by Rinker Buck
The new metal implement shed that protects the Midway Pony Express station and road ranch, near Gothenburg, Nebraska, is one of the most creative preservation efforts along the trail.
The new implement shed at Midway Station sets off the lines of the original log facade and its window casements like the frame on a valuable print or oil painting. The new roof bathes the cabin in shade, protecting the log-and-adobe structure from direct sunlight, and the space inside is cool. Gill’s solution for Midway Station is one of the most sensible historic preservations that I’ve seen. Government didn’t do this; he did it, with his own money.
I stood in front of Midway Station marveling about this while I watered the mules from the ranch spigot. When I put my bucket down to scratch Jake’s ears, Olive Oyl dived in headfirst for a drink, overturning the pail and spooking Beck, who reared so high that I could see her shoes above my head and then leaped forward to run away. I was quickly overrun by the team, but managed to pull myself from underneath the hooves by propping one knee against the wagon pole and wrapping my arm around Jake’s head. Nick immediately saw what was happening and as I bounced along on the pole desperately hanging on to Jake, he steered the mules toward a cottonwood grove, where they stopped. It was only the brilliant mule handling of Nick that prevented me from becoming one of those wagon travelers who at noon are well and in the enjoyment of good health and in the evening a corpse.
I was winded and rattled by the brief runaway, I was furious at Beck, and my knee was bruised and my shoulder ached from clinging one-armed to Jake. After I helped Nick back the team away from the trees, I walked over to the log cabin and sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes, taking deep breaths as I slowly felt my heartbeat returning to normal.
The experience became another case of fear motivating me to push on, not discouraging me, and at Midway Station Nick and I made a mid-afternoon decision that became habit-forming for the rest of the trip. We had already completed our allotted twenty-five miles for the day, and now we were on a comfortable ranch where we were welcome to camp. But we had made more than thirty miles the day before and could easily bring our total to thirty-five miles today, making our two-day total almost seventy miles, substantially revising my expectations for the trip. There were still four hours of daylight left and the mules weren’t spent. My adrenaline drip from the runaway, and then from bouncing along on my ass beside the galloping team, emboldened me. This was mixed with anger at Beck. Fuck you, crazygirl mule. I am going for more miles this afternoon, a lot more miles.
When I asked Gill if there was a ranch farther west where we could camp, he suggested the farm and feedlot of a friend, Jim Hecox, which sat on the bottomlands of the Platte right on the trail.
“Jim won’t be there,” Gill said. “He’ll still be out in the fields cutting alfalfa. But you don’t have to worry. He’ll pull in tonight when you’re asleep and be delighted to see a wagon parked in his yard.”
• • •
We clattered off the Lower 96 with a wonderful feeling of being passed from ranch to ranch, and from memorable trail stop to memorable trail stop, by happy Nebraskans. The ranch road curved northwest following the old ruts and delivered us to a large granite Oregon Trail marker out on paved Highway 47. On both sides of the highway, the river was flooded out into large, sandy lakes. Turning in for the Hecox place, we splashed through deep ponds that rose above our wheel hubs and covered the wagon in mud.
That night we were exhausted, filthy, sunburned, and covered with trail grime, and I felt stiff from my runaway drubbing by the mules. But our daily routine was exhilarating. The trail had turned me into an exuberant workaholic. Rise at dawn and carry water and feed for the mules, harness and hitch, walk or ride on a wooden Schuttler seat all day, carry more water, then lug the heavy harness again, wash the mules, cook dinner, and snake a hose across the ranch to refill our barrels at night. Unload and repack the wagon, every day. The endurance required should have been too much for us, but across these Nebraska plains endurance just begat more endurance. Even the smallest decisions seemed momentous now. I was too tired and sore after dinner to wash our dishes and instead collapsed, with my clothes and boots still on, into my wagon bed. Fuck the dishes. Fuck hygiene. We’ve done seventy miles in two days. The dishes could wait until the morning.
I was too hyped by the day to sleep right away, and the view out the back of the wagon was too beautiful to ignore. The South Hills rose sharply in the distance, with the deep folds of the canyons washed in pastel twilight. As I stared over my boots toward the hills, I realized that I had resolved for myself one of the great debates about the overland years. Some historians, often called “economic determinists,” argue that America’s frequent cycles of financial collapse and farm failures drove the majority of pioneers to the trail. Other scholars, sometimes called “adventure theorists,” postulate that romantic yearnings for exotic travel and for fulfilling manifest destiny were more dominant motives. Reaching middle Nebraska, I decided, had turned me into a diehard economic determinist. Forget adventure. Adventure gets pretty stale after a while and you’re not much of a romantic after a month on the trail. No one would do this, day after day, unless he had to.
14
AN APPARITION WAS RIDING WITH me across the trail. At critical moments of the trip I was flooded with memories of my father, and reflexive comparisons of our adventure now and our covered wagon trip to Pennsylvania in 1958. There was something pathetic, I thought, about a sixty-year-old mule skinner remaining so dependent on his past. I reminded myself of those droll WASPs that you meet at New England cocktail parties, palavering away about restoring their father’s old wooden boat. But then I experienced an intense moment out past Chimney Rock that forced me to reconsider the psychic tattoo of paternity.
