| BY MARK COATNEY
It's
a distinctly American thing, this idea of reinventing yourself.
You used to do it by heading west, but that frontier is
closed down now, has been for years. The past is the only
virgin land left in America, and every town along the river
we've been to so far is ready to light out for the territory.Tourism
is the big thing all through this area. In small towns like
Grafton, Ill., and in St. Louis, residents are looking to
tourists to boost their economies. The scale of their ambitions
is different — St. Louis wants to pull in international
sightseers, while the smaller towns upriver would be happy
with visits from the surrounding area — but the idea
is the same: They hope that people will pay to see what
they have.
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| DIANA WALKER FOR TIME |
| The Gateway Arch of St. Louis: Well worth the trip |
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What they
have most of all is the river. And, well, because I'm a tourist,
and it's a stunning morning sitting on our boat tied up next
to the Gateway Arch, watching the sun come up over Illinois,
I certainly would pay to see this even if Uncle Luce wasn't
ponying up.
But it's
not the river of the present that the tourists will find,
for the most part. Sure, I'm on the Mississippi in St. Louis,
but hardly surrounded by St. Louisans (if that's what they're
called; there are, after all, none here to ask). "The
river is almost like a foreign country to people living
here," says Wally Spiers, a columnist for the nearby
Belleville News-Democrat. The real river is full of barges
and the occasional one-hour cruise boat and not much else;
the towns sit behind their levees.
When
the towns talk about the asset that is the river, what they're
talking about is the Mississippi of Mark Twain, about creating
and showing an idealized past. When homeowners in Elsah,
Ill. — a town drowned by that big flood back in '93
— rebuilt, they reconstructed it to look much as it
did 100 years ago. St. Louis has Laclede's Landing, a somewhat
Disney-esque renovation consisting mostly of bars and restaurants
in an old warehouse area by the river. The Mormon Church
is trying to restore Nauvoo to a moment frozen in collective
memory 155 years ago. Hannibal as seen from the bridge over
the Mississippi today looks very much like a painting of
Hannibal in the 1840s: small brick buildings tucked cozily
between two hills. The town is all about Mark Twain, with
multiple Tom Sawyers and Becky Thatchers strolling about.
But because
it's for tourists, and you don't argue in front of the guests,
it's a curiously incomplete past. You see little Toms and
Beckys running all over the place, but no Jims, nothing
that addresses the critical plot point of "Huckleberry
Finn," that people were owned here, bought and sold,
and that Huck's guardian was one of the owners. The Mormons
in Nauvoo are only too happy to talk about their religion,
but for the most part only in terms that aren't recognizably
different from, say, Protestant doctrine, leaving out some
of the parts where their theology diverges.
In the
stories we tell about ourselves we are all bright and strong,
full of courage and conviction. We'll have to see whether
these idealized reconstructions will grow, and thrive, just
like the frontier settlements did.
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