Every station stop was interesting in its own way. The terrain kept changing, of course, but all the people tending the stations had stories to tell that kept us entertained during meals and during the nights we’d spend at the overnight stops. Some of the men reminded me of Mr. Tavish, and had stagecoaching tales about robbers and Indians just as exciting as the Pony Express stories Tavish had told.
I’d listen to the stories, and I’d also wander out to the barns and stables where they kept the horses and repaired the coaches. I talked to the hands and learned all kinds of interesting things.
The Concords were so well made that all the men who worked on them spoke with pride, almost as if they’d designed them themselves. One man got to talking so much that he showed me practically every inch of the coach and how it had been put together. He said it was built lower down to the ground than the English mail coaches so that it would be able to round the curves and handle the rough terrain of the West better. The tops were built out of thin basswood, curved at all the edges to reduce the wind resistance. Being heavier on the bottom like that enabled the coaches to take the sharp curves faster. One Concord, he told me, was being shipped from Boston to San Francisco and went down when the ship sank. But a month later, when the coach was pulled out of the water, it was put into service, and was still on the road to that day.
“Just look at them wheels, Miss,” the maintenance man went on. “Why, every one of them spokes is of seasoned ash and hand-fitted to the rim and hub.”
You could tell they were strong, and had to be, because the wheels were big—three feet in diameter in the front and five feet in the back. The hardwood spokes held them together and took all the weight as the wheels were spinning around.
Most of the luggage went up on the flat roof. The strongbox for valuables was stored under the driver’s seat. On the back was another rack with leather over the top of it to protect everything inside from the dust that the coach kicked up. This was called the boot, and it carried extra luggage as well as tools, water buckets, and sometimes mail and other packages.
The coach body had two long, heavy leather straps underneath, running from front to back as supports. These acted as suspension, to absorb the bouncy, rutted, rocky roads. The leather worked much better than iron springs, which were used on most kinds of wagons.
We stopped every fifteen miles or so for changes of horses, and once during the day and once about nightfall at the home stations. There was still lots of snow on the ground going through the mountain passes, and the nights got cold in those small sod houses. The trip from Sacramento to the Missouri River cost over $500, which was a lot of money for Pa to part with for my sake.
I sure hoped it would turn out to be worth it!
Chapter 4
Growing-Up Tears
Every mile of the road we traveled had memories, and I was surprised at the things I recalled because I had been so young when we’d come this way before with Ma.
Ever since South Pass beyond Fort Bridger, the stage followed the same route we had come across by wagon with Captain Dixon. As I looked at the countryside passing by, I thought of Ma nearly all the time. Memories of that wagon trip kept flooding over me—the mountains . . . Fort Laramie . . . the descending plains . . . Indians . . . buffalo . . . talks we’d had . . . things Ma had said to us . . . ways she was always trying to prepare us for growing up.
And now I was grown up and on my way to St. Louis. Ma had gotten a good price on a wagon there, and had bought most of our supplies before we crossed Missouri to Independence to join Captain Dixon’s wagon train. Everything was full of heart-stirring, sad, melancholy memories.
My memory of Ma dying brought me to tears a few times during the weeks of the trip. But as I saw places that stirred up the past, I felt a quiet melancholy that seemed to have nothing to do with Ma. When in the distance I saw the wooden walls of Fort Laramie, something out of another world came up from inside me, touching my heart with a significance that could not be understood by the mind, only felt.
As we approached the fort, I began to hear voices in my mind—Tad and Becky clamoring in the back, Emily asking questions, Zack exclaiming over the troop of soldiers escorting the wagons toward the fort, Ma trying to keep us all calm. I remember her turning, with words meant only for me, as she did so often. Even though I was only fifteen, she tried to treat me as a woman. So many voices, so much laughter, so many poignant memories . . .
Perhaps facing the past and feeling the pain of it is part of growing up. I was twenty-six, and I had a lot more growing yet to do. But the tears I cried as I traveled east somehow felt like the tears of growing up. I was experiencing emotions impossible for children to feel—the aching nostalgia of the past, and the significance of memories that ran too deep for words.
The farther east we went, the more I found myself thinking about New York and the farm where we’d lived. I wondered if it was still there, and if there might still be people there who’d known Ma and Pa, or even us kids, or any relatives, or the church.
A different feeling started to come over me. I wanted to see the place where we had lived, wanted to walk through the fields and the house, wanted to climb the oak tree again—oh, there were so many memories! I began to anticipate going there to visit.
What would it be like? Would there be anyone I’d know? Would it feel like home?
At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering if there would be tears, and if the land and town and farm and fields and oak tree would have that sad kind of meaning, too, that couldn’t be explained.
There was only one way I’d know. One way or another, I had to go back there to visit and see the place.
Chapter 5
Insides of Things
Traveling all the way across the country, I had a lot of time to myself—time to think and time to write. My journal was filled with pages of thoughts and observations and feelings that didn’t have much to do with where I was or what was happening around me.
