Tripping Over Utopia: HoSPITable?

When one reads, "The Colony offers the public an opportunity to step back into a time when colonists lived by the golden rule and shared their crops, clothing, crafts and even their earnings. Spend a day with us: exploring an 1800s colony with a mapped walking tour, visiting shops and museums, enjoying homemade meals at the Fest Hall, taking part in festivals and parades, reliving a way of life when no doors were locked and yours was also your neighbors" it seems reasonable to expect at least a half day's worth of interest, right? Well, at least now I understand better why Bethel, Missouri's website posts very selective views of their historical buildings...wouldn't want to give away all the little town's secrets before you make the long journey to the middle of nowhere only to experience what might best equate a snake in the mailbox. Perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration, but I do not exaggerate the unexpected spit and bite that we found in Bethel.

Certainly, we were a little surprised to find the "tourist office" (e.g. the General Store) as well as streets of Bethel seemingly vacant, but the cold stare welcome that we received upon entering the Fest Hall was almost as hard to swallow as the clouds of cigarette smoke that hung and seemed to have been hanging in this community eatery since ol' Wilhelm Keil, pipe in mouth, had founded the town in 1844. This was not the first strange restaurant-entering encounter Mom and I had had on our trip so far. In fact, just yesterday at the little restaurant in Bishop Hill, we stared down the hostess before Mom caved in with a feeble, "Two, please?" And, let's not forget the timidity of the Marshalltown-ites...but this was, without question, far from timidity. It was out-right annoyance that we could read on the only three visible Bethel-ite faces.

According to the tourist information that Bethel provides both on their website as well as the distributed brochures, 117 people live the community of Bethel, but entering Bethel on this Sunday morning did not exactly conjure the days of a "successful communal colony" nor did it exactly exude the liveliness of a tourist destination; rather, in it's emptiness I more expected to see Clint Eastwood or at least a tumbleweed amble down the street accompanied by Morricone's eerie theme. On this quiet morning, it seemed that 114 of these Bethel-ites were tucked away in the church just down the street leaving the pleasant proprietors of the Fest Hall to serve as the town's tourist-welcoming committee. This time, "Two, please?" did not suffice to jump start any sort of hospitality, so Mom and I assumed two seats at a table anticipating that this might direct our intentions of actually eating there. I suppose that we were successful in this regard, but we were not so fortunate with our requests. Apparently 10:15 is fifteen minutes too late to order from the breakfast menu and forty-five minutes too early for the lunch buffet (complete with macaroni and cheese...). How could we not know this? It's not as if all the tourist information had lead us to believe the possibility of finding a "homemade meal" in Bethel. (Direct quote from website: "Fest Hall Restaurant -- open seven days a week from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., the Fest Hall Restaurant serves some of the best home style food in northern Missouri. Simple, good quality fare, generous portions and reasonable family prices make it a meal worth the trip to Bethel.") After waiting fifteen minutes for a coffee, Mom and I decided that the glass of straws must have spilled on their second draw for who would help us, and we laid a couple of dollars on the table on our way out the door. Since the General Store/Tourist Office was either closed for the day or forever, we had no hope of retrieving the promised audio walking tour of the little place. Instead, we gave ourselves a nice little self-guided tour finding at least the most amusing aspects of the town. Perhaps they do have a sense of humor here?

Architecturally, it was evident that this had once been the site of a nineteenth-century communal colony. The simple brick structures recalled several of the communal dwelling examples that we had already seen in Amana and the Harmonists villages, but the short-life of this commune testifies that the Keilites may not have possessed the determined industrious spirit of their northern communal neighbors. If they were anything like their descendants, their only determination was to run people out of the town...or at least to just make them incredibly uncomfortable.