by Rinker Buck
When I asked him if the kids at the front of the wagon were his grandchildren, he smiled patiently and seemed eager to talk about it.
“Right, they’re our grandchildren,” he said. “You’re going to see a lot of families like ours out here, and anywhere in the Midwest. It’s meth. Meth and the recession.”
The man explained that his son, who was now almost thirty, had not wanted to go to college or join the military when he finished high school. He knew that he wanted to work with his hands and dreamed of eventually owning his own welding shop. So he took a six-month welding course at the local community college, then worked in a muffler shop for a year until he found a better job at a factory outside St. Joseph that fabricated pickup trailers. But he was furloughed after three years when orders for the trailers dried up, mostly due to the national recession after 2008.
Meanwhile, an epidemic of methamphetamine abuse—the underground drug is made from a mixture of acidic chemicals and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals—had swept the country, hitting particularly hard in small towns and rural communities in the Midwest. Meth dealers and what to do about them is a big problem from Indiana to Arizona. The dealers prey particularly hard in high schools and community colleges.
“We had always known he did a little meth,” the man said. “But he was basically a good kid. He had a decent job, a live-in girlfriend, he went water-skiing on weekends with his friends. But after he lost his job he started dealing in meth. It broke our hearts.”
After his son and his girlfriend had two children, their lives spun out of control, and the man and his wife went to court to obtain custody of their grandchildren. The son was now in a long-term treatment facility run by the state of Kansas, and the family had not seen his former girlfriend, the mother of the children they were now raising, for more than two years.
“It completely changed our lives, but we’re actually real happy to be raising children again,” the man said.
The man decided against retiring from his job as a supervisor at a local sewage treatment plant, but his wife, a schoolteacher, retired early, despite losing a few hundred dollars a month in pension payments. She had worked all through the childhood of her own kids, regretted it, and wanted someone home every day when her grandchildren returned on the school bus.
I saw this later in the towns of central Nebraska and all through Wyoming and Idaho. On Sunday mornings, the cafés of towns like North Platte, Nebraska, and Douglas, Wyoming, were full of grandparents who take their grandchildren out for pancake breakfasts. The grandparents are raising the children because the biological parents have skipped off—for whatever reason, not always meth. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have often meant that both parents in a military family get deployed at once, and they leave their children with their grandparents. Layoffs of single working mothers lead a lot of families to decide to become multigenerational again. A wave of bipolar disorders and addiction to video games and gambling has also taken a toll on families.
Later, when I researched the subject, I was surprised to learn that what I saw from my covered wagon was confirmed by census data—a demographic change so dramatic that the U.S. Census Bureau highlighted it in its 2010 population reports. Today, roughly seven million American children live in households that include their grandparents. Almost half of these children are being raised primarily by their grandparents, a 16 percent increase over the numbers for the 2000 census. That’s a huge statistical spike for such a small subset of families. In many western states now, efforts are under way to change the laws affecting health care, so that grandchildren can qualify for their grandparents’ medical plans. There are large, active support groups in many western towns for grandparents raising their grandchildren, and the churches have also jumped right in, scheduling evening play groups and extended hours for Sunday schools that allow grandparents to spend time alone at home or go out for dinner with their friends while the kids are cared for at church.
Before we rumbled off in the wagon, the grandfather beside the road near Marysville said one other thing that I would hear again and again from his peers in the West.
“I wish every couple had a chance to do this,” he said. “You do a lot better job raising grandkids than you did with your kids, and we’re too busy to be lonely. I’m volunteering as a Little League coach next year.”
Children, of course, rarely yearn to stand at the end of their drives offering buckets of water and bags of apples to passing traffic, and I never would have seen this from a speeding car. I began to think of my Peter Schuttler as a plodding social observatory, and the contradiction of being able to see the modern world more clearly from the vantage of a nineteenth-century wagon appealed to me. Seeing America slowly was, in a way, like eating slow food—I wasn’t covering much ground in a single day, but I was digesting a lot more.