I have always felt as if I were living two lives at once—one, what I was on the outside, the part of me that other people saw. The other, what I was on the inside, the part of me that was thinking all the time.
That’s why I kept a journal. I had to let the thoughts out someplace, and writing them down somehow made it feel like the thoughts were completed, and then I could move on to think about something else.
One of these little thought-journeys happened just the night before we arrived in St. Joseph, and I found myself thinking about it that last day on the stagecoach. I had been talking with the wife of the stationman after supper when she said she wanted to go out to the chicken coop to check and see if there’d been any eggs laid in the last couple of hours. I went with her, and there was a big brown egg, freshly laid.
“Isn’t that a beautiful big egg,” she said, reaching down to pick it up. “My husband will love that for his breakfast tomorrow.”
Just those few words set my mind racing. I got to thinking what it would be like if, instead of fixing the egg for breakfast, she set it up on the mantel to admire. What if it was the most beautiful egg ever seen, and she didn’t want to destroy it by breaking it? So to preserve it she set it there, and took good care of it, and showed it to everyone who came through the station.
Now there’s no doubt that an eggshell is a wonderful creation of God’s. It has got a unique shape. It’s strong enough to hold a little baby chick until it’s ready to come out into the world.
I found myself thinking how lots of folks do that with many things—they set the shells up on the mantel to look at and admire. But they never get inside the shell because they’re so busy looking at the outside.
But it’s the inside where the life is, not the shell. The yoke of the egg becomes a baby chick, and the white feeds the chick while it’s growing in its shell. An egg is no good if all you do is look at the shell. If you put it up on the mantel and leave it there, it will eventually spoil. The life in it will die if it’s left there in
the shell. The purpose of an eggshell is to be broken, so that the life inside can come out. The shell has no meaning all by itself. It’s only a container for the life. Yet it’s easy to see the outside and think you’re seeing the egg, when really you’re only seeing the shell, the husk, the container.
It almost seems as if God intentionally hides the important insides of things, surrounding them with attractive, unusual, attention-drawing outside skins. We look at and admire a tree’s bark and leaves and branches and shapes, but its real life flows invisibly in the sap deep inside. The dirt and soil deep under the ground give life to the roots and enable plants to grow above ground where they are seen.
And people, too, have an outside shell that folks see—our body, our looks, our voice, our behavior and mannerisms, even our personalities are really part of the outside skin, our shell. But the real person is inside, in the soul. Just like the white and yolk of an egg. And like with eggs, if all we ever do is relate to the shells, the outsides of people, we’ll never know the real life inside them.
After that, I found myself looking differently at people, trying to catch their eyes and seeing if I could use them like windows to see inside, past the shell into some part of their soul. I found myself listening to people differently too, watching for glimpses of the inside real self that might be revealed.
Why, God, I asked silently as I sat there bouncing along and thinking about the five other people in the stagecoach with me, did you make it like this? Why did you hide the inside life of things behind shells that sometimes we can’t see past?
Then I thought of the time Jesus was telling stories to the people and trying to explain spiritual truths to them. His disciples came to him afterward, confused about what they’d heard and full of questions. Jesus said to them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables, so that they may see but not perceive, and hear and not understand.”
I was confused, too, when I thought of that. It seemed as if God were intentionally obscuring truth so that some people would be able to see and understand it, and other people wouldn’t. Why would he do that? Why would the kingdom of God be a “secret”? Then I remembered another place where the Bible talked about the “mystery” of the gospel.
I thought about all this for a long time, and I kept coming back to Jesus’ other words to his disciples after he’d finished telling the parables: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” What did that mean? Did God intentionally hide the whites and yolks inside shells to keep some people from seeing where the real life was? At first that didn’t sound much like God.
But then I got to thinking about God himself. He was life, the life of the whole universe! He was the one who gave everything else its life! If the whole universe was like an outside shell, God was inside it—like the yolk which feeds the developing chick, like a heart, like a soul, like the sap inside a tree—giving it life and energy and meaning.
But why did God make it so that the most important things are the hardest to see? I remembered one of Jesus’ parables about this very question. He said the kingdom of heaven is like finding a treasure buried in a field that is so valuable you go and sell everything you have in order to get it. Buried . . . hidden . . . secretive . . . a mystery. Why did God hide himself and the truths of the kingdom of heaven? Was it because he wanted people to have to dig and search and look for them? Why did God show himself only through the insides of the things he made? Was it so that only those who really wanted to search and look and dig in the field for the hidden treasure would discover the hidden meaning and life? Was there something about God’s being, something about truth, something about the kingdom of heaven that required being sought and searched after and dug for?
I never did come up with any real answers to all my questions. But I sure did find myself looking at things differently after that—looking to see where I might be able to catch a glimpse of God inside of something he had made.
Especially people.
