In order to visit Jerusalem’s Temple Mount — which includes sites holy to Muslims, Jews, Christians and others — non-Muslims are expected to follow guidelines set by the Jordanian Ministry of Religious Places. In order to play a round of golf at the revered site of Augusta National, you need an invitation from a club member. To visit the Scientology Celebrity Center on Franklin Boulevard in Los Angeles, it surely helps to be a member of the church. And also a celebrity.
But in order to visit Hill Cumorah — the site where members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints believe that the Prophet Joseph Smith unearthed the artifacts which, translated via divine inspiration, produced the Book of Mormon — all you need to do is drive for a few hours through New York State, dodge the equipment trucks servicing the natural-gas fracking operations on the Marcellus Shale, and turn up at the village of Manchester, just south of Palmyra, sometime during the visitors’ center’s operating hours of 9am and 9pm. You don’t even need an appointment.
I arrived at the Hill Cumorah Visitors’ Center thinking that it would be my only destination for the day. (The facility’s sign, by the way, is nicely accessorized with that very proper apostrophe; my hat is off to the Saints’ Official Grammarian.) So here was what I anticipated: a quick tour of the Visitors’ Center; a five-minute climb up the hill; snap-snap some photos — and then I’d be headed back south in under an hour. But of course it wasn’t that simple.
First, I always forget how out-of-place I seem at any Mormon site: I’m always a lone dude, dressed in my very casual style, fording streams of towheaded youngsters barely kept in check by their oblivious yet beaming parents. I can blend reasonably well into many different milieus…but this isn’t one of them.
And second, while visiting these sites I never have that standard demeanor of being slightly bashful and wanting to be led around. Instead, whenever I see folks at these sites wearing official nametags, I charge right up to them and try to discover what they’re about. Today this was the fate (first) of a dewy young Latina named Sister Madsen, who was stationed right inside the Visitors’ Center’s gleaming glass entryway for, I can only assume, exactly this purpose. “What’s here?” I asked Sister Madsen. And then she began to tell me.
The Hill Cumorah Visitors’ Center has exhibits. And that’s pretty much it. The exhibits themselves are self-explanatory: You’re drawn in by a painted tableau of some event from the Book of Mormon, you approach a railing and press a brightly-labeled button or two that catches your eye, and then a video screen pops to life and gives you a little one-minute elaboration on whichever topic you just chose.
But who can be satisfied with that? You could have this very same experience via the internet — in the comfort of your own home, in your underwear. (Although that experience probably wouldn’t be as inspiring to report to your local bishop or stake president.) Instead, I wanted to know what Sister Madsen thought about…all sorts of things.
And Sister Madsen was totally game. She was a student at the University of Utah, working here at the Visitors’ Center as part of her mission assignment. She didn’t find my questions about Joseph Smith’s early history (as a con artist) or his spectacularly failed bank (Ohio’s Kirtland Safety Society) too impertinent to answer. And she’d been taught well to turn absolutely any conversation around to the amazing achievements of the Church. Had I ever lived overseas or learned another language? Oh, that’s wonderful. Did I know that the Book of Mormon has been translated into that language? In fact, we can probably find that exact translation in this exhibit right here — yep, there it is! So that’s pretty neat.
(Most of Sister Madsen’s more carefully-prepared remarks ended with this very phrase: “So that’s pretty neat.” Because, I guess, what kind of atheistic spoilsport won’t admit it when things are clearly “neat”?)
And if you think I was constantly pestering Sister Madsen, think again. Because after I’d taken ten or fifteen minutes of her time, I would carefully detach myself from her presence. —But then a few minutes later, obviously goosed by her supervisors at the front desk, Sister Madsen would sidle back into the exhibit room and offer me some additional memento to take away: a map, a brochure, a comment card which seemed to be a transparent invitation to have missionaries come knocking at my door (or, more likely, at the door of any friends whom I wished to prank).
But despite all that promotional noise, I was still grateful for Sister Madsen’s interruptions because she informed me about the other LDS-related sites in the area. In fact there’s practically an entire LDS-tourism industry headquartered in this little Finger Lakes town.
Altogether I spent about two hours in the Visitors’ Center — which was approximately ninety more minutes than anyone really needs to spend in there. (Although of course I had the excuse of repeated exchanges with the delightful Sister Madsen.) Then I went outside and climbed Hill Cumorah. This is not only a holy site of Mormonism, but it’s also the venue for the annual Hill Cumorah Pageant, a summertime sound-and-light show dramatizing certain aspects of LDS theology or history. So right there in the noonday sunlight I walked up the steep asphalt path, turned around to snap a photo of the hilltop monument, and then headed back down again. To a Gentile, Cumorah itself is kind of…meh. It’s just a hill.
