by Kevin Burton
Thirty-six little hours before we were to set sail for Memphis, my wife Jeannette checked the weather.
And we never set sail for Memphis.
The National Weather Service had issued a flood warning covering Memphis at exactly the same time we had planned to hit town. That sort of thing will never escape Jeannette’s detection.
And my tears fell like rain, as it says it the more cliched songs by the artists who are honored in the music museums in Memphis.
Memphis has long been a desired music-and food-filled holiday destination for us. We’ve been rhapsodizing about Memphis since our dating days. I had already captured content from the Memphis Commercial Appeal about the top 100 songs about Memphis, for inclusion on this here blog.
Let’s just say I didn’t take the flood-warning news in stride.
But as Wednesday night gave way to Thursday morning two weeks ago, I got over it, which was good, since that was the only option open to me. “Risk-reward” I always preach to Jeannette. Couldn’t go back on that now, although I suspected the flood threat was less than advertised (and I haven’t heard about any particular carnage there, since).
Speaking of options, staying home that week – the week which included our 13th wedding anniversary – was not an option, I learned.
The suitcases were 80 percent packed and my wife was 100 percent invested in a road trip.
“We’re going somewhere,” Jeannette instructed.
That wasn’t a hard sell, I was invested too. So, changing gears on the quick-quick, we decided to tend to some unfinished business in Northern Missouri.
We had been through Hannibal at least twice, staying there on the way to or from beep baseball tournaments in Indianapolis or Chicago. But we were never lingered in Hannibal long enough to do anything.
Our unfished business in Hannibal is now finished.
We arrived Friday the 11th and departed Tuesday the 15th, but not before doing a very high percentage of the Hannibal stuff, which is to say the Mark Twain stuff.
Hannibal’s favorite son is everywhere in town. You can no sooner escape him than escape the period dialect used by the characters in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by most accounts the greatest of Twain’s works. It’s there and you’re in it, get used to it.
(For instance, lunch on Sunday was at Finn’s restaurant, where I got some exceedingly great Cajun catfish, of which Huck would have approved.)
We were so tired from travel Friday, we ordered in food once we got settled in our room. I was delighted to see there was a Cassano’s Pizza in Hannibal and that it was the same chain I remember from childhood in Ohio. It was the same pizza, if a little less salty, cut into squares instead of wedges, that I remembered. Jeannette liked it too.
Thus fortified, we set off for Twainworld the next day.
Our first venture was the Mark Twain Riverboat. That was a leisurely hour-long guided tour travelling south from Hannibal then back again.
We learned a little of the shipping industry, the men and women who work there and the tools they use. We learned a lot about the local lore including a fanciful story about Lover’s Leap, a high mountain peak from which you can see all of downtown Hannibal and observe barges travelling up and down the Mississippi River.
Legend has it that a beautiful young maiden and a young brave from neighboring-warring tribes met at the site and fell in love. The girl’s father learned of the liaison and ordered her not to see the boy again.
After the father discovered she had disobeyed him and kept seeing the brave, he waited, then approached Lover’s Leap, not just to catch them in the act, but to shoot his only daughter with an arrow through the heart.
The brave saw the incoming missile in time, and the two leaped from their vantage point hand in hand, to meet the fate that all tragic lover do.
Except they fell smack on top of a Burlington freight train, travelled thereby to the next town, married and had twelve children and made a million dollars, which would have been a lot back in those days.
Next we went to the Mark Twain Cave, a series of tunnels that was discovered it is said, because a dog once chased a mountain lion into it.
Well I don’t care shucks about caves (was that bit properlyTwainian?), but I sure wanted to hear about this bad-ass dog that went around chasing mountain lions.
“It was a hunting dog…” said the tour guide. But still!
After being assured that the cave was now free from mountain lions, we took the tour. That is an exercise in claustrophobia and avoiding jagged rocks sticking out at all angles. But it was not without its charms. The cool part was the stories of who had been through the caves, Twain Himself, Jesse James and others. A handful of weddings have been held there and the guide showed us where the mini-chapel is.
Everybody in the world has signed the rocks in the cave, to the point that it is now illegal to do so.
One of the other tourists spotted a single bat hanging on a wall in the cave, which is not unusual except that there was only one. I did not tilt my head in the direction he indicated, preferring instead to concentrate avoiding crashing my head into the lower rocks of the cave’s ceiling. Jeannett of course, being dynamite in a small package, had no such worries.
A nearby winery was not a farm growing grapes, as we supposed, but a place selling wine, and thus nothing to see. Jeannette was disappointed, I was relieved. I was ready to go back to room 220.
On Sunday with great gusto, we went up and down Main Street and some of the cross streets in Hannibal to the shops there. All the delights were overpriced, but we captured some o0f them anyway. Some were just a bit less overpriced.
“Are you in the cool crowd” a vendor asked my wife, pointing to a sign offering a discount for those aged 62 and above. That made her laugh and was of great good fortune, for had she asked me about the cool crowd I would have had to confess that, “oh no, I’m only 61.”
Mark Twain’s face on a label on a bag of cheddar cheese popcorn adds at least $7 to the price and adds nothing to the taste. But I must admit the popcorn was very good.
We had some great ice cream and some good coffee. We signed up in a drawing to win a $400 basket of goodies, donated by the store’s suppliers. But alas, we didn’t win. I had already done the mental gymnastics to figure how we would fit it into our already-overpacked Toyota.
By Monday, our anniversary, we were spent and visited just the Mark Twain Museum, not to be confused with the Boyhood Home and Museum. I say our business in Hannibal is finished, but maybe not. The Boyhood Home could be something we check out later.
On Tuesday, we started the 14th year of our marriage by pointing the car north, toward Iowa.
Tomorrow: bookstores and trains in Iowa, tornados and a curiously bad hotel in Nebraska.
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