City Slickers

Friday, October 6, 2006

I spent the summer of 1991 as a service missionary in Nauvoo, IL. Along with 11 other young men and women, I was there to perform on stage in the daily live performaces at the Visitors' Center and Old Cultural Hall. The performances were primarily at night so our days were filled with lots of odd jobs.

I spent several weeks working as a guide for a few of the restored homes and historic sites. Another part of the time I was there, my companion (who would later be sent home for fooling around with one of the sisters) and I were assigned to work on the church-owned ranch in and around the restored area of the city. Our duties included a wide range of things from herding cattle for vaccinations to clearing brush from emply lots and along side the roads.

It was during this time that Elder Paul Walstad and I decided we had been working hard enough. Little did I know that he was already keeping busy working Sister Sue Geertsen pretty hard... but I digress. "Wally" and I decided to take the church pickup truck we were loading full of tree limbs and catch a movie in Keokuk, IA.

We didn't call the Mission President or the Director of the Visitors' Center. We just got in the truck and drove. We were dressed in jeans and t-shirts so were it not for the faded logo on the side of the pickup, no one would be able to identify us as missionaries. I was giddy with the feeling that I had somehow escaped.

We were just like Paul Newman and George Kennedy in "Cool Hand Luke". I could only hope this wouldn't turn out as badly. Being fully emerged in the superstition that surrounds Mormon Missionaries, I was sure in the back of my freshly-washed brain, that some evil would befall us.

As it turns out, nothing bad happened at all. In fact, it was a pretty good day. We saw "City Slickers" and enjoyed every minute of it. We even had a good laugh about the calf birth scene as we had just spent the previous week doing exactly the same thing for several cows on the church farm. We got back to Nauvoo just in time to return the truck, get showered, and perform in our shows. No one ever found out.

That day was a hell of a lot better than the day Wally and I got poison oak. It was piles better than the day I was covered from head to toe in cow shit. And it was WAY better than the day Richard G. Scott put the fear of God in me. It was not quite as good as the day I got the perfume-laced letter from the young and pretty Joy Fellingham though. That was a pretty damn good day too.

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