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Show RIVER IV. FREE AND EASY AND COMFORTABLE I felt a lot of responsibility that it was up to me to make the trip work. This happened partly because nobody else wanted the role, but it had to be done. Or it might have started because nobody else wanted to go to the trouble of waking up Vince. I'm a morning person and had a hard time sleeping past sunrise. Vince, on the other hand, didn't know that there was sunlight at seven in the morning. He could have slept till noon without any problem. It was no fun waking him, but then it was no fun sitting a#he dock watching the morning grow old, either. So it sort of evolved into my duty to wake him up each morning. I hated it and he probably liked it even less. I realized that this was petty bullshit, and I began to suspect that it would have consequences. On the Monday morning after our harrowing run into Dallas City, I woke Vince up and Rosie and I drove Prometheus down the river to Nauvoo, the legendary city wherelvlormon prophet Joseph Smith built his kingdom on the Mississippi in the 1840s. I'd heard tales of Old Nauvoo since my childhood in Utah and was excited at the prospect of visiting the place. We were soon cruising south through harvest-heavy cornfields that stretched to the far horizon of the flat, fertile prairie. Before the morning was very old we pulled into the quiet, shady center of the modern town and walked overtfae^seg^^ - t h e ^ e of the Mormon temple. The House of the Lord had been the largest building in Illinois in its day, but now there were only a few piles of stone, the few survivors of the ruins that the locals had not hauled away, scattered on a green lawn, and a hole that had been the temple's basement. - 7 1 - |