The Trip, Part II

Some more pictures from the trip--this one of the Hill Cumorah. It really is the tallest thing around--a spectacular view from on top. Several people elected to roll down it. I declined. A set of keys to one of the rental cars was lost in the process (and quickly found).
We drove from Palmyra, New York, to Kirtland, Ohio. Everyone learned the Erie Canal song ("I've got an old mule and her name is Sal...") on the way. It was sung several times during the trip. We stopped at one of the locks on the actual canal. It's still used for shipping and recreation.
A reconstruction of the John Johnson farm in Hiram, Ohio, where the Church was officially founded on April 6, 1830 (a Tuesday). The other building on this site is half a visitors' center and half a meeting house for the area.
And we went to Kirtland, Ohio. The Kirtland Temple was a highlight of the trip for me. It's currently owned and maintained by the Community of Christ, a break-off from the LDS Church. They also run several of the sites in Nauvoo, and they had some big-wig guides for our group. One was one of their major scholars, and the other the director of all their sites in Nauvoo. I appreciated their work to maintain these common aspects of our heritage and their explanations of their beliefs, but that wasn't why I so loved visiting the Kirtland Temple.

A lot of amazing things happened in the Kirtland Temple while the saints were there. There are reports of miraculous things happening at the two packed dedication services. Later, Christ, Moses, Elijah, and others appeared here. And though not all the ordinances we have in the temple were performed until the saints were in Nauvoo (so after the days of the Kirtland Temple), it was the first temple of the new dispensation--it opened this age of temple work. I felt such a special peace being inside it, and I felt close to and grateful to those who worked so hard for it.

It's a big building, and I got the impression that it's very delicate. There are three levels: two huge meeting rooms (with pew boxes and benches that could be shifted to face either way) on the first two floors, and offices upstairs. The main level meeting room was for everyone, the second level was for priesthood meetings and training. The upstairs offices were used by the First Presidency, but also used as a school on weekdays open to anyone.
On the way to dinner that night, we stopped to see Symons Ryder's grave. He was an early member of the Church; the reason he gave for leaving it was that Joseph Smith spelled his name wrong ("Rider") on his mission call. He was a wealthy man, and after he left the Church gave a lot of money to a college in the area, and was a leader in the Campbellite Church. "Disciple" in "disciple of Christ" is misspelled on his gravestone.

Isn't this a wonderful cemetery? We stopped really briefly, but there was a quick game of "Enemy and Defender," which involves lots of running and giggling, before we left...car keys were lost then found here, too.
The next day we flew to Saint Louis, then drove to Nauvoo. A brief stop in Hannibal, Mark Twain's home town.
By now we had a tour bus rather than cars. Everyone was excited as we drove into Nauvoo--excited to see the temple. There it is, on the hill. We drove in to Nauvoo from Missouri, talking about the saints being driven out--following their footsteps, so to speak. It was so hopeful--triumphal, even--to see the temple in Nauvoo. And when we left a few days later, we were again in their footsteps, this time to Salt Lake City. Salt Lake, where it all finally worked--enough for them to build their houses, city, temple. Enough for them to stay. It strikes me that I am living what they hoped and worked and sacrificed for.
At one of the Community of Christ gift shops in Nauvoo, our professor, Richard Bennett, noticed two or three books he had authored or co-authored. He asked one of the students for a pen, picked one up, and started signing. He let the visitor's center people know as he was through about half the stack.

The Trip, Part I

It's not like I haven't gone on any trips lately--I kind of feel bad for not giving others this kind of attention. But this really was a special one. I signed up for a Church history class this semester because I needed two more religion credits, two more Honors credits, and something that fit with a crazy schedule. This class was the only one that fit the bill. I was surprised, though, to get an email this summer informing me that the class included a trip to Church history sites in the eastern US. My parents, bless them, agreed to pay the subsidized fee--and it was an amazing week.

We flew into Rochester on the 22nd. For the first half of the trip, we were in rental cars and mini vans. We landed and started driving, and all of us were just excited to be there. Couldn't quite believe it--midterms one day, New York the next.

The next morning we went first thing to the Joseph Smith farm. This is where the 14-year-old Joseph Smith prayed about which church to join, and got a direct answer from God and Jesus Christ.

I was just blown away with how beautiful upstate New York is. When we were flying in I had already pretty much decided to move there. The farm itself is also beautiful. And, this is silly, but part of what was so cool about being there was that that's where the Restoration DVD was filmed--the DVD I sometimes saw three times a day on my mission with people learning about the Church. It's a good one. Click the link, go watch it.

