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"!

Kodachrome

Kodachrome

They give us those nice bright colors

They give us the greens of summers

Makes you think all the world's a sunny day.

..Paul Simon

I guess you could say it's just bred in the bone. The crisp new leather camera bag front and center with the toddler in the fifty plus year old snapshot was omnipresent during my childhood, sometimes in the foreground therefore unintentionally starring in the recorded history of our family. Over time, the shiny saddlebag took on the character and texture of a Pony Express rider's satchel after a couple of trips cross country. The camera bag was a signal that Something was going to be Remembered.

Does anyone outside of professional photography even own a camera bag anymore?

I do. Current incarnation is a compact little LowePro just the right size for a DSLR, battery charger and two lenses. Or...my wallet and two lenses, if, as is my wont, I hang my camera around my neck for easy access.

To be quite honest, if you count the uber-rugged, heavy-duty, closest-thing-to-Kevlar, tips-the-scale-at-twenty-pounds Tenba bag I now carry, I am never without a camera bag. I bought it to replace the super convenient little Swiss Army backpack I treated as combination gear and hand bag. When the zipper broke two years into use, I was crushed and disappointed. Firstly, because I replaced it sight unseen with an overweight over engineered monster that may never wear out...and secondly, because Swiss Army gear should last more than two years even when thrown carelessly on the floorboard every day and stuffed mercilessly into crannies in cars and overhead bins in airplanes. I guess that's why they don't make them anymore. Brass and tanned cowhide like my mother and father's heirloom beats a two way zipper any day. The Tenba will hold not just a camera, but a Kindle and an iPad too. It's more like a steamer trunk than a briefcase.

from the Island of Misfit Toys

At this point in my diatribe, you may be asking, "Your iPhone 6 is always at hand...can be shared instantaneously...edited on the spot....why on earth are you whining about cameras?

It's a sad truth. Consider the contents of one drawer of my cupboard: a whole array of outmoded superseded camera equipment. Heavy metal, not plastic, precisely machined, created to capture a moment unique in time and bring it back to life. Now, as discarded as the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys, blind eyes turned upwards. Generations of German and Japanese engineering gone by the wayside.

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic.. I bought it in high school and carried it right through college and into marriage, recording school trips to New Orleans, a summer spent in Washington DC, our first home in Columbia, a weekend getaway to Kentucky, our first summer on the farm....and ultimately, the first year of Lee's life. The Instamatic shot a cartridge of 24 pictures and used a flash cube for low light shots. The ultimate in point and shoot. It was a big deal to finish a roll of film and take it to the drug store to be sent off for developing in Omaha, and a little bit like Christmas to open the packet of prints when it returned after a couple of days.

These prints look older than I feel! The colors have deteriorated and faded; to an eye accustomed to the wonders of auto focus and HD, most are either under or overexposed and fuzzy. But I try to salvage what I can digitally, preserving a snapshot, so to speak, of when we were very young. I have but a few Polaroids of Blake's folks in their youth, even fewer photographs of our grandparents when compared to the black and white albums and carousels of color slides (Kodachrome or Ektachrome....I don't remember which) of my Zeiss and Canon toting parents.

I had a Fujica SLR for almost twenty years, a birthday present in 1982. It was completely manual...the photographer chose the shutter speed and the aperture based on the ISO of the film loaded. No auto focus and no built in flash. But it did sport a metering system, a big step forward from the hand held light meter my folks used for difficult shots. I always shot 200 film, walking the line between detail, what tech calls pixels, and a lack of sharpness caused by movement. Life was recorded 24 shots at a time, except for vacations, when I would load up on film, buying 8 or 12 rolls at a time, even a couple of rolls of 36, just to be safe. Finding film in some of the places we wound up was not a sure thing and I was paranoid about running out. Even so, the number of pictures I took from 1982 to the first digital camera Blake bought me in 2008 average one album a year, not counting weddings, graduations and the births of grandchildren.

One night the Fujica shutter locked wide open and moved no more, almost as if it sensed the end of the film era. It's last picture was taken through Ben's telescope: the moon.