Chapter 6
Caverns of Pain and Joy
Clackity clack . . . clackity clack . . . The steady vibration of the engine and the cars speeding along the tracks had a sound and feel all its own. Now that I was out of St. Joseph and well across Missouri, the stagecoach part of my journey already seemed like a distant memory. This was so different than riding in the horse-drawn Concord!
The clattering and swaying of the train coach put me in a thoughtful mood, and I found it much easier to write in my journal than for the last three weeks, even though I had to be careful not to spill the ink! The sounds and rhythm were like rain on the roof, and rain had always made me thoughtful. Even though I was just getting used to it for the first time, the sound of the train hurrying along the tracks was already making me feel reflective.
The train was a remarkable invention. And it wouldn’t be long before there would be trains going all the way to California! This very track I was now on would eventually take people from coast to coast!
There’d been a groundbreaking in Sacramento on January 8, just four months earlier. It was pouring rain, but that didn’t stop Governor Stanford from turning the day into a great celebration. There were speeches, and then he turned over the first shovelful of dirt where the beginning of the transcontinental railroad would start toward the Sierras.
Immediately the work had started, clearing out the railbed and building bridges through the mountains between Sacramento and Nevada. But none of the actual rail for the tracks, or train engines and cars themselves arrived for a long time after that. They would all have to be brought the 18,000 miles around the Horn by ship. Nevertheless, the building of the Central Pacific Railroad had begun.
On the other side, the Union Pacific was slower to get started. They were supposed to begin laying down track westward from Omaha, Nebraska, but I hadn’t heard that they had done anything yet.
Thinking about Mr. Stanford reminded me of Cal and everything that had happened. As much as I tried not to think about it, the memories were too fresh, and I couldn’t help it.
I suppose that’s another part of growing up—loving something or someone that gets taken away from you. Almeda said it made a person older and wiser. Sadness and pain somehow make you see things you couldn’t see before, give you a clearer vision even if there’s a hurt to go along with it. Any kind of pain—the loss of a good friend, a faithful dog, or horse, the disappointment of not getting something you wanted, or wanting to do something that didn’t happen—all those disappointments bring with them a kind of sadness that opens a place in you that can’t get opened any other way—a special place in your heart. God wants to get in so that he can live there himself, but the door to that place can be opened only by the experience of pain or sadness. It seems kind of funny that God wants to give us life and happiness and fullness and joy, but, as Rev. Rutledge often said, one of the ways he uses to do that is pain and hurt and suffering.
But I had also learned from Rev. Rutledge that God often does things in a way that seems backward to us, completely different from the way we think he should. The last time Rev. Rutledge preached about the “upside-down ways of God,” he had talked about a place—he called it a cavity, a hole—that’s down inside us all. This place next to the heart is where the fullness of God’s life and joy lives.
Rev. Rutledge compared it to a big cavern, a mine. The bigger the mine, the more of God’s life and joy and wisdom you can hold. He made us picture in our minds two gold mines in a hillside—one a tiny little one going in only a few feet, and the other a huge cavern that men had been working on for years that went way inside the mountain and was huge inside and where there were many different veins of gold.
“In the same way,” he said, “we all have different-sized mines or caverns inside us. The bigger the cavity, the more of God’s fullness we are able to hold.”
But what he said next really made me think. “The way God works inside us to make the caverns bigger,” h
e said, “is usually with painful circumstances. The trials and hurts, the bumps and bruises, the heartaches and sadnesses of life—those are his tools, just like the picks and shovels and sledgehammers you miners use! God has tools too, and he can’t widen and deepen out our mines without using them. The greater a man’s or woman’s suffering, the deeper the cavern is hollowed out for holding all the more of the abundance of God’s life and being and character. The greater the sadness has been, the greater potential there is for joy. The deeper the hurt, the more of God’s love it is possible to feel.”
I’d heard him say things like this before. But this time it struck so deep in me because I was feeling pain just then in my life. And I hoped it was making a place bigger inside me to be able to hold all the more of God’s joy someday!
Chapter 7
Thinking about Marriage
The hurt I felt as I rode east, wishing I could forget the events of the previous year, was more from foolishness than anything. For all my talk about growing up, I had behaved so immaturely. I had allowed myself to get swept off my feet.
I thought back to my twenty-first birthday, to the day I had ridden up the hill early in the morning and had talked to God about my future and what I hoped my life would be.
Everything had been so clear then! My heart was focused on God, and I wanted nothing but what he wanted for me. I wanted to be pure and to love him with every part of my soul. I wanted to love other people, and to tell them what was in my heart toward God.
I had even thought about marriage back then. I had envisioned the kind of man I might like to marry, if I ever did—sensitive, gentle, strong, open, emotional, tender. But most of all, a man who shared the desire I had in my heart to follow God with his whole heart. I had asked myself back then how a man and woman could possibly be friends and companions for a lifetime if they didn’t share that most important thing of all—that inner direction of where you want to go and what you want to be in life.
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