Next up was the restored printshop of one E. B. Grandin, who first published the Book of Mormon (after wisely demanding payment up front). This establishment was located on a main street in downtown Palmyra, where the town fathers seem reluctant to let the Mormons dominate the region’s historical attractions. Practically every other non-Mormon site of any historical significance in Palmyra is prominently signed and promoted: antique shops, carpet factories, etc. Meanwhile, the historical marker for the Grandin printshop is obscured on one side by a telephone pole and on the other by a parking sign.
Once inside the printshop, I immediately flustered my poor guide, Sister Clark — another college student, this one from Texas — by requesting that my guided tour of the place be short, so that I could visit one or two more sites before I left Palmyra. Sister Clark performed admirably under tough conditions — zipping through a discussion of 19th-century printing methods, while avoiding a large tour group that seemed to be simultaneously ahead of us and behind us as we progressed through the building. At the end of my abbreviated visit to this site, Sister Clark offered me many of the same bits of literature that Sister Madsen had offered me. You have to at least admire the Church’s dedication to branding: Both young women clearly understood the importance of driving web traffic to mormon.org.
Finally I visited the Smith homestead, back down the road in rural Manchester. As I approached the door, a young woman came out to greet me. Fleetingly I wondered: Did they call ahead from Cumorah or the printshop, to issue warnings about my approach? But instead my greeter just suggested that I hurry down the gravel path and join a tour already in progress. The just-departed tour was given by a formidable man named Elder Nielsen and consisted of, as far as I could tell, just one other visitor.
The story of the Smith homestead itself was quite interesting: After four years of making payments on the debt and improvements on the land, the Smith family actually lost the right to purchase the land outright. They had to hurriedly arrange for another buyer so they might at least remain as tenants on the land they’d cleared and in the dwellings they’d built. Then even this effort went mostly for naught when most of the Smith family followed Joseph to Ohio and points further west. But those unexpected developments were still pretty neat, as Sister Madsen might have said.
The real prize of this tour was the practiced narration of Elder Nielsen, who was a past master at framing every little turn of fate so as to show the guiding hand of a benevolent Creator. Even the way the trees grew in the Sacred Grove (where Joseph Smith received some of his early revelations) symbolized to Elder Nielsen several lessons about obedience to Heavenly Father. At the end of his tour, Elder Nielsen encouraged my fellow tour-taker and me to explore the Grove further for ourselves.
Which we did. My companion turned out to be a property manager from Berkeley, Michigan. He was a Saint, of course; the outline of his sacred undergarments was visible through his T-shirt. His name was Maynard.
While we strolled, I could tell from the first few probing questions Maynard asked me that he wanted to be asked a few questions himself. I took the bait, and wound up hearing all about Maynard’s difficulties with one particular tenant at a building he managed. He’d called the cops on her many times, on account of the dudes who always wound up fighting over her. “She must be very good-looking,” I proposed. “Well, she has a nice figure,” Maynard allowed. But since I didn’t want to open a discussion here about the LDS apostate Fawn Brodie or the peculiarities of Mormon archeology, I didn’t have much else to offer Maynard that seemed to interest him.
So this was how I spent my time in Joseph Smith’s Sacred Grove: In the company of another solo dude, trying to make some kind of low-wattage connection but basically failing. It was hard to decide which of us was more out of place, really: I of course am not a Saint — while Maynard seemed generally ill-at-ease, or maybe just uncertain. I wonder if he expected more from his visit to Manchester. I don’t think our fairly random post-tour conversation included any of the answers he was looking for.
After I finished my stroll with Maynard, I stopped inside the small Smith Homestead Visitor Center. (No comforting plural-apostrophe, here.) At which point yet another amazingly beautiful potential guide, name of Sister — sorry, Hermana — Garcia, popped out of an office and spoke first: “Can I ask you a question?” she asked.
Oh no, I thought. I’m finally busted. They did call over from Cumorah and the Grandin building after all. I’ve asked too many questions. Quickly I eyed up the distance to each exit, trying to guess which one led most directly to a protected position.
But as it turned out, all Hermana Garcia wanted to know was whether I was the guy who’d left a bag behind at the Grandin building. “They said it was a single man,” she explained. The bag wasn’t mine. Maybe it was Maynard’s, of course; but he’d already driven off — possibly in a state of bitter disappointment. So I was reminded one more time, in one more way, of what an unusual presence I am at these LDS sites. Lone dudes seem to stand out at these places — and maybe occasionally suffer from obscure frustrations too. If you ever want to go to one of these places and just blend in, then my advice is: Don’t go with me. In fact, try to hire a couple of blond toddlers for your visit, if you can manage it.
Photo by J. Stephen Conn on Flickr.