• • •
At Marysville, Kansas, I decided to stop for an extra day to rest the mules and see the Oregon Trail sites, which had always been my plan. A mile or two outside town, the skies cleared and we decided to stop at a veterinary supply store to buy some gall ointment and food supplements for the mules, and I also needed to find hay. While I went inside, Nick held the mules from the wagon seat, talking to some tourists who wanted to take pictures of the wagon and the team.
Northeast Kansas is big horse country, and the thirtyish woman behind the counter inside was dressed in a western shirt, blue jeans, and lace-up packer’s boots. She was a rodeo performer and told me that she barrel-raced and competed at dressage meets out as far as western Nebraska and Wyoming. She was very knowledgeable and helpful and wanted to know where we were headed with the wagon and team.
“All the way,” I said. “We’re hoping that we can make Oregon.”
“Oh, God, I would kill to do what you’re doing,” she said. “Kill. Okay, so where are you sleeping tonight? Where’s your camp?”
I told her that we were planning on crossing the Big Blue River, and then finding a farm nearby to rest the mules for a day. We could either walk or hitch rides into Marysville.
“No,” she said. “Go to the corrals right here. Just take a right at the Hardee’s. You’ll see the ball field, the public park, and the rodeo grounds. There’s water there, a big corral for the mules, and you’ll be right in town. Just roll the wagon right in there and enjoy yourselves.”
“Nobody cares?”
“Nobody cares. Look, those corrals are for you. Every town in this country out here has public campgrounds and corrals. It’ll be that way all the way out to Wyoming. When we go barrel racing? We camp at the corrals. Just hit the public corrals every night.”
When I asked about hay for the mules, she pulled out her cell phone and called her boyfriend, a local rancher, talked for a few minutes, and then told me that a stack of 30 percent alfalfa hay would be waiting for us at the public corrals.
“Should I pay you for the hay?” I said. “I might miss him.”
“You’re not paying anybody for that hay,” she said. “And I’m giving you the ranch discount on what you’re buying here. Everybody is going to be so into this, all the way out. Your biggest problem is going to be dealing with all of the people who want to help you.”
We enjoyed Marysville and had a great camp there. At the public corrals, we pulled the wagon out of the wind in a depression below a large barn, ran our hose down from the water hydrant, and washed the mules. They kicked up their heels and galloped off when we turned them lose in the corrals, happy just to be wild equines again.
Everybody in town, grandparents with their grandchildren, policemen on their patrols, a group of German tourists, came to visit us in camp, and Nick entertained these visitors by showing how Olive Oyl could retrieve a stick from the top of a pickup cab. Sitting on our camp chairs down off left field at the baseball diamond, we watched some of the best softball I’ve ever seen—ladies’ fast-pitch, Marysville versus Riley County. (In the fourth inning, the Marysville shortstop caught an impossible
pop fly behind third and whipped it to the third baseman, who tagged the runner and then whipped it to second for another tag, an astonishing triple-play.) When we turned up for the wagon to cook dinner, I discovered that the constant jostling of the axles had broken the gas line on our cookstove, so I walked a mile up to the Wal-Mart to buy a new one.
On the way back, while I was walking along the highway with a new Coleman stove under my arm, a pickup stopped on the shoulder beside me. The driver was a fun-looking, studmuffin cowboy, and his girlfriend, also wearing a cowboy hat, sat close to him in the middle seat. They rolled down the window, offered me a ride back to camp, and then ran home for steaks and beer to join us for dinner. There was a beautiful sunset that night in Marysville, with a low deck of cottony cumulus, lit blue and yellow by the falling sun, and we sat up until after dark talking, enjoying ourselves, and going over the maps of the routes we would follow into Nebraska.
