You Never Really Leave Home
I am in Hannibal, Mo., boyhood home of Mark Twain and me. Each of my visits is a raft ride back to my past. My family moved here after we buried my father in Southern Illinois, on the Ohio River; we had family here. I lived in Hannibal from the summer before seventh grade until I graduated from high school. My mother taught home economics at the junior high and still lives here. I took full advantage of the privileges of being a teacher’s kid, which kept me out of trouble.
After high school, I left town for college elsewhere and didn’t look back. I wanted no more of small-town nosiness, social hierarchies and riding around looking for trouble. Yet, perhaps because I had spent my early childhood years in pancake-flat corn and soybean country, I would always miss the hills and trees of Hannibal. Further, I would carry for the rest of my life a share of the legacy of Samuel Clemens, whose writing under the pen name Mark Twain would to some extent influence everyone who came after him in his boyhood home turned tourist town. In school, we read Twain’s stories and could not avoid seeing references, all over town, to his humor, satire, and, whether many of us realized it or not, his criticism of our own hypocrisy.
As a teenager, I was sensitive to the literary history and Midwestern beauty of Hannibal, which is a couple of hours drive upriver from St. Louis. I’m not sure many of my friends, who had lived there all of their lives, fully appreciated their surroundings – steep hills of hardwoods diving to valleys and cave openings and rising to bluffs from which one could scan the flat, Mississippi River valley five miles wide on the Illinois side, and from there wonder what was beyond – in the rest of America and in the future. I also knew, somehow, that to be young in the 1970s was lucky and that the music and easy summer days and nights were to be relished while they lasted.
I have lived on great rivers most of my life. I believe rivers flow into a lot of people. Anyone who has a relationship with water, or a favorite tree, prairie or forest might tell you this connection to nature became part of who they are. I’m not sure I am up to the task of guessing how this works, but if you are kind or harsh, generous or suspicious, rugged or soft, you might understand yourself more if you look at where you came from and at the people who were around you in your childhood and at how they came to terms with the land.
On the plains of the upper Texas Panhandle and across the state line into Oklahoma, where I worked for a while, everyone can see you; there is little privacy. In Hannibal, on the other hand, I felt there were places where pirates might have hidden comfortably, never discovered by the law. The allure of a hidden cave opening that might await, dark, silent, off in the hills behind some rock, leading to a labyrinth eternally 52 degrees, tugs at me still. The hills of Hannibal challenge the imaginations of the young to climb up and see, trespassing if necessary. Young Sam Clemens scrambled up and down them and played in their caves, managing to find his way out by candlelight. Those hills, and what may wait over or under them, create dreamers.
This past Friday, my wife, Lisa, and I attended a funeral at the First Presbyterian Church in Hannibal, a sprawling brick building near downtown, where my family has worshipped for decades. From there, it is an easy walk to the literary stomping grounds of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and the pretty Becky Thatcher. When I lived in Hannibal, the church’s soaring sanctuary saw no jumping up to yell hallelujah or amen or any of that Baptist-y stuff. We did not have guitars when there was “special music.” You sat there in your good clothes and thought about God or, sometimes, about how long the preacher would go on with his sermon. Children sat still or they got their knees pinched by stern-faced mothers who knew just the right spot to induce temporary paralysis. We were the frozen chosen.
The church was built in 1895 when they decided the previous church was not nice enough. It remains full of its original, dark woodwork. It has Tiffany and Co. stained glass windows. The acoustics are locally renowned; every choir in town wants to sing there. I recall the upper floors as a place where a kid could feel a little lost in the narrow hallways, dim light and dark woodwork.
Long before they fixed the treacherous steps up to the bell tower, which was kept locked and was strictly off limits, kids were able to find ways to get up there and look over the city, play with the ropes and tap on the old bell. The bell came from a steamboat that sank near St. Louis in 1840. The salvage of that vessel was sold at an auction that the preacher of our church happened to attend. As the story goes, he borrowed $30 from friends to buy the bell because he thought it had a lovely, mellow tone. That bell is rung to this day, every Sunday.
On the way back down to St. Louis, Lisa and I risked missing our flight to drive the long way, on scenic state Hwy. 79. We glided down and then up long hills, past vistas that presented wide swatches of Mississippi River bottomlands, past farms both proud and failing, through poverty and persistence and faith and past a cat in the road that had stopped traffic in both directions; the cat finally moved, slowly. Not a single driver expressed impatience.
At the old steamboat landing of Clarksville, Mo., we cut west through farmlands to connect back to state Hwy. 61, which leads to Lambert International in St. Louis. The winding, two-lane country road was classic Northeast Missouri – no shoulders, no ditches, large trees inches from the pavement.
I can be away from this area for years, but when I return I am still comfortable driving these narrow backroads traveled mostly by farmers and crossed by the occasional raccoon or deer. Lisa was enjoying the pastoral scenes of farm, field and cow, and was just starting to doze off when my right tires brushed the edge of the gravel beside the blacktop. I inched the car back to the left. She opened her eyes to a vision of near-instant death by hickory tree.
Lisa smiled at me, sweetly, as is her way, and offered, “This drive would be nicer if it were less like a carnival ride.”
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.