Columbia MO on west, we noticed billboards advertising another thriving local line of business. "ADULT XXX Videos DVDs Toys Magazines Lingerie Shoes!!!!" (Shoes -- hunh?) Maybe it's for lonely truckers, maybe this is just a part of the country where there's very little else in the realm of entertainment, but there were sure enough of these billboards for us to wonder. In the interests of journalism, I probably should have gotten off the road to investigate . . . . but, well, the Family Truckster has a moral tone to uphold.