By our second night in Marysville, everyone in town seemed to know that a covered wagon was parked at the rodeo corrals. The young couples and the grandparents brought their children down and, while Nick and I showed the mules and the wagon to the adults, the children chased around the ball field with Olive Oyl, throwing her sticks, squealing with delight when she made fox leaps out of the tall prairie grasses to catch bugs, and sitting around in a circle and coaxing her onto her back so they could scratch her belly.
Nick was convinced that the children had come into our camp to learn about covered wagons and the Oregon Trail. After he had exhausted all of the adults with his grand blarney about wheel hubs and draft teams, he called all of the children over and sat them down for a lecture too. This is the wagon tongue, this is a whippletree, and, children, let me show you how the braking system works. The kids fidgeted a lot and looked anxiously back toward their parents. But Nick has no summary function. He palavered on to the kids for another ten minutes about cast-iron skeins and oak wheels.
When he was finally done, Nick grandiloquently held out his arms and smiled at the children.
“Okay, kids. Do you have any questions about the wagon or the Oregon Trail?”
A bright young girl in a pink tank top raised her hand.
“Yes, honey,” Nick said. “What would you like to know about the wagon?”
“Can we play with Olive Oyl now?”
Everyone laughed and the kids chased down to the ball field with Olive Oyl. Nick shrugged and turned for the corrals to feed and water the mules while I stepped up to the wagon to cook dinner.
“See, what did I tell you?” Nick said. “It would have been a mistake, big-time, to come out here without that dog.”
We loved the gypsy life in Kansas. After dinner, we sat on our camp chairs facing the corrals, watching the sun fall over the junction country. At the fairgrounds above the wagon, Nick had found a corner in the sheep barn filled with fresh straw, and slept there. As I dozed off in the wagon, the distant barking of dogs, teenagers squealing off from the Hardee’s in their pickups, and the Union Pacific trains rumbling through bathed me in the familiar night sounds of a midwestern town. I was excited about the next day, when we would cross an important milestone along the trail, the Big Blue River just west of town.
10
IN THE MORNING, LIGHT RAIN fell through low clouds, obscuring the new concrete bridge that gracefully arches skyward over the old pioneer ford at Marshall’s Ferry. Descending the hill in Marysville for the bridge, we passed St. Gregory’s Roman Catholic School, where the students knew that we were coming. Smiling, attractive Anglo and Mexican faces filled the windows, and the children were pumping their hands over their heads to urge us on. A few of them were waving small American flags and one boy held up a sign that he had handwritten on a piece of school paper. JESUS LOVES MULES.
I was cautious about and even afraid of making our first crossing of the trip over a tall bridge, especially with a team of mules that we really didn’t know well yet. Bridges are notorious runaway zones for teams. A mule or a horse can get a third of the way across a bridge, look sideways and realize that it is suspended high over water, panic, and then bolt from side to side in an attempt to escape, overturning the wagon or crashing into oncoming cars. The covered bridges of the nineteenth century, which prevented horses from seeing out the side, solved this problem, but modern open-air spans can grip them with agoraphobic terror. I’ve nearly lost a horse several times crossing long bridges and, once, I dragged my wheel hubs all the way down the side of a school bus.
My dread of taking horses across bridges is an echo from the nineteenth century that was embedded early in life. On our 1958 covered wagon trip, during our fifth or sixth day out, we were approaching the old rickety span that crossed the Delaware River between Lambertville, New Jersey, and New Hope, Pennsylvania. With traffic behind us, my father trotted our team, Benny and Betty, up the inclined approach to the bridge. When the horses saw the grated metal roadway of the bridge, through which they could see the water below, they balked and reared, lunging backward and sideways so that the wheels of the wagon banged against the metal stops on the wagon box.
My father was clearly overwhelmed by this sudden crisis at the bridge and, with a load of children in the wagon, worried, but he managed to calm the team and then called out to the motorists behind us to back their cars away from the bridge. By inching the team backward, then turning, he shoehorned the wagon off the bridge entrance and then, throwing home the brake, he drove us down an embankment near the bridge entrance to a safe patch of grass. My brother and I scrambled off the wagon and unhitched the team, tying them to the wheels.
