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..."

Meta-blogging

I feel like writing, but I don't really have anything to write about.

The reason I started the blog in the first place was so that my family could see what I was doing while I was in Europe for the summer. And that was pretty good blogging. I wanted to put a map or something on the page: "where am I now?" My little icon would have jumped between Switzerland and around France. Now, though, my theoretical icon would just sit in Utah. Which is great, just not as interesting for the blog as constant traveling is. I get to go to California in a couple of weeks, though. That is neat. And I just got research accepted to an on-campus student research conference, which I am excited about.

Yep, that's all I have to say. Here's a picture of my hip nephew.