Mud
Back in the days of old Nauvoo, Americans were still laboring under the bizarre misconception that the only good land is the land trees grow on. And so they would break their backs for years chopping trees, removing stumps and breaking hard, unfriendly ground in order to plant, say, wheat. In a few years the shallow soil would stop supplying nutrients and folks would have to move on.
Meanwhile, the Great Plains sat ignored because, since no trees grew there, how good could the land possibly be? Never mind that wheat is a heckuva lot more like prairie grass than trees and it would be much, much simpler to just try planting there than to go cut down another forest anyway. But they knew what they knew and that was that.
Never know what you know and let that be that.
Eventually, someone figured out that their basic assumption was erroneous, and the Breadbasket was born. Huzzah!
Nauvoo used to be a swamp, and quite frankly, swamps are neither forest nor plain, but something else entirely. So just throw those last few paragraphs into the Nice to Know category, and let’s move on. Because what Nauvoo has is mud, very clayey mud. Nauvoo’s mud is great stuff—converted potters who arrived in Nauvoo immediately set to work, and Nauvoo’s pottery industry bustled—even if it never did become the huge manufacturing center some had hoped. Because of the mud, Nauvoo was also chock full of brickyards. Which was handy because if there was one thing Nauvoo needed, it was more houses. Wilford Woodruff, was it, who made trips to the brickyards everyday and handpicked each brick for his home individually? Honestly, I consider that more than a little obsessive for brick quality. But then, I’m not an apostle either. And, well, his house is still sound and stable. I stand corrected.
Speaking of bricks, let me tell you a joke. Fellow JSA student Jaime told me this joke on the trip to St. Louis to attend Greg’s homecoming. It seems a man was a real tightwad and so had calculated to the brick just how much building material he would need to build his house. He purchased the exact number his calculations had produced, and took the bricks to his lot. After finishing the house, he was alarmed to discover he had one brick left over. He scrambled around the house, looking for an empty spot missing one brick. Finding none, he rechecked his calculations. He could find no error. Finally, in frustration, he threw the brick up in the air. The end.
I suspect some exhaust may have been leaking into the van, because I found that joke hilarious.1
Nauvoo clay is red. And thus Nauvoo pottery is red. Well, I suppose orange would be a more honest designation, since orange is the cross between red and yellow, and Nauvoo pottery runs the gamut from almost yellow to almost red. Thus, I feel more justified in describing the stuff as orange.
Nauvoo clay is additionally very, very bad for clothing. We first learned this when a number of out more crazy students became embroiled in a bitter mud battle in the middle of a January rainstorm. They came in decidedly orange. Like they were doing an interpretive dance entitled “Zion’s National Park.” They were forced to throw away their clothing. I just tut-tutted and went my merry way.
Part of the reason my way was merry is because I had discovered a fancy little website called atomfilms.com and my new hobby was watching cartoons online. One of my favorites was the highly quotable “The Pigeon and the Onion Pie.” Poor pigeon doesn’t think he can fly (his dad was a human, you see), but the Onion Pie encourages him. It’s very touching. We also enjoyed “Humdrum”, an Aardman (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit) short involving argumentative shadow puppets.
Eventually, us short film fans branched out into live films, and our favorite in the living genre immediately became “Dirt”—the story of a man who loves dirt. It began with a childhood game involving sticking dirt into nose, mouth, ears—all facial orifices were invited. And this guy could always take More Dirt. This game led to his regular eating of dirt. At first it was just a little dirt sprinkled on his food—maybe a little mud gravy on his dirt-and-meatloaf. Eventually, plants began sprouting through his skin and the man became a self-supporting ecosystem. It’s very neat; you should try it—it would really cut down on grocery expenses.
Nauvoo dirt, however, is not for the eating. We students were invited to come over and dig through the dirt the temple construction workers had excavated from the old temple well. Perhaps there would be exciting things to find. But not probably. Had it been probably, they wouldn’t have let us dig through it!
It was all very ceremonious. After an opening prayer and some remarks, we all put on latex gloves, and gardening gloves over those, and then warned not to eat the dirt. “Don’t eat the dirt! Do not place the dirt in your mouth! The dirt is not for the eating nor for the putting in the mouth!”