The Sacred Grove was a highlight of the trip. It was so peaceful. A few people talked about hoping for a life-changing experience going into the Grove where Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ came to answer a prayer, but that that didn't happen. That instead, there was a feeling of calm and of peace. The feeling here--that feeling--was like being in the temple.

Next was the Grandin Print Shop, where the first edition of the Book of Mormon was printed. As we were about to leave, a senior missionary stood up and said they were one of a handful of missions that was piloting a program with missionaries blogging. MISSIONARIES BLOGGING! Using technology, how wonderful is that? And it's not just the senior couples, but young missionaries, too. Here's his blog, and a link to all the official missionary blogs that have been started. I'll put a link in my blogroll, too.


This is Alvin Smith's grave (Joseph Smith's older brother), though his remains got washed away in a storm a long time ago. So his grave marker.

I sat down and started writing an essay. Writing a good, though-out essay--thought maybe I could post that here. My blog needs a niche, or reviving, or something. And wouldn't it be interesting to be able to sit down and read intelligent and thoughtful essays that were good and thought-out?

But I gave up quickly. I didn't even take the photo for this post. It's one my uncle Niel, who's building the fence, took and that my mom sent out. Didn't take it, didn't load it up.

It's a picture of the Corner. Bertelson Corner is a piece of land on Big Turtle Lake in northern Minnesota with three tar-paper cabins from maybe the '40s, a wash house, a boat house, a tool shed, and a pump house. It has a regulation-size badminton court and a shuffle court that no one's used for years (but that I've always been dying to try. Once I brought this up and somebody said the stuff to play was probably in the former-boat-house-now-tool-shed and I was sent to look but couldn't find anything and was terribly disappointed), two aluminum canoes, a speed boat and a pontoon boat, and an great big Windstream trailer that must be from the '60s. The Corner is a time capsule--the chairs and tables, the pictures and the old magazines lying around. There's a fan in "the House"--the biggest of the little cabins--that has a green tag hanging off of it. "If you take this," it says, "make sure it's back at the Corner by July 1958. --Dad."

I was surprised about how happy I was to be back here. I came when I was little-little, and didn't come again until my second sister was in junior high and I was 11 or 12, and the three of us (with my mom) came up. For a long time I felt like I had missed out on the Corner because of that little gap. But when I was getting an update on my second cousins--the ones that were younger than me, young enough to not consider ourselves the same age, are starting (and finishing up!) college, the baby who wasn't born yet that first trip back is in sixth grade--I realized I have been coming for awhile.

It's usually walking across from the cabins towards the lake--under the trees, across the short grass--that I start to wax reflexive. I think about the last time I'd been there. I think about how old I was then, what I was doing. The Corner was bought by my maternal great-grandparents, and my grandma and her sisters spend time in the summer up here together. Since I got here on Friday, I've been listening to them talk about the cabin they would rent before the Corner was purchased. Listening to them talk about the people they know or knew up here. Listening to them tell stories and laugh and laugh, and realizing they all have a sense of humor and love of life, like when they were younger (I think I realized this when my grandma told about how her mom sent her and her sister outside with some cleaned fresh fish to put them in that side of the icebox that opened from the kitchen and from outside--it was dark, and when they opened the little door, there were these two hands sticking out to scare them--their mother's hands). I think about myself and how I've changed from Corner visit to Corner visit--how much more they must do that than I. Thinking about year to year, not just back ten or fifteen years. The other day, we went on a drive, my mom and grandma and great aunts and I. We went in to see the place of a man they had known who had passed away. The now-owner drove in while we were there, getting out of her car, wary. My grandma explained we had known the former owner and introduced the group. "We're from Bertelson Corner," she said, "been coming here since 1925..."

Cannon Center Dada

Yesterday in my French class, we talked about the Dadaists and their artistic movement after WWI. According to my professor, they were disenchanted generation of young people. The War wasn't as glorious as they had been promised, and when they got back, no one could understand what they had been through--or even conceive their war in the trenches when machine guns and tanks and gas had barely replaced horse and cannon warfare.

And thus began the Dada movement, with the goal of making nonsense. The world didn't make sense, reality was disconnected from language--therefore disconnect language from any reality, the Dadaists figured. It was a primal scream and a hatred of civilization when what they saw of "civilization" was rotten to the core.

