O, Pioneers!

Pack the sofa
And pack the old arm chair
Tell the china
To ask the silverware
To pray we find that
They speak the language thereAnd say good-bye to Carolina......Lyle Lovett, Goodbye to Carolina

We have a new parlor game.  It's completely harmless..doesn't cost a dime...yet keeps us entertained on long car trips or during coffee breaks in the office. At least once a day, and frequently more often, an email appears with listings for a whole bunch of houses near or around the Lake of the Ozarks.  Sometimes the houses are small and old and cheap; sometimes they are upper floor condos with big balconies overlooking the water; and sometimes they are monstrous vacation homes with docks and six bedrooms, decorated in an unmistakably generic yet tacky style that features pelican door knockers and shower curtains with sailboats.  They are all fun, good for daydreaming on wind whipped afternoons when grit irritates your eyes and dust fills your ears.  We are modest folk: not for us the vistas that top seven figures on mountain or beach.  Best to aim low if one is going to aim at all.  And it does no harm to look.

My dad must have subscribed to that notion.  Every once in a while, he'd decide he wanted to move somewhere else, so we'd load into the car and drive to some other suburb and look at apartments or neighborhoods. 

Picking up and moving out never struck me as the least bit odd.  Everybody did it.  Our subdivision had been built on bare dirt and populated mostly by young families just starting out on their own. At the end of every school year, some friends would leave to be replaced by a whole bunch of new kids when September came around.  This was the Sixties, we were the end of the Boomers, cars were cheap, homes were plentiful, and people knew they could do better..somewhere else.  Of course it would be our turn to move...it was only a matter of time.

Eventually, the discussions my parents must have had after our bedtime crystallized into actions. Instead of a summer vacation, we would have a "Moving Adventure"thanks to the U Haul trucks my dad rented.  Laura and I were tasked with devising an efficient plan for loading the big pieces of furniture; we measured and drew and cut out paper representations of the love seat, the hutch, the dressers and trunks.  We bid farewell to the black baby grand that had dominated our living room.  I'm sure there were other items discarded or given away, but for the life of me I can't imagine what they were, only that the truck was packed to the gills and the metal shelving for my dad's radio equipment was tied to the back.

By this time in my life, after several trips west along the paths of the pioneers, I was enthralled with the Oregon Trail and the great American Westward expansion.  In my imagination, our yellow U Haul equated favorably with a prairie schooner and a family on the road to a new life.  If we made it down I-55 and Highway 54 with our teetering truckload of possessions, we'd arrive at our family's Oregon in Calloway county, Missouri.  Other folks might use Mayflower, but we were rugged and self sufficient and moved ourselves.

That was my romantic notion anyway.  After I helped hoss those self same possessions up the steep and narrow stairs, I might not have been so enthusiastic.

 My mother's best friend, whose family had, it goes without saying, also moved before we did...to Beatrice, Nebraska, home of Homestead National Monument, wrote my mom a letter afterwards saying, in no uncertain terms, DON'T MOVE YOURSELVES!  When I read it just last month, I had to laugh, having helped to move everyone in our family multiple times in the last decade and a half.  There was another letter among my folks' things, one from our pastor in Illinois.  He had come by the house to find us up and gone...

I know the process of  packing  up life and leaving was way more complicated for my parents than it was for me as a kid. Like the pioneers, I figured  life would be better somewhere else and I looked forward to a new town and a new school.  Our grandparents lived in Missouri and we loved to visit.  Illinois was where we lived, but not permanent...not home.  Even when our house sold, I never really missed it, not like places I have missed since that time.

Back then, we were all pioneers....


Go west young man while you still can
Before you're old and gray
Go west and make a better life
Than you could if you stayed
Lyle Lovett, Goodbye to Carolina

The Pioneering Spirit

"The Peter Schuttler wagon was the minivan of the plains, and by the 1880s, at least thirty thousand Schuttler wagons had crossed the frontier". Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail.

After reading this, I look up from my navigator's position in the passenger's seat of this 2014 Chrysler Town and Country and take a peek behind me.  Like the pioneers in their Peter Schuttler, (NOT Conestoga, wagons, contrary to popular myth), there is no room to spare in our vehicle.  Every seat has a kid and every kid has a life support system, a comfort zone built of books and movies, teddy bears and a stuffed pink pig. Within an hour of our departure from Kansas City, jumping off place for many wagon trains, the van's floor is completely covered with the kids' scattered possessions.  The front seat is no different with coffee in the cup holders, iPads in the chargers, and last but not least, a six year old Rand McNally Road Atlas for those roads less traveled where cell service falters and paper is still relevant.  The westward travelers had a wide variety of guidebooks and maps from which to choose, available not just at outfitters' establishments, but even at bookshops in places like New York and Chicago. I cannot imagine what the floor of those wagons looked like after months of dust and ruts and wind.

