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Show RIVER caught a ride with our gear back to the Nauvoo House, where we took showers that left us feeling miraculously clean. We thanked our RLDS host for the favor. I'd never met a real-live Josephite before, and I couldn't resist asking him a typically impertinent Brighamite question: "Don't you believe Joseph Smith had more than one wife?" Our kind host simply laughed. We were now a couple of miles from the main town and the grain elevator where we proposed to rendezvous with the raft. We trudged down the dirt roads that ran through cornfields to the head of the bend dragging our duffel bags. These fields had once been covered with the log shacks and shanties of the general Mormon population-I didn't know it at the time, but my great-great-grandfather had once lived there. Not one of these humble dwellings survive, leaving only the handful of more substantial brick homes and buildings of the 1840s standing; most of the old town had simply vanished into the cornfields. It was hot and two-ton farm trucks loaded with corn kicked up dust as they rumbled past us on their way to dump their loads at the grain elevator. We were about beat when a trucker who'd just dumped a load of corn at the silo pulled up next to us. He waved me over to his side of the cab. I opened the door and the young, long-haired driver drawled, "Got any money?" "Uh," I said. "No." "Here," he said. This young knight of the road handed me a dollar and blazed on down the road. We went down to the riverbank and waited for the raft to show up. It was the only time I ever saw the raft from shore: it appeared in the distance as a speck on -76- |