Travels with Barley (17 page)

“If the cops do come in here,” Dan told me, “they're looking for potato chips.”

For Sonja Bush, the issue was simply being the object of an affront that she felt stemmed from religious narrow-mindedness. “At first, I just went along with it,” she said. “But then I got so mad… . This is a farming community and the people who come in here are good, honest, hardworking people. We have fun and there's no real sin that goes on.”

With the temple open three months now and the summer crowds having thinned out, I asked her if things had calmed down. “There's still tensions,” she said, “though not as much because I think they've come to accept for now that we're here.”

Then she dropped a bombshell: “I lease the place and my landlord just sold the building to a Mormon in Utah. I'm sure he's using my lease money to turn it into a little nest egg and will convert this into anything he wants to one day.”

Then she laughed: “Yeah, I think they're going to get me.”

I thanked her and the guys at the bar for their time and went seeking a counterpoint to this. But there were no tourists (Mormon or otherwise) milling about the temple and I couldn't just go in: temples are closed to nonbelievers. So I drove back to the Joseph Smith Historic Site, where I inquired of a kindly woman at an information desk in the Historic Nauvoo Visitors Center, a rambling, modern building, if she knew anything of this controversy. She said she didn't but she did offer me a number of Historic Nauvoo pamphlets and suggested I take in the “inspiring film” interpreting “the early developments of Historic Nauvoo.” I accepted the pamphlets but passed on the movie, opting instead to walk over to see the Historic Smith Family Graveyard where Smith's remains lie. I wondered what Smith himself would make of all of this.

And I wondered if I would make an odder stop along the River of Beer.

An hour before dark, I drove toward another shrine, this one to a most secular man and a most secular faith, if literature can be called a faith. I'd entered Hannibal, Missouri, about seventy miles south of Nauvoo, and was heading in the direction of the childhood home of my literary hero Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. I'd decided that this odd day ought to be capped with something personally inspiring, whether Hannibal mustered even a single candidate for the Perfect Beer Joint.

Hannibal—“America's Hometown,” a sign told me—seemed to lay out quiet and drowsy in the late afternoon sun. I followed Mark Twain historical markers and desultory traffic down into the city center, and then farther down toward the riverfront, where most of the town's considerable Twainabilia can be found. I'd decided Hannibal was as far as I was going, and I immediately faced a lodging conundrum: the old and faded (but perhaps character-filled) Mark Twain Hotel or the Hotel Clemens Best Western. (Coming in, I'd also noticed the Comfort Inn on Huckleberry Drive, not to mention the Super 7 Motel and a Travelodge, both on Mark Twain Avenue.) My problem was solved when I realized, upon closer inspection, that the old Mark Twain Hotel was closed to lodgers and that the Hotel Clemens Best Western sat right across the street from the Mark Twain Dinette & Family Restaurant. It was also within walking distance of both the Jumping Frog Café and Becky's Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor and Emporium, not to mention things I really wanted to see, like the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, Becky Thatcher's House, the Tom and Huck Statue, and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer Dioramas.

Hannibal is a town of about 18,000 and it made me wonder how many jobs here were tied to the Twain industry and how many things named Twain, or named for Twain characters, there were. Later, flipping through the Yellow Pages, I learned that even the Miller Beer wholesaler in town called itself Mark Twain Distributing Co. Twain, a lager man, probably would've appreciated the beer connection. It's hard to know what he would have made of the Sawyer's Creek Fun Park, Café and Christmas Shop with its bumper boats, miniature golf course, and Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher dolls, looking like mutant cousins to the Cabbage Patch Kids, at $22.95 a pair, mail order.

All the Twain sites were locked up tight by the time I parked the car on a steep grade and checked into the hotel behind a busload of elderly tourists who seemed to be in a contest over who could register the slowest, and several biker couples whose formidable tattoos at least gave me a number of worlds to visit while I waited in line. Still, before dark, I was able to wander around and peek in windows of Twain's home, and Grant's Drug Store, the handsome clapboard business and house where Twain's family lived for a couple of years when they fell on hard times.

There was enough signage about that I was able to refresh my memory that Twain was actually born in Florida, Missouri (not to be confused with Louisiana, Missouri, or Mexico, Missouri), and moved to Hannibal in 1839 as a four-year-old. He moved away in 1853, having worked briefly as a printer and a journalist, packing with him the boyhood memories that would turn into
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, and salt numerous other of the thirty-odd literary works he would produce in his lifetime. When Twain revisited Hannibal in 1882 to complete his seminal memoir of his river pilot days called
Life on the Mississippi
, he wrote of it:

The town still posed handsomely from the bluffs above, though in character it didn't much resemble historical descriptions of Twain's old Hannibal with its rowdy port full of flatboaters and river rats, its slaughterhouses and port-packing plants, its lumber mills, barrel makers, and odoriferous hide-tanning factories. I strolled well beyond the few square blocks holding Twain's renovated Hannibal and, in the fading light, on a street of somewhat faded houses, experienced a kind of Tom-and-Huck moment when I was accosted by a large and menacing dog of uncertain breed—I was guessing a Great Dane-shepherd mix, with the moderating influence of maybe a bull mastiff someplace in the gene pool. The lads no doubt, with Twain's acquiescence, would have beaned the monster with a handy rock, fed it something ghastly but not fatal, or found some other clever way to throw it off their tracks. I could merely stand and back away and yell at the beast, hoping the owner might appear and be more hospitable than the dog. (On the other hand, I have a theory that dogs often look and act like their owners, which, in this case, would have exacerbated my problem.) This stalemate ended only when a car came up the street and the pooch happily went snarling after it, gnashing at a rear tire, as I sprinted in the opposite direction.

On the late side of the dinner hour, I found my way to Bubba's, a restaurant tucked into a handsome old warehouse on the “wet side” of the Mississippi River levee (what locals call the Flood Wall) not far from the hotel. I chose it by name alone. I'd lived in Columbia, Missouri, for three years as a graduate student and always found that Missouri, outside of St. Louis and Kansas City, felt more like the South than the Midwest. And when in the South, you are required, every time you encounter a place named Bubba's, to stop and eat there. It was a good choice. I opted for the pit-smoked barbecue ribs and they were terrific.

It was there that I allowed myself the idle thought of what it would have been like to go beer drinking with Sam Clemens, perhaps before the time, late in his life, when he had become so exasperated by the chronic tragedy and folly of the world that a pint or two could no longer comfort him. Though I hadn't plotted ahead in search of beer joints, I had bothered to do some beer research on Twain and found a number of references that made me think he had once been a committed beer pilgrim himself. In Albert Bigelow Paine's 1912 biography of Twain, Paine writes of Twain as a San Francisco reporter, living in a flat above the tin roofs of Chinatown. There, he and his companions, after late night beer-drinking sessions, would sometimes toss their empties down upon those very same roofs, then duck for cover behind the blinds when bleary-eyed residents came stumbling from their houses, shaking their fists at all the clattering. Paine described the beer-drinking outings, and Twain's fondness for the barleyed beverage, this way:

And I decided that Twain himself might have weighed in on the controversy back in Nauvoo after reading a letter he had written, while on hiatus in New York in 1867, to his old newspaper back in San Francisco:

Alas, Bubba's was a pleasant enough place to ruminate these matters but it was mostly empty and, though it served beer, it didn't qualify as a beer joint. So I wandered back along quiet, darkened streets, fairly beat from more than six hours in the car, thinking maybe that on this Wednesday night all of Hannibal had already gone to bed and so I would, too. But as I crossed Main Street, I noticed lights a couple of blocks away, and what looked like the orangey glow of a neon sign. As I got closer, I realized it was a bar and that there were actually people drinking beer in it. It was about nine o'clock; I wandered in.

The place was called Sid's National Bar & Grill and, whether it was a biker bar or not, it was at this moment about half-filled with bikers, with biker girlfriends, and with a few people who looked like they could be bikers-in-training. Loud biker rock pounded from the jukebox and the bikers themselves were engaged in a rather raucous and competitive game of darts involving one of the larger dart players—well, human beings, actually—that I'd ever seen in person, a guy who seemed to be a curious cross between that late-'50s soap commercial character Mr. Clean, but tattooed as thoroughly as Dennis Rodman. I threaded my way to the bar and, remembering where I was, ordered a Bud. Since I lacked tattoos, an earring, a muscle shirt or muscle jacket, a black leather jacket, a proper pirate's head scarf, the proper frayed denim jeans hung with chains and held up with studded belts, and since I did not have on what bikers might consider manly footwear (having dressed for dinner in chinos and penny loafers), I didn't want to stick out any more than I already did. I tried striking up a conversation with my bartender but between the music and the dart-related exhortations it was so loud that I could barely manage to find out how much I owed for the beer, much less plumb the deeper meaning of Sid's National Bar & Grill. So I sat on a bar stool sipping my Bud and watching the darts match unfold, the air filled with smoke, music, chatter, and occasional outbursts of cheering and cheerful profanities. Thus, I was hardly prepared for what happened next.

A man in a ball cap suddenly stood up from a table, yelled “Quiet!” at the top of his lungs, and then said: “It's 9:10 on 9/11. In a minute, at 9:11, I want everyone to stand in a minute of silence for the people who died in the World Trade Center and their families.”

The place hushed. Darts ceased flying. Somebody pulled the plug on the music.

And as the clock struck 9:11, the bikers, some still clutching beers, and some taking off caps, bowed their heads in a deep and enveloping silence.

And this they held, for well more than a minute, until someone moved toward the jukebox and plugged it back in.