"My own comedy of discarding began that first morning....I had slept peaceably enough, but across the thirty-eight-inch span of the wagon, my head was wedged between a barbecue cooker on one side and a stack of books on the other." Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail

 Unfortunate, ill-informed or gullible pioneers took outfitters' advice and found their wagons bursting at the seams with useless and superfluous gear that would be discarded in vast quantities along the trail as the emigrants came to their senses. We are not green tenderfeet when it comes to long road trips; a cooler of drinks and a cooler of snacks are close at hand.  The kids have been hugged and kissed by their parents and told in no uncertain terms, "You go to the bathroom every time the car stops!"  Today's pioneers obeying the modern rules of the road.....

The pioneers slept among their belongings too...or underneath them for safekeeping.  Our road warriors are spread between four queen beds and two bathrooms...not exactly roughing it.  But there's a fair amount of negotiating.  Experience and compatibility come into play whether one is bunking with the pots and pans....or your cousin with the restless legs.  Blake discovers early on that Aaron is not exaggerating when he says he won't sleep with Gabe: "He kicks!" Gabe nods complacently...he is guilty as charged and yet innocent of conspiracy by reason of slumber. For the remainder of the trip, Gabe is the one child who will have a bed to himself.  One morning Blake and I awake to find the bed next to us empty of dreaming children.  First Aaron...and then Lizzie... have been driven to find less comfortable, but quieter, places to lay their heads by their Grandpa's snoring.

"Perhaps we possess a dimly repressed but nevertheless accessible memory of how much community was formed by the necessities and sheer obstacle-climbing along the trail.  That's what the covered wagon represents....We have always called this the "pioneering spirit". Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail

Last night Blake got a phone call from a friend of ours who was in some distress.  Members of his family traveling from South Dakota in a pickup towing a trailer had broken down near Rock Port. They were moving an aged parent who was waiting inside in the air conditioning.  There was no chance of finding someone to repair their truck on a Saturday night, so we brought over one of our pickups with a bumper hitch so they could hook up their trailer and continue on their way.
Stranded travelers and broken wagons..runaway mules or lamed teams....part of the rough road the pioneers trod, but one that translates seamlessly to any hot August day when the interstate highway is littered with "gators" and the shoulder punctuated with overheated tourists with their car trunks... or hoods.. up.

Ann and Matt are packing up the fourteen years of their life in the painted lady on College.  Aaron says it's not so hard to think about moving when the pictures are off the walls and the books are in boxes.  Like the pioneers, they are choosing what to discard and what to store.  Pots and pans, books and dishes are easy to move. A garden...not so much. And so there are some newcomers to the plot of soil behind our garage: some roses, some iris, of sentimental memory.  They are watered in and pruned back and will grow patiently amidst the veggies until their new home is ready and a new garden begun. Our pioneer ancestors pulled up roots.....but they didn't sever every one.  The yellow rose we called the "Corner Rose" from the original bush at a bin site was no doubt an immigrant from some other farmstead miles away. The two fern leaved Mother's Day peonies in Lee's garden at the farm are hand me down posies brought to Missouri in a wagon. Ann and Matt will also move the limestone stepping stones picked up from the creek that runs through Redbarn.  Such are the seeds we plant to build new homes from old memories.

"On our 1958 covered wagon trip, my father wanted the automobile drivers backed up behind us to know that we appreciated their patience...so he had a sign maker in New York City paint a simple explanation in black and red letters...

We are Sorry For The Delay--But We Want The Children To

SEE AMERICA SLOWLY....."

Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail

Alas!  Our black minivan is under more of a time constraint than the Bucks' family.  But our wagonload traversed eight states, saw cotton and rice and peanuts,climbed the Mississippi River flood wall at Greenville and showered in tannic cypress stained waters, ate ice cream in Arkansas, tunneled through an Ozark mountain and under a Florida bay, tried eggplant fries, blue crab in a basket, and Key Lime pie.  We saw tows and barges (Josh: Is that an aircraft carrier?)  and a guy in a jetpack turn flips in the air.  We bobbed in the Gulf and built a magnificent...if ephemeral... white sandcastle.

We know our way around a Holiday Inn Express breakfast.

No..we didn't ride the Oregon Trail in a Peter Schuttler wagon....but we sure had "pioneering spirit"!