Don't misunderstand me. To have a camera in my pocket for the sun behind a cloud, dew hanging of a flower, or even a classic car at Casey's adds to the sum of my happiness. Taking four shots at blowing out birthday candles and keeping just one wasn't an option with film. Digital is a license to be silly...not just historic. Pixels encourage creativity...visual jokes, panoramas, way out close ups, in a spontaneous outpouring that amateurs would never have attempted before this freedom of expression was....well, free.

What's to be done with this voluminous recording of minutiae and the mundane? What will our grandchildren do with it all?

In my case, there will be physical books and albums, not just files and .jpgs. I am in the minority; I still print. All these artifacts will wind up, I suppose, where people's great great great aunt's gravy bowls and wedding dresses reside: a local or county museum hard by someone's once treasured tools and someone else's wedding dress, too old to dispose of and too arcane and personal to be historic.

In the meantime, I remember the old ways, paying homage to the blind lenses and camera bodies good for naught but paperweights.

Long live Kodachrome.

 

 

 

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"Sell That Fine Pig"

Lily is wearing a sleeveless ruffled top with her shorts and cowboy boots. Her long red curls are tied back from her freckled face with two ribbons. She has walked into the sales ring at the Atchison County Fair from a Norman Rockwell painting. I cannot help but be charmed. But when the auctioneer reads her name, she bounds across the sand, with one finger beckoning to the shaggy lamb behind, who follows her, his leash trailing. This makes me clap my hands in delight and sing under my breath,

"Lily had a little lamb....."

And everywhere that Lily went,

The lamb was sure to go."

Surely this performance earned the young lady a couple more bids on the premium for her animal. The lamb knew Lily and Lily knew her lamb.

Jilli's sheep is tired by the time she is called to the sales ring. But Jilli isn't. With enthusiasm that is not entirely communicated to her animal, she somehow moves him to the center of the ring with her hands, rope, boots, and the sheer force of her personality and will. She is working so hard. The bidding takes a good long while, long enough that the reluctant sheep gives in, stands pat, and allows Jilli to mold it into the preferred stance. It may or may not matter at this sale, but her folks have impressed upon Jilli that she should never stop working until the job is done.

Because of the heat and humidity, the sale starts late this year. Whether its the hour, the temperature, or just the ongoing slow decline and consolidation of our county's business community, the stands are full of family members, but not as many buyers as one would wish for the number of exhibitors. Nonetheless, the bidding can be brisk; it is always good-natured; and whether the animal is a hog, a rabbit, a goat or a chicken, the kid will get a nice check and the buyer a round of appreciative applause.

When Lee and Ann and Ben showed animals for 4H and then FFA, the barns were full with up to 70 steers and one year, on top of 200 hogs. Six or seven Hurst cousins worth of cattle did contribute to the bounty. Today's show ring features a solid representation of pigs, a pampered lovely handful of steers, sheep, goats,and a rainbow's worth of rabbits and chickens in arms. Farms have changed in our county, but the faces of the parents watching from the barn, the fence, or the stands are ever the same: focused and intent, alert to the bidders and the auctioneer, poised to offer advice and encouragement to the showman in the ring.

Some of the bidders are the same too. It does my heart good to hear some of the self-same folks bidding that were buying animals at the fair almost thirty years ago when Lee and Ann first led a steer into the ring. Now Lee and Ryan and Ann and Matt are the ones reminding their kids when the pigs were born and how much they weighed and Aaron, Lizzie, Gabe and Abbie are the ones with whips and brushes, ever watching the judge, and stuffing ribbons in their jeans' pockets as they drive the pigs back to the pen.

"Sell that fine pig!" All the pigs are fine by the end of the evening as the stands thin and the buyers settle up. Every time the ring man raises his hand and calls,"Yup!", its a vote for tomorrow, a down payment on the success of the little girls with star spangled belts and boys with sweat running down their faces.

"Sell that fine pig!" and pay it forward for the kid whose pig peed on her boot or the kid run over by his animal in the alleyway. Raise your hand and you'll send a message in a bottle from the past to an unknown future where the lessons of responsibility and conscientiousness pay interest and more.

Sell that fine pig!" and record for posterity the common language of hard work between generations. Support your fair and vote for the heritage of blood and land and tradition personified in kids and pigs, moms and dads, goats or sheep, steers or chickens.

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