At North Platte, we laid over for two days at a pleasant house and pasture just south of town owned by a friendly retired couple who became our trail family for a couple of days, Don and Sheila Exner. Nick made a particularly heroic entrance at the Exner place when the mules balked and reared while he was squeezing the wagon through the narrow space between two outbuildings, scraping the wheel hubs against a disc harrow parked near one of the sheds. We used our layover in North Platte to resupply and visit the local museums, the huge Union Pacific rail yards, and Buffalo Bill Cody’s restored mansion north of town.
Don Exner is seventy-three but looks much younger, and he is a brave, stoic man. He had spent his career managing Woolworth stores in the Dakotas and Nebraska and then was almost completely paralyzed from the waist down after a thirty-foot fall from a house roof when he was in his early fifties. Doctors told him that he would never walk again, but Don refused to believe it. He hobbles gamely between his house and garage shop on crutches, grimacing with pursed lips as he forces his legs up at every step, and performs his farm chores sitting on a golf cart that is outfitted with conveniently located tool kits.
From the age of eight onward I had watched my father slowly decline from the phantom pain attacks that he suffered from his amputated left leg, and being around someone like Don often reminds me of him. My father struggled around our farm on crutches himself, racked by searing pain, and helping him up from the barn at night or watching him being carried off to the hospital for Demerol shots was part of my childhood routine. The last few years had been particularly edgy in this regard, because I had often written stories about soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, missing arms and legs. The details about phantom pains still bother me and whenever I wrote an article about injured war veterans, I was likely to be mildly depressed and preoccupied for days. While researching one of these articles, I read a study documenting how modern medical science has made very little progress understanding and alleviating phantom pain and how, for the majority of amputees, the frequency and intensity of attacks will increase with age. That is one consequence of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we don’t often read about. Thousands of children of veterans across the country will spe
nd their childhoods as I did, watching their fathers grimace and twitch with severe pain when the unpredictable phantom attacks return. There is probably a family rushing a war veteran to the hospital for morphine or Demerol shots right now.
Don is a lot quieter and more stable than my father was, but there were some similarities that struck me. He has the same clear olive-tone skin, symmetrical oval face, and bald pate, and like my father’s his face relaxes with an amused, saturnine expression when he finds something ironic. Dragging his legs around the house, he never complains about his handicap. With our new trail family in North Platte, I woke in the morning feeling that I had just returned home for a long vacation with my parents, and was looking forward to joining them for breakfast. Even the way the light fell across the wainscoting and furniture in the house reminded me of my father’s library.
Nick and I had made an important revision of plans back in Minden. We were still determined to make an unassisted crossing without motorized support, but it didn’t make sense to leave Nick’s pickup all the way back in St. Joe. We would need the pickup to close down the trip once we got to Oregon, and we didn’t want to travel two thousand miles on an airliner to retrieve it. If we wrecked the wagon somewhere or our wheels broke, we would need the pickup within a couple of hundred miles. So we landed on the plan of leapfrogging the truck ahead of us once a month. From Minden, Nick had driven with Bill Petersen back to Kansas, and then we had placed the truck forward in North Platte. Now I wanted to place the truck another two hundred miles ahead because I knew that we would have to reshoe the mules and probably make wagon repairs at our next planned layover, somewhere in eastern Wyoming. I had made arrangements with the North Platte Valley Museum in Gering, Nebraska, next door to Scottsbluff, to park the pickup there for a couple of weeks.
The drive west to Scottsbluff would give me a chance to scout the trail ahead and then I would either find a bus or hitchhike back to North Platte. One morning, at breakfast with the Exners, I told Nick about my plans.
“Trail Hand,” I said. “You’ll have to play tourist without me today. I’m going to drive the Toyota up to Gering.”
Don looked up from his plate of bacon and eggs with an amused smile.
“Oh, I’m not sure it’s safe for a young man like you to be thumbing rides across Nebraska,” he said. “I’ll follow you up to Gering and then run you back in our car.”
I felt guilty about accepting Don’s help, but I could see that he really wanted the excursion, so we agreed to leave after breakfast.
We reached Gering by early afternoon. I parked Nick’s pickup in the shade of a pine grove beside the museum and then walked over to Don’s car to tell him that I would quickly return—I just needed to tell someone at the museum that I had dropped off the truck.
“All right,” Don said. “But don’t be long. I can’t sit forever in the car.”
The museum in Gering is one of those local gems that you can find all over the West. The displays inside include an exquisite collection of Indian arrowheads, a Studebaker prairie schooner, and an Indian bull boat made of buffalo hide. My book turd completely got away from me and I forgot about Don out in the car, and then I wasted more time discussing the pioneer lore of western Nebraska with the museum director.
When I finally stepped toward the glass doors near the museum entrance, I could see Don outside, struggling up the walkway on his crutches. The path was treacherously strewn with large pinecones from the trees. Every time he threw a crutch forward, it landed on a pinecone and threw him sideways, and Don grimaced with each labored step, trying to right himself. Goddamnit, Rinker. You promised him not to be long. He drove all the way out here for you. Now you’ve let him down.
