Mark Twain and the Wonderful State of Missouri

Right now we're holed up on the edge of a packed truck stop in a little berg called Cameron, Missouri. We were headed for a state park down the pike a bit from here, but when the grocery clerk from whom we'd been buying supplies told us that a RV park of sorts could be found right here in Cameron we decided to save ourselves the drive and get dinner on the table sooner.

Oh, this place has all the required amenities mind you -- water, sewer, electricity. And it's far enough away from the truck parking to be quiet, maybe even too quiet. No, the only problem with our "home" for the night is that it reminds us of what you might find if you had explored behind the Bates Motel and found an RV park there.

The "park" consists of a patch of asphalt, most likely put down when Eisenhower was running for election, a half dozen desultory poles planted every twenty feet with just the barest remnants of white paint still adhering to them, and a whole lot of nothing else. No trees, no friendly patch of grass for people to "walk" their pets. Not even a rusty old barbecue pit, most often made from a converted truck wheel.

To the white-ish poles are attached the electrical boxes providing our 30 Amp service, themselves looking like they had been pulled together from a dozen different sojourns to the Sunday afternoon flea market. Beneath the poles, amongst the disintegrating chunks of tarmac and rangy weeds gaining a toehold, are the required sewer outlets caped by a PVC lid growing ever more yellow in the sun.
Our water is provided by an ancient freeze-proof, lift-up faucet, canted at a 15 degree angle from being backed into a few times. It's so old and rusty that it steady leaks from the top seal so much water that I suppose the camp owners will actually lose money on our stay.

But hey, we had such a wonderful day today that I'm just going to overlook the less than wonderful camp conditions tonight and just tell you about our day, one that started out in one of the most beautiful campsites in all of Missouri, tucked as it was into a mountain glen literally choked with trees, where we spent the most peaceful night of this whole trip with not a single sound to disturb our slumber.
Today we had toyed with the idea of doing a host of different activities but we finally decided to visit the town of Hannibal and see what Mark Twain's boyhood stomping grounds had to offer. We gave ourselves a tentative time limit of the morning hours before lunch and set off from the middle of town on a grand adventure back to the year 1835 when Sam Clemens was born. Sam was not born in Hannibal, but in an even more obscure town of Florida, Missouri. But from the time he was four he lived in Hannibal.

Hannibal nowadays has a population of just 17,000 or so. I think I read somewhere that it was really an up and comer back in the riverboat days situated, as it was, just a sixty or seventy miles north of St. Louis. Today it's a much quieter place. In fact, if Twain hadn't lived there I suspect that Hannibal would exist only in the history books today. Nearly every business in town tries, with obvious varying degrees of success, to springboard off Twain's fame to make money on everything from antiques to cheeseburgers.

Still, Hannibal looks charming from a distance and we found the inhabitants to be just that. Everywhere we went on our "history walk" people were friendly and outgoing and eager to provide us with whatever information we required, even if they didn't stand to benefit. Our intent initially was to find the Clemens family home and see what we could see. But the clever museum folks of Hannibal don't let you breeze in and out so quickly. Once you check in at the information center and pay your $7.50 (seniors, you know) you are given tickets and started on a historical journey that takes a couple of hours or more to complete and marches you through Sam Clemens' entire life, from boyhood to manhood.

A lot of times when you're museum addicts, as best describes Concetta and me, you end up experiencing a multitude of efforts in that realm. Some museums are too cursory. Some are overwhelming. I tend to like a light touch since I easily get bored when I try to read little cue cards on 11,000 different exhibits. In Hannibal, we thought that the museum folks have done an outstanding job on their museum experience, both at the information center where you start your tour and, later, at the more formal museum two blocks south. As you wend your way from information center to the Huck Finn house, to the Clemens house, to the infamous whitewashed fence, and on to the two-story main museum, you discover that all the exhibits are presented with a minimum of verbiage and a maximum of visuals. Life-sized photos and cutouts of Clemens are often utilized to present the viewer with excerpts from his various published works, speeches, and letters. We just thought the whole effect was terrific.

So, there you have it. If you're a Twain fan and you haven't been to Hannibal, we'd encourage you to go. There's lots more to do in the area than we did, but you'd have to plan on staying a bit. And if I were you, before you go, I'd pick up that battered copy of Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer from your bottom shelf and re-read those magic words. It will make the whole thing come alive for you.

Personally, I've been a Twain fan since the seventh grade when I used to prop one of his books of short stories inside my text book while in Spanish class and spend the whole period lost in Twain's world. I didn't learn Spanish all that well, but I did discover a love of good writing that has never waned.

After our morning with Mark Twain and our lunch in the parking lot of a deserted auto garage, we cranked up and headed out. After checking our directions with the gas station attendant where we topped off the tank, we set our course for Highway 36 that runs from border to border across the states of Missouri and Kansas and then plunges right on into Colorado. Our goal for today was to get as close to St. Joseph, Missouri as possible. The town of Cameron, a few miles to the east of St. Joseph, was just the only town in our guide book that listed a camp site.

And here we are. Outside the window the night is descending. Atop one of the scraggly power poles a "night light" just snapped on providing us with a pool of soft illumination to keep us company. Fortunately, we don't have a bedroom window which faces that direction, so it shouldn't keep us awake.

As she has done for the past several days since the rain stopped in Ohio, mother nature has provided us with spectacular displays of pastel skies all day. I've included a photo of one vista where we stopped to use the phone. The country through which we've been traveling since we left Hannibal is achingly beautiful, with tiny farm houses, red barns, and meandering streams dotting the landscape amidst hundreds of acres of waning crops. If I stopped everywhere I saw a prize-winning photo waiting, I'd never get anywhere.

Tomorrow? Well, I'd like to see what St. Joseph offers to commemorate its place in the American biography since it was the best-known "jumping off place" for wagon trains leaving for the gold fields of California and the verdant farming country of Oregon.

Until then, we wish you good food, good wine, and exiting destinations.

Ciao.