by Rinker Buck
One of my favorite pioneer journalists is George Law Curry, perhaps because his life story so reminded me of my own grandfather and father. A Pennsylvanian who couldn’t afford an education, Curry started his career as a printer’s apprentice and worked his way up to becoming a newspaper publisher. He crossed the trail in 1846 and later followed a career track common to many overland emigrants, becoming a prominent newspaperman and politician in Oregon, and briefly served as the state’s acting governor. In May 1846, Curry wrote back to the paper he had founded in St. Louis, The Reveille, from the banks of the Wakarusa River in Kansas.
Life on the plains far surpasses my expectation; there is a freedom and a nobleness about it that tend to bring forth the full manhood. A man upon the horizon-bound prairie feels his own strength and estimates his own weakness. He is alive to every thing around him. For him there is a joy in the “lone elm” grandeur on the mounds, beauty in the grassy and flower-besprinkled couch on which he rests, and a glory forever round him, stretching his spirit to its fullest tension.
In the trail journals, I often came across the phrase “seeing the elephant,” a term that the pioneers used to describe their anticipation about striking out across the unknowable wilderness of the plains. The origins of the phrase are not certain, but it seems to have been a popular nineteenth-century colloquialism that referred to the rare thrill that families felt when leaving their isolated farms to see the elephants marching through town when a traveling circus arrived. The term was a kind of destroyer-preserver image that changed in meaning over time, and depending on the circumstances.
Initially, the pioneers jubilantly expected to “see the elephant” in the endlessly scenic plains that they would encounter after embarking across the Missouri River. “All hands early up anxious to see the path that leads to the Elephant,” wrote gold seeker John Clark of Virginia in 1852, the day he left for the trail on the St. Joseph Road. But a mythic, baleful elephant also came to represent the many hazards of the trail—disease, drowning, or stampeding buffalo that carried off a wagon train’s cattle. Pioneer Lucy Cooke made a difficult early-season crossing of the trail in April 1851, when the waterways of Kansas were perilously swollen from heavy rains. The wagons of her train had to be tediously unloaded and then pulled across even small streams by chains. “Oh, surely we are seeing the elephant,” Cooke wrote in her journal. “From the tip of his trunk to the end of his tail!”
Seeing the elephant, as historian Merrill Mattes put it, “was the popular symbol of the Great Adventure, all the wonder and the glory and the shivering thrill of the plunge into the ocean of prairie and plains, and the brave assault upon mountains and deserts that were gigantic barriers to California gold. It was the poetic imagery of all the deadly perils that threatened a westering emigrant.”
In the early 1850s, during the frantic California Gold Rush, another popular phrase gained circulation among the mostly young, urban eastern men and Europeans who were rushing west on the trail. “The cowards never started,” they said. In a 1962 article on the covered wagon, a writer for American Heritage offered his own amendment for the old saying. “Only the madmen started!” he wrote. As I made my final preparations to depart for the West, I knew that many people would consider me unhinged for wanting to see the elephant. I was a madman for becoming a twenty-first-century traveler along the ruts. But I was cheerful about that. I would live for the summer according to my own personal creed.
I do not believe in organized religion, herbal remedies, yoga, Reiki, kabbalah, deep massage, slow food, or chicken soup for the soul. The nostrums of Deepak Chopra and Barbara De Angelis cannot rescue people like me.
I believe in crazyass passion. It was crazyass passion that dug America’s canals, flung the wagons west, built the railroads, and propelled the God-fearing to their deaths at Cold Harbor and Shiloh. My father’s generation gave great crazyass passion surviving the Depression and then fighting a noble world war. Brandy and words mixed with Winston Churchill became the crazyass passion that saved the last free country in Europe. Crazyass passion threw Herman Melville to the seas, Jack Kerouac on the road, and Wilfred Thesiger across the sands. My corporeal self would be driving mules across the plains, but it was crazyass passion that would deliver me to the trail.
2
MY DREAMS OF CROSSING MORE than two thousand miles of western terrain were fortified by two gloriously farcical delusions. I would cross the trail alone. And, in addition to the mules and a covered wagon, I would be taking along a riding horse. I knew that I would enjoy exploring on horseback the distant canyons and river bottoms that I could see from the wagon seat, especially after I reached the dramatic bluff country of western Nebraska, and my childhood memories required me to think of myself galloping across the sage every evening to scout for a camp. I pictured myself high atop my horse under a cowboy hat, cheerfully taking notes about my poetic surroundings as I simultaneously juggled the reins, a lead line for the mules, my canteens, a compass, and maps. I would be the happiest multitasker in the history of the Oregon Trail.