But it's also that disconnect when someone just doesn't understand. When there is a gap that doesn't get crossed. Like I wrote in my notes: that frustration when you're trying to communicate something, and there is something dividing that communication. The other person hasn't had the same experiences as you, or they are too young, or too old, or you are afraid of hurting them my telling everything, or they don't understand the words you are using, or, or...

But that's not why I'm writing about Dada. During my freshman year, I was sitting in the cafeteria with some friends, and one of them brought up talking about it in on of her classes, and the other friend knew what she was talking about. I didn't have any idea what they were talking about, and didn't pay much attention--I was so distracted with my delight in the word. Dada. This delight elicited the beginning of a poem using all the phrases that I thought were lovely that we used in our conversation that night.

So yesterday in class, I was delighted [I think I've overused this word, but it is the only one that fits the way I want it to] when the professor said "dada," and even more so when I found out my Cannon Center version pretty much fits with the description (I think) because it is absolutely nonsense. But it sounds pretty. So maybe it doesn't count.

Cannon Center Dada

I have a strait-laced spoon on a Welch bed of grapes
The cult of Katie Couric and the dreaded Spanish drapes.
Chips on ice and an empty plate for dinner

Count or not, it needs additions, so feel free.

Fiction and Life

If you haven’t read the seventh Harry Potter and are planning to—this post has some spoilers.

I finished it this afternoon, sitting in my backyard. Midway through chapter 33 I started crying. Harry Potter was going to be killed—he wouldn’t grow up, he wouldn’t even see the end of all the horror. And it was that horror that made me cry, too. That things were so dark, that people lived in fear and couldn’t move about and live freely. That he saw the bodies of his friends.

It felt ridiculous that I listened to the leaves rustling in my backyard and thought about these tragedies. JK Rowling writes fiction, so it wouldn’t ever matter what happened to Harry Potter the literary character. But I was bothered, in the back of my mind, by how that battle scenes and dying aren’t restricted to works of fiction. And that real battles aren’t so clearly divided between good vs. evil. Real life is so much more complicated than that—good and bad are all mixed together. Like in Iraq. I imagine both sides (if there even were clearly defined sides) feel they are fighting for country and for a good government and for freedom.

I had always wondered, had I been born in the midst of the American Revolution or in Nazi Germany or during the Civil Rights movement, what I would have done. I wonder what side I would have joined—or if I would have even recognized what was going on around me. I have a feeling that, in such extraordinary circumstances, I would have kept my head down and my nose clean. Which makes me feel guilty.

A Little Too Academic (sorry)

Today we went to see the abbey of Jumièges. It is an extraordinary place--a huge abbey in ruins. Most of the main building that is still standing is romanesque, and an amazing example of a romanesque structure because it is so tall--a demonstration of the power of abbeys at the time, and of the afluence of the area. The abbey, and an accompanying legend of the "enervés" of Jumièges, illustrate as well the former path of the Seine. The river currently flows a good kilometer from the abbey, but once must have been closer.

The legend of the "enervés" tells of two sons who commited treason in leading an army against their royal father. Their crime merited death, which their mother, the queen, could simply not support. So the king agreed on a lesser punishment. The two were "enervé"--the nerves in their legs were cut--then they were sent down the Seine in a boat filled with food. The monks at the abbey of Jumièges took them in and cared for them. This painting depicting the scene, "Les Énervés de Jumièges" by Évariste Vital Luminais, is at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Rouen.

I had already visited the abbey a few weeks ago, but hadn't gone on a tour like we did this time. The coolest part, though, was when the tour ended, for some reason just the people in the workshop got to go down and see other parts of the abbey campus--or what used to exist of the abbey campus: a bakery, stables...they think only about a fourth of the buildings that stood at the abbey's heyday exist now. The tour guide went and got two flash lights that could have been used during WWII and he unlocked an iron gate in a wall. We desended--it was dark and damp and a bit slipery--a staircase into a chamber with a vaulted ceiling, then turned around and walked down a long tunnel that lead to another dark, vaulted room, then down another tunnel that ended, bricked off. I had forgot my camera this morning. The picture, that I found on Google, is pretty close, but think no lights, a dirt floor, and peaked (gothic style), not rounded.

A Few Thoughts

This is a picture of the church in Duclair. And the clouds of Normandy. The clouds here are beautiful.

Today is my last full day at the MJC in Duclair, I think. I have three more weeks in France. A lot of the internship has been...well, not what I expected. "Expected" namely being that I expected to have a defined role--ie something to do. Even so, there is a lot to look back on and it has been a good experience.