My father walked back up the embankment to survey the bridge. I still remember the way he was silhouetted in the harsh sunlight against the bridge structure high above me and how, with a worried look, he pulled off his Amish straw hat and wiped his forehead with a red bandanna handkerchief taken from his back pocket. This was one of the few times that I remember feeling that this man whom I revered and trusted to guide me didn’t know what to do. Maybe he couldn’t protect us here.
When he came back down the embankment, my father wiped his forehead again with his bandanna and told us what he wanted to do.
With a length of rope, he said, he was going to lash the pole of the wagon to his shoulders and pull the rig across the bridge by hand. To the right of the automobile span there was a pedestrian walkway with flooring made from wooden planks. The horses would walk on that, he thought, and my brother and I would lead them one by one across the bridge. There was a short metal grating entrance to the walkway that would spook the horses at first. But my father said that my older brother would lead the more sensible and willing horse, Benny, by a long line, and I would be positioned next to the grating with the buggy whip. When Benny balked at the grating, I would surprise him from behind with a lash on his rump, and he would probably jump to the wooden planking, and the other horses would follow.
“Boys,” my father told us, “when you get up on the walkway, if the horses start to fuss or run away, just let them go. Let them go. When a horse is afraid it just wants to be free to take care of themselves. So just let them go if they rear and balk.”
“Dad,” I said. “That’s crazy. They’ll run away and we’ll never catch them.”
“Just listen to me,” my father said. “Let them go. A horse will never go far. Once they’re past what they’re afraid of, they stop. Get the team and Texas onto the planks and then let them go if you have to. We’ll catch them on the other side.”
I felt queasy and uncertain inside because I didn’t think my father was right, and I wasn’t comfortable following the directions of someone who was making things up as we went along. I was suddenly filled with doubt about this trip. Why were we traveling by covered wagon if we didn’t know what we were doing? My father should have known about this bridge. The whole trip was a bad idea.
Up near the bridge, while my brother led Benny to the walkway, I stood back with the buggy whip hidden behind my back, holding th
e other horse, Betty, with a line. When Benny balked at the metal grating, I surprised him from behind with a good crack on the ass and he vaulted to the wooden planking, galloping a few strides before he calmed down, but my brother ran several strides ahead of him and then had no trouble leading him across. Betty had been teamed with Benny for her entire life and didn’t like being left behind, so she leaped over the metal grate too, pulling the lead line out of my hands. But my father had said just to let her go. So I followed on the wooden planking, leading our riding horse Texas, more or less herding Betty from behind.
It was an eerie, incongruous feeling, being suspended seventy or eighty feet above the Delaware River, herding horses across a narrow wooden walkway that seemed to stretch forever to the distant bank. I had crossed this bridge several times by car, but on foot I noticed things that I hadn’t seen before. Up close, the steel structure of the bridge was unbelievably rusty and corroded, with large, scabrous flakes hanging out from the beams and blowing in the wind. On the river below us, teenage girls were laughing and screaming as they jumped off a houseboat to swim. I was frightened by the way the bridge shook and rattled underfoot every time a car passed.
It was a long walk to the other side of the river. I was gripped by a long, gray depression while my heart raced with panic attacks. I was often overwhelmed as a boy by feelings of anxiety, and by profound embarrassment about the kind of family that I came from, my fears made worse by my inability to share them with anyone else or even to comprehend what they meant. These pangs struck particularly hard when we all had to file into Mass together and then sit in front of the other families at Christ the King Church. I believed in God then, and didn’t understand why He was being so unfair to me. God, why did you have to give me this crazy family? Why did you give me this crazy father? When I prayed, I begged God to suddenly and miraculously make my family normal.