Don stopped to rest in a patch of sunlight along the walk. The survivor’s expression on his face was the one my father had worn when he pulled the covered wagon across the bridge to New Hope in 1958. The flesh tones and perspiration on his bald scalp and high cheekbones were also the same.
Suddenly I wasn’t in my own moment and my vision of Don had crossed over to a strange junction space. A Niagara of lightness filled my abdomen and chest—whether from a racing heart or just an extreme calmness inside, I couldn’t tell. Oh, I can’t believe this. I am way out here in western Nebraska, and my father has come.
The rest arrived spontaneously. I couldn’t prevent the words and the thoughts that welled up.
Dad. I’m sorry that I didn’t make it to you that weekend, but you died three days before I could get there. I have detested living all of these years knowing how much I neglected you after I left for college. But I had to get away from you. Can you accept that? I was planning on coming back, I really was. The other thing that I always wanted to tell you so you could feel better about us is that I always remembered what you told me that last time on the phone when you called me in Albany. You said, “Son, you’re not going to amount to much until you get an opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times.” Dad, I was fucking twenty-five years old, and a total crazyboy. It’s a miracle I got out of bed in the morning. But that article that you wanted me to write, which happened to be a pretty decent piece about prison reform, appeared in the Sunday Week in Review nine days after you died. There were many more after that, okay? I just wanted you to know because by your lights I certainly haven’t accomplished all that I could have, but I did do that. Late on Saturday night when I knew that the newspaper trucks had arrived I walked in the rain down to the bottom of State Street and bought the paper. I stood at the bottom of the hill reading my story. There’s a view of the Hudson from there and I could see the lights on the tugboats pushing oil tenders north and I’m not going to bullshit you and say that I cried but I did spend a very long time down there just regretting and regretting profoundly that you didn’t last long enough to see this, but there was nothing I could do but stand there and think about you. I thought about you, then, and a lot later. I just wanted you to know about the article. Dad, I know I let you down, but can’t you let me go? I was never worth it in the first place and I would know that you are fine now if you would just let me go. Dad, let me go.
You never know the real edge of pulling out of a trance like that, but I soon found myself outside on the museum walk, kicking away the pinecones so that Don would have an easier time. I was embarrassed about my rudeness, but he was more pained than annoyed.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t be long,” Don said, perspiring from the effort of steadying himself on his crutches. “We should get moving.”
Don and I had lunch in Gering and then drove back across the plains. Every time I watched him struggle on his crutches to get out of his car, or I noticed him using the hand controls for the accelerator and brakes while he drove, I manically seesawed up and down again—feeling my heart race one minute as I thought about my father, and then afterward experiencing an extreme, chemical calm. It was as if a lifetime of depressive cycles—the dark, gloomy lows, immediately followed by the sharp, ebullient highs—were concentrated inside me as we drove from Scottsbluff to North Platte.
We stopped in Paxton, Nebraska, along the Platte, to meet Nick and Sheila for dinner at a famous old western landmark, Ole’s Big Game Steakhouse and Lounge, and Nick and I enjoyed wandering through the rooms looking at the trophies from the founder’s safaris in Africa, and the photographs on the walls of Nebraska cattle roundups and jackrabbit-hunting parties.
After dinner, I flashed again out in the parking lot, when the evening light falling on the river caught Don’s determined jaw as he struggled back toward his car, reminding me again of my father. I let the moment pass and Don and I drove quietly east together as the darkness gathered on Route 80. I was exhausted and confused by my emotional reckoning with my father and when we got to North Platte I collapsed into my wagon bed with my clothes and boots on.
Over the next few days, I was occasionally moody about my father’s reprise, but I enjoyed the therapy of driving mules across the plains. Nick and I had always been able to d
iscuss anything, no matter how personal, and the long, scenic stretches along the trail together had reinforced that. Nick is a veteran of many self-help programs and nothing fazes him. He knows the jargon. When I described what happened with Don Exner in Gering, he tried to be helpful.
“Rink, you’re not any more fucked up than the next guy, okay? Nobody really recovers from anything. I’m fucked up. My friends are fucked up. Everyone in the family is totally fucked up. You just happened to see Daddy keel over in the fields too many times. You still feel guilty about it.”
“I wish they paid overtime for guilt trips,” I said. “I’d be rich by now.”
“Look, Daddy was our enabler,” Nick said. “That’s why I drive team and you are this frickin dreamer. Daddy enabled us for this trip. Why wouldn’t you think of him on the Oregon Trail?”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “There’s no cure for me.”
“There’s no fuckin cure for any of us, Rinker. Get into it, dickhead. I’m fucked up, you’re fucked up, okay? Fucked up is normal.”
Nick was right, I decided. Fucked up is the universal condition of man. We were crossing to Oregon behind a cranky team of mules—the very definition, the apotheosis, the pinnacle, of fucked up. I woke in the morning to harness mules, fucked up, obsessed all day on making more miles, fucked up, and collapsed onto my squalid wagon mattress every night, fucked up. I was having a great time, enjoying the best summer of my life, fucked up. Fucked up is good.