To accomplish this, however, I would need my old riding saddle, bought twenty years earlier on a Wyoming cattle drive. In a transaction typical of the arrangements between members of my family, I had lent the saddle many years ago to my younger brother Nicholas, in return for his help when I was renovating my house. The saddle had sat all those years, mostly unused, in a dusty corner of Nick’s barn in Maine. Early one morning in April, just a few weeks before I was scheduled to leave on the trip, I emailed Nick and asked him to ship me the saddle.
I wasn’t surprised when Nick’s reply arrived a few minutes later. He had plenty of time on his hands. The summer before, he had taken a bad fall from a neighbor’s roof and shattered the bones in his right foot into dozens of fragments. The injury had not healed quickly, and for the past eight months he had been confined to either the postoperative ward of the Veterans Administration hospital in Augusta or his living room couch. Nick’s postcards and emails have always been a tonic for me, evoking the literacy standards of the nineteenth century, when Civil War soldiers and stagecoach drivers were too busy leading interesting lives to bother much about punctuation or spelling. Hearing from Nick instantly put me in the mood for pioneer travel.
“I can send you the sadle just tell me were and when and listen hear you ashol why didn’t you tell me you were making the Oregin trip this year Im comin.”
Some of you are already familiar with my brother Nick. Last summer, while you were touring the beautiful seacoast of Maine, Nick Buck was that rather generously proportioned, gregarious fellow with the Fu Manchu mustache and a NAPA Auto Parts cap, rumbling north on U.S. Route 1 near Damariscotta in a battered old farm wagon pulled by a team of mismatched draft horses. Stopping traffic in both directions on the busy coastal highway, Nick wheeled into the parking lot of the Hannaford Supermarket and then trotted over to the handicapped parking space, where he tied up his team. (“Whadya mean why do I park in handicapped?” Nick said to me once, when I was along for his Saturday-morning ride. “That’s the only place where they put a sign so I can tie my horses.”) It takes Nick a long time to shop at Hannaford’s, and not simply because he is an ambitious eater. Nick is a much beloved figure along the mid-coast of Maine, and everyone wants to stop and talk when they see him. At the supermarket, Nick’s whereabouts are rarely a mystery. His booming baritone voice carries everywhere, even through hardened walls.
“OH, YEAH! Did you see that team of mine jump the ditch? I thought I was going to lose that whole frickin load of kids off the back of the sleigh!”
Nick is our family’s Renaissance man. He volunteers his wagon and team every year for free kiddie rides at local fund-raisers, he’s a popular actor in community theaters, a mainstay of several local self-help groups, and his lectures about horses, stagecoaches, and the old Boston Post Road have been some of the most highly attended events in the history of several Maine libraries and museums. Nick is also well known for being able
to build or repair anything, a kind of local handyman and global Robin Hood rolled into one. If your grandmother in Waldoboro is complaining about her leaky water heater, Nick will generously offer to drive up there and install a new one, probably forgetting to send her a bill, but he’s just as likely to be found rebuilding homes for hurricane or earthquake victims in New Orleans or Peru.
Many people, after they have met Nick and spoken with him for a while, drool over his curriculum vitae. He epitomizes the personality type that down-easters call the Mainiac—a person so completely devoid of practicality, yet so devoted to fun, that his life can only be considered utterly romantic. He is also something of a prototype for the middle sons in large families. By the time Nick arrived, there were already seven Buck children. My father and mother devoted a lot of care to raising children properly, but they can be classified only as burned-out parents by the time number eight was born. This led to a curious phenomenon that I saw in other families. The older sons and daughters received an extraordinary amount of attention and contributed to my father’s personal bankruptcy scheme by attending the best private schools. But the middle boys were just surplus carnal results, afterthoughts, and no one cared how they dressed or what they did in school. Then the parents of these large Catholic clans gathered a second wind and showered the youngest children with affection. But the middle boys were neglected truants who could do whatever they wanted.
During his senior year in high school, Nick was suspended for a minor smoking violation—he says that he was taking the rap for a friend—and never went back, finding that he enjoyed jacking up barns and working in a gas station a lot more than classes in algebra and European history. A few months later he enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard. Nick became certified as a marine engineer and was assigned to work on icebreakers along the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers in Maine. He crewed boats that performed several dramatic sea rescues, and then he became the last lighthouse keeper in Maine when he took over the windswept, historic Whitehead Light Station, on an island south of Rockland, running it for eighteen months before it was automated and abandoned as a manned station. The trajectory of Nick’s life was celebrated twenty years later, when he returned to Whitehead to lovingly restore the light keeper’s house for the wealthy family who bought the island after it was sold at a government auction.
