Day 11

Suddenly, George Washington

      This being America, you never can tell when George Washington will show up.

      We woke and boarded the bus, our guide from the day before, Gail Holmes, and a lovely assistant person, led us across the river to Omaha and into an otherwise empty section of town (I am convinced Gail likes deserted places).  We entered (and here it comes) Mt. Vernon Gardens.  We tumbled out of the bus in order to look nobly down the psychotically steep hill to the river and contemplate that our nutty ancestors chose this hill of all hills to ascend after crossing the river.  I swear, those people!  Next thing you know it will be Hole in the Rock!

      I wanted to go examine the Grecian gazebos and the shrubberies and smashed bike racks in Mt. Vernon Gardens, but no, no time.  We fought for supremacy, as if the bus door was momma bird’s mouth, then found our seats.  And that was it for George Washington.  As quickly as he appeared in our lives, he slipped out again, tipping his tri-cornered hat before dissolving into the mist.  It was an American metaphysical experience.

Anyway

      Gail’s lovely assistant (and sometimes author) regaled us with tales of Winter Quarters, quoting my ancestor Alfred Boaz Lambson, which did not seem to impress anyone to a sense of awe in my presence.  No one was any more impressed by Hosea Stout speaking out of an electric can inside a log cabin built inside the Winter Quarters Visitors’ Center which is, I must say, quite possibly the finest Church Visitors’ Center I have ever visited.  The center’s excellence was helped along by our excellent tour guide, two-week greenie Sister Wakefield, and the simple fact that we weren’t quite so cocksure about the happenings post-Nauvoo, and thus were much more teachable.  I’m sure Sister Wakefield appreciated that as well.

      We no doubt realized we were experiencing one of our final opportunities to capture each other on film and thus immortalize our memories.  One result of this, I am told, is that the center had to replace its carpet a week later.  (Faded from the flashes, you see.  Get it?  Get it?)

      (Nevermind.)

      Anyway, I asked if I might be able to get a copy of the electric can speech featuring the famed Hosea Stout.  Alas, one was not available, but the lady at the front desk took my name, and that very day mailed a copy of the cabin’s “Audio Script and Presentation”, complete with photographs of the cabin’s interior (which are actually easier to see in a blackandwhite photocopy than in real life—mostly, I suppose, because banging one’s head is not requisite in looking at a photocopy), to “Eric Justin.”  I assumed she meant me.

      But isn’t that amazing?  Not only is the joint très nice-nice, it also has the best service!

      The script consisted of diary extracts from Ursalia Hascall, Hosea Stout and Mary Richards.  The ladies each talk about how nice a time they had in Winter Quarters.  Grampa?  Well, he thought it was too cold.

Aspects of Eternity

      Leaving the Visitors’ Center, I was asked by one of those I home taught for a blessing.  Something unpleasant and disconcerting had happened that morning which affected her more directly than the rest of us.  Although I do not intend to carefully recount the Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood, or outline each use, responsibility and blessing the priesthood carries, or any fringe concepts of what priesthood “really is” or any other such thing, keep priesthood in mind.  As if giving and receiving blessings of comfort isn’t enough, opportunities to consider priesthood’s additional roles in the great miracles of life and eternity were just on the other side of the street.

      It had been roughly twenty-four hours since I was last able to hang out with dead people, and so I was glad to be back in a cemetery.  In the Winter Quarters cemetery is the very famous statue of parents standing over the grave of their frozen child.  The photographs never show it, but when you are up close, and look down where the parents are looking, there is a tiny, bronze infant lying in the hole.  It has a rakish lock curling over its forehead, but it is hard to get much of its face—it is almost as if the suffering and grief of the parents are blurring their vision.  The child seems to be sinking into the mud.  A blanket covers the baby’s crossed arms, but the navel is visible through the blanket and the fingers may be counted.  It is a horrible juxtaposition of blurring vision and clarity.

      This statue is very commonly shown in articles detailing the sacrifices of the pioneers.  The point of these articles, most frequently, is to remind us that possessed of an eternal vision, the pioneers were able to persevere.  They knew that although the pain was great and the suffering enormous, that little baby sinking in the mud was not lost to them.  That little baby lived, and awaited mother and father to come and join him at a later time.  They may have heard it taught that someday, they would be able to raise that child.  They surely felt that there are no lost children—they likely remembered that Jesus himself invited the children to come to him.  Perhaps they smiled, as they imagined their infant invited to the lap of Christ even now, as we stand here sad.  The awful task of filling the grave may have been a little easier after these reflections; going on, suddenly possible again.  Perhaps father gave mother a blessing of comfort.  Perhaps he also requested one from a friend, who only last week had lost one of his own.  Winter Quarters was a place where all suffered together.

      How would those pioneers feel, if they could rise from their graves now and see a completed temple at the foot of their graveyard?  When we arrived, the Winter Quarters Temple was not quite a full story above ground, but the wonder of its placement was not lost on us.  I imagine when the site was selected, heaven smiled.  Life, death and eternity are one round, and having a temple next to such a sacred graveyard emphasizes that truth in a profound way.  But too much profundity isn’t good for a college student, and so we were swept away to our next stop: the Omaha Airport.

The Collapse of the Bus Buddy System

      We removed ourselves from the bus and took our stuff with us, and entered the Airport of the Year (I don’t know which year).  The bus took away the van people and the old people and the etcetera people back to the hotel where the van people would load up and drive to BYU, the old people would pay off the bus driver and come back to the airport, and the etcetera people would etceterize their lives into etcetera.  We’ve never heard from them since.

      Somehow I lost the cheese.  Dad’s blue cheese—a genuine Nauvoo souvenir—was left in the Dahl’s van, so I had to wait in the lobby, with nothing but cranberry sauce, sour cream and salsa to eat, for the Backman’s return.  They were headed to Florida.  (I tell you!  Being old is the life!)  They arrived and we chatted for a while and I saw them to their gate (I had happened to see it and could think of no reason not to be congenial), and thus I missed my chance to fly standby on the flight that took nearly everyone else to Denver.  I had purchased my tickets to and from Nauvoo earlier than everyone else in order to fly to Chicago and attend my friend Josh’s wedding.  Thus, when I talked to the BYU travel office, they did not yet know when the Nauvoo program would be scheduling flights.  I decided it would be better to fly out later in the day than too early, so when I did fly out, it was too late to race the sun.  It was dark in Denver, and darker in LA when I arrived to meet my family.