The plan the MJC people came up with to occupy me for the next three weeks is the next week off (except Wednesday evening, which is an apero and a barbeque), then for two weeks I am going to participate in a sculpture workshop. I don't really want to participate in a sculpture workshop. I don't know why I have such a bad attitude about it. It really will be interesting, I imagine. And how could I participate and not learn things?

Last night, the mother of Jennifer's host family, Caroline, showed us how to make crepes. While we were making them, Caroline talked about how she thinks it's important to travel. She spent two and a half months in Boston when she was twenty-two. Her son is that age now, and is looking at starting a job. She thinks it's too soon for him to settle down like that.

The family is doing some work on their garage, and they found a German rifle from WWII hidden in the wall. A few weeks ago, a woman who used to live in the house visited them. There were Germans in the house and in surrounding houses during the war, and the woman thinks it was her father that hid the when they left.

Wednseday night, Christine Rolland, the internship coordinator, had Jennifer and I to dinner. There, much of the conversation was on the horror of the newer laws that prevent restaurants preparing their own sauces (must be prepackaged) and that the milk in cheese had to be pasturied. Christine and her husband insisted that it was to boister industry at the detriment of small business and flavor. Personally, I've had a few I'm-going-to-die-of-food-poisioning moments. Well, I exagerate. But things like how leftovers are often left on the stove rather than in the fridge. Food service people take money and prepare food without gloves or soap in between, and food items are often stored at room temperature here, too. There was a barbeque a few weeks ago at the MJC, and the raw sausages came strait out of a plastic grocery sack. So I think restaurants not being able to prepare their own mayo (doesn't mayo have raw egg?) has more of a reason behind it that to insult the taste buds.

Does anyone else find this amazing?

Last Saturday, Jennifer and I went and visited Weston in Caen--about an hour and a half by train. Caen was lovely. If you ever find yourself in the area, take a look. I walked around William the Conqueror’s castle. To be fare, I think it was one of several, but still—WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. Call me a dork, but I couldn’t help but thinking about soldiers patrolling the heavy walls or firing through the arrow slits.

We also saw the Abbaye des Dames, one of a pair of abbeys built by William and his wife Mathilde. The chapel was eleventh century architecture—different from the constantly gothic cathedrals. Mathilde is buried there, or entombed, rather, in black marble. Her epitaph is the primary source of information about her. The abbey was one of the things I’ve most enjoyed seeing this far in France. I really loved the architecture. We went on a guided tour, which included the crypt. The crypt was cool, but not quite as creepy as I had been expecting.

Paris: Take Two

I went to Paris yesterday.

This round, Paris was a lot more agreeable. So maybe I can see why people like it so much. I went with a hiking club from the MJC who usually meet the first Sunday of each month. They do a walk in Paris every year, and Jacques, the vice president of the MJC’s board of directors, invited me and Jennifer (the other intern from my university in Rouen who arrived last week) to come along.

When we were waiting on an overpass at 7:30 am for someone (I had no idea who) to drive by and pick us up, I wasn’t so sure about the whole thing. I didn’t really want to go back to Paris, though I did want to be sleeping. It’s about an hour and a half to Paris, and once we got there and got going, I was glad I went.

I didn’t have to plan anything, which was really nice. And I didn’t have to worry about getting lost. It was to someone else to navigate. Since being here, I finally understand why people travel with big tourist groups. Planning a trip is a lot of work.

Anyway, Jacques was the guide, although everyone in the group was anxious to answer questions and offer information. They told me about De Gaulle broadcasting from England; they told me we were walking through the chic part of Paris, so not all Parisians live like this; they told me about the two houses of their congress (and I told them about the United States’ Electoral College, which, thanks to the 2000 pres. elections, a lot of people here have heard of). They told me that there are no telephone poles in Paris—it’s all underground (and, that up into the seventies, there was a tube system underground, too, for delivering the mail that worked with vacuums—bank drive-in style). We looked at jewelry in the windows of the Place Vendôme. We saw the Eiffel Tower and walked along the Seine and went into the Garnier opera house. We went under the Arc de Triomphe. I have wondered for a long time how pedestrians get under the Arc. A mystery solved.

The memorial for those who died in the war with Algeria. Jacques fought in the war (but he didn’t die, so the memorial isn’t for him). He also worked in several countries, including Algeria, for France Telecom. That’s how he knew about the telephone lines under the streets.