When pressed for details, they explained that the dirt may be contaminated with Hepatitis B and they wouldn’t want us to get sick. I noted that I had been vaccinated for Hep B, but nevermind that I had been vaccinated—they still didn’t want me eating dirt! Can you believe that?
This “dirt” I refer to was actually mud. The sort of mud that’ll take your shoes off if you’re not careful. Very orange, super clayey, Nauvoo mud. Although no one expected us to find anything 1840s, I was hopeful. (Better to throw something down the well than risk some golden-legged apostate getting it, right?) But what we found instead was a plethora of pennies (dating all the way back to 1961!), empty Sunkist cans, and a bunch of solo velcro shoes. I did find part of a round brick thingey that ranked among the most exciting finds of the day, but it was no older than the 1940s.
I wrote Steve, the newspaperman who had accompanied us to Missouri, and he asked the vital, archeological question, “Were they historic, Mormon-era Sunkist cans?” This was just what I had been wondering, but the on-site historian had assured me they were not. A disappointment for him also, I am sure.
I still have the shirt I wore to the dig, but it has, very distinctly, a splattery handprint on the back. I don’t know who slapped my back under the guise of friendship first, but by the time I left the temple grounds, most everyone had taken the opportunity to slap a mud-encased hand between my shoulder blades.
Lloydel and I were the very last two to finish. We really wanted to make sure that everything of interest was out of the mud before they packed it up and sent it to professional muddiggers along with everything we had found. Each item pulled from the mud had been carefully catalogued and ziplocked. Each drinking straw (and there had been lots and lots of straws) was carefully catalogued and stored away.
I found one astoundingly unexpected thing in the mud. A bran’ spankin’ new and very shiny Sacajawea dollar. It obviously must have fallen out of someone’s pocket because it certainly had never been buried in the mud. It’s insistent reflectivity argued against that. But no one would claim it. Several of us had received Sacajaweas as change in Keokuk, so it had to be ours, didn’t it?
When they finally kicked me and Lloydel off the temple grounds and told us to go home and wash up, we did so. We went to the bathroom and cleaned our arms. We didn’t shower at this time because if we had, we likely would have missed lunch. So we just cleaned our arms of the Hep threat, and went and had us some hamburgers. After lunch, I scraped as much crusted on mud as I could into a little film canister, and stuck it in a drawer. This teensy, worthless and possibly disease infested souvenir of temple grounds mud now resides in the trunk of my car.
Jaime told me another joke to make up for the first one, and I feel I owe you the same kindness. It doesn’t relate to our discussion like the first one did, so I’ll add an element to make it fit.
Seems an expert in antebellum America was making an extensive study of the era’s Southern white trash. His especial area of interest was geophagy. Many visitors to the South had noticed that the poor, white children were always eating dirt. The kids ate dirt because of hookworm infestations. Hookworm, which was very common among the Southern poor, prevents one’s body from properly making use of iron. And so those with hookworm instinctively eat dirt in an attempt to get some iron in their system.
Unhealthily intrigued by geophagy, the expert had taken to rolling his favorite brand of cigar in mud, and letting it dry before smoking. He is, when we meet him, on a plane smoking one of these cigars and trying desperately to ignore the yippy little dog on the woman’s lap next to him. Finally he can take the idiot animal’s antics no longer and turns to the woman and demands she shut her dog up. She immediately snaps back, asking him to put out his foul cigar.
“No! You shut up your dog! Then maybe we can talk about my cigar!”
“No, I don’t think so, you put that disgusting cancer stick out and then we’ll ask Fluffy if he can’t be a little less excited.”
“What? Cancer stick! Fluffy? You shut that dog up!”
“You put out that cigar!”
Incensed, they begin yelling for the flight attendant. She hurries over and listens to their individual complaints.
“She won’t shut her idiot dog up!”
“He won’t do anything about his awful cigar!”
The flight attendant pauses for a moment to consider the situation, then, with the wisdom of Solomon, she grabs Fluffy by the scruff of his neck, the muddy cigar with her other hand and throws both out the window.
A few minutes later, the man happened to look out the window, and guess what he saw?
(If you’re guessing the puppy with the cigar in its mouth, you’re wrong.)
He saw . . . 2
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Thanks for revisiting Nauvoo with me. I would love to hear your thoughts.