After the Coast Guard, Nick converted the love of horses and antique rigs that he picked up on our old farm in New Jersey into a successful sleigh-ride business at New Hampshire ski resorts. He spent the next ten winters up there, building huge, thirty-passenger sleighs from scratch. By day he pranced his big, dappled teams of Percheron and Belgian draft horses across icy parking lots and through the porte cocheres of fancy inns, building a considerable reputation as a horseman, and by night he partied with the ski bunnies that he met in the bars. Every summer he decamped for Dutch Harbor in Alaska, where he ran the engine room of the largest American fish processing boat in the Bering Sea. When he was in his thirties, a girlfriend persuaded him to stop drinking and settle down in Maine. Nick bought a run-down farm in Newcastle and—sort of—fixed it up. The next fifteen years were devoted to building and restoring trophy mansions along the Maine coast, and collecting carriages and sleighs, and Nick imaginatively treated his ferocious attention deficit disorder with a busy weekend schedule of team driving, acting in plays, and Habitat for Humanity projects.
But the recession of 2008 had wiped out mansion-building in Maine, and then Nick had fallen off his neighbor’s roof. He was now unemployed, and an invalid, so financially desperate that his family and friends had to throw fund-raisers to help him catch up on his mortgage payments and credit card bills. I hadn’t considered Nick for the Oregon trip, because he was so immobilized by pain and recurrent infections in his foot that he couldn’t even rise from his couch to cook his own meals. My sisters in Boston had been running up to Maine on weekends, housekeeping and caring for Nick as best as they could.
Now, on the eve of my departure, Nick was flooding me with emails, insisting that he could make the trip. His doctors were promising to give him a clean bill of health soon. He was passionate about going not only because, as an experienced horseman—arguably one of the best team drivers of his generation—Nick knew that I couldn’t possibly make it from Missouri to Oregon alone. He also knew that an Oregon run with mules was the dream opportunity of a lifetime.
My sister Ferriss says that Nick was “born at the wrong time.” There is even an informal psychiatric term for people like him: “born out of century.” His knowledge about old wagons is encyclopedic and adamant. When I was with him once at a museum outside Boston, Nick saw a restored Civil War escort wagon and said, loudly enough to be heard by the museum director a floor away, “Oh, Christ, look at that. Those are World War I artillery hubs on an 1863 wagon. Why would anyone do somethin so frickin stupid like that?” If it is an Albany cutter, and you call it a sleigh, he will remind you. It becomes frightening to be around him when you realize that he can do the same thing across a broad spectrum of artifacts—airplanes, ships, steam engines, antique pickups, churches, breakwaters, and Victorian houses. Nick is a gorgeous cluster of autodidacticism, and you can’t believe that this guy standing next to you with hydraulic fluid all over his shirt is more erudite than the curators at the Smithsonian Institution.
There are a few other contradictions, glaring but charming. Nick is well known in Maine as a fastidious builder, and none of his multimillion-dollar projects is done until every balustrade and vaulted ceiling has been approved by the architect as perfect. His standards for personal possessions—his pickup, his farm, his furniture—are a great deal more proletarian than that. An avid reader, Nick often surprises me with his recall of history books, even classic novels. But a lack of performance in school and the general addled nature of the brain through which information must be processed results in a pronounced verbal dyslexia, which Nick calls his “lysdexia.” During December one year, Nick and I decided that we wanted to watch a Christmas video together.
“Okay, so Rink,” Nick said. “Let’s watch Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Wife.”
But it’s easy to ignore these oddities because Nick’s outlook is so endlessly jolly. Recently, he faced a problem with his elderly cat, Poopy, who was not well. One night after work, he rushed Poopy to the vet. Via our family email tree, Nick delivered the news about what happened there.
“My cat Poopy passed away this evening about six o’clock at the vet’s office were I had taken him to be passed on. Because he passed away while the paper work was being filled out I got out of there with out a bill. I feel terribly guilty to be filled with joy over the fact that I got out with a dead cat and no bill. I think I may be on a paved road to you Know were.”
I called Nick to commiserate about Poopy. But it was one of those weeks when he had lost his cell phone and he wasn’t receiving messages. Eventually, he got back to me via email.
“Rinker Sorry I Missed your calls. The Cat Poopy has left the Planet. It was a sad day but he had lived a long life and died at the last moment of it, as most all of us do.”
• • •
My email exchanges with Nick about the Oregon Trail trip became a study of our divergent personalities, the amazing wealth of possibilities contained within shared DNA. I would write Nick long, learned dissertations on my plans, with links to maps, and typically overresearched histories of the places along the trail where I planned to camp. Nick emailed back about wheel grease and tools.
“I have two horse anchors a wheel wrench my wheel jack actually two if one brakes dad’s old leather tool kit from the covered wagon trip ’58 and my buddy Alan can get some High tech grease that will prolong times between greasing the wheels. Blankets for the Mules we’l need for cold nights and equine aspiran lots of every bolt on the wagon all perpose tools I have a Coleman stove and a Keroseen lantern as well. O and PS no matter what any jerkof waggonmaker says we’l have to Rebild the brakes evry 100 miles.”