| Wednesday, August 18, 2010 9:13AM | | | | Finish line: Iowa City | Posted By: James Reston
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After a few nights in sketchy Super 8 motels, I treated myself last night in Keokuk to the extravagance of an overnight stay in a grand, 19th century B&B, high on a bluff overlooking the magnificent river. With its Disneyesque turret, its great portico, formal garden, and solarium to enjoy "if it wasn't so frightfully hot," the mansion called Grand Anne was built in 1897 by the wealthy purveyor of home remedies and flavored extracts. I got the Rose's Room on the top floor.
I awoke to a crisp, cool, sparkling morning, for the heat has finally broken, and walked out to the bluff's edge to see the sun shimmering across the river and its large islands of flowering lily pads. On the opposite bank on the Illinois side is another mansion, a ridiculous over-the-top faux-Turkish pile that a class action lawyer has built as a shrine to himself and decorated with Chilihy glass sculptures. When I was told that the lawyer had built the shrine after acquiring a lovely wife 20 years younger, I nodded in recognition.
I head up the Illinois side to Nauvoo and was pleased to find, even on Sunday morning, that I could see again the film about the tragic and heroic stay of the Mormons here on their way to the Great Salt Lake. This is where Joseph Smith, their founder, had been assassinated and succeeded by Brigham Young. Whatever one's religion, the Mormon story is one of the great epics of American history. But the Nauvoo exposition does not treat the dark side. That I knew from my association with the author, Fawn Brodie, (who advised me during the Frost/Nixon Interviews in 1977). Besides her psycho biography of Richard Nixon, Fawn had written an unauthorized biography of Joseph Smith, and as a devout Mormon, was excommunicated from the Church for straying from the sanitized version of Mormon history.
From Nauvoo I crisscross the river between the Illinois and Iowa sides, mingling with the boat and motorcycle crowds, passing through Fort Madison (which was an important outpost in the battle to rest control of the upper Mississippi from the Sauk and other Western Illinois tribes) and Burlington. At last I pass over the great river for good at Muscatine Iowa, whose sunsets, Mark Twain proclaimed, were unequaled on either side of the ocean.
Iowa City was at last within reach. The town is much more than the end destination for me, since our precious, fragile handicapped daughter, Hillary, got her kidney transplant in 2005 at the University of Iowa Hospital. (I wrote about that in my book, Fragile Innocence.) And now my son, Devin, deepens our connection. When I greeted him with a huge hug, I threw my hat in the air, as if I'd just won a rally race across Africa. The old motto of Iowa, now regrettably abandoned, occurred to me once again.
"Iowa! You make me smile!"
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