On our way to a friend’s farm in Iowa we begin seeing signs advertising Mark Twain’s boyhood home. Huh. Didn’t know that was here. We do a quick 3G search and, sure enough, this is where Twain first encountered the Mississippi River, and a nearby cave that inspired the one in Tom Sawyer.
It seems a waste on an open-ended road trip not to stop and see interesting things as they come up, so we pull off the highway and into the tangle of gift shops and museums that is Hannibal.
A digression: When we toured Prince Edward Island, the setting and inspiration for Anne of Green Gables, several years ago, the portion called “Anne’s Land” was the least enjoyable because it was not so much a shrine to the books as a shrine to the selling of them, especially in Cavendish, the town on which Avonlea was based. There, B&Bs found remarkable ways to incorporate Anne or Gilbert into their names; gift shops literally sold Anne toenail clippers; and the building that inspired Green Gables was brightly painted and redecorated inside to look more like a giant doll house than the antique home where Lucy Maud Montgomery spent her summers. And you are charged to look at it.
Drive a few miles west of Cavendish to New London, however, and you can still see the gentle farm country of Montgomery’s early years, and tour the house she was born in, which has been humbly preserved for over a hundred years.
That's our spectrum for judging "childhood homes."
Back to present day: Hannibal seems to be somewhere between the two, but more on the respectful side of things. There are antique stores with “Puddin’head,” “Aunt Polly,” and even “Mrs Clemens” in their names. There’s an ice cream parlor called Becky’s and we decide that would be a nice pit stop snack, so we go in and look at the flavor board. Chocolate, vanilla… huckleberry.
Of course they did.
Despite these bits of exploitation, the town has preserved a charming historical look, and an undeniable small town-ishness. In one antique store we find a woman who looks 80 if she's a day, sitting on a stool with a fan instead of an air conditioner. Her wares resemble a 1960s garage sale and include used matchbooks. Jacob is tempted to ask if she knew someone who knew Samuel Clemens, but decides not to risk sounding sarcastic.
The museums are closing for the day so we eat our ice cream and just stroll around town. There's a lighthouse trail past a statue of Tom and Huck, and we walk up a steep hill to find… another steep hill. Which we walk up. To find another. Above that one, a steep set of stairs. Finally, at the end of those, a lighthouse that is padlocked shut.
Why do these lighthouse trails never go all the way to the top?
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