The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

“Okay, so I was lyin. Big fuckin deal. I knew I could thread us through that needle and get us down here alive. Besides, if I was wrong?”

  “What?”

  “We’d be dead. We wouldn’t give a shit.”

  • • •

  After the gorges, the trail rose and fell across two sets of foothills, but there were wide, grassy meadows in between and I knew that we had reached the bottomlands of the Bear River. Overcome by my exertions all day in the thin air, I stumbled several times carrying water for the team, but I steadied myself by clinging to Jake’s bridle and then asking him to raise his head to hold me up. We were still hours away from Cokeville and I had to leave the wagon a few times to track us on foot through the cattle ranches, once more experiencing the strange effects of hypoxia. As I scouted ahead through the gulches, I looked back at Nick on the wagon seat. He seemed miniaturized and far away, and I was afraid that he wouldn’t be there the next time I looked. My arms seemed grotesquely long and bent, as if I were looking at myself in a fun house mirror.

  But these moments passed quickly and the oxygen deprivation helped too. With even the slightest exertion on foot, I felt light-headed and weak, disconnected from the ground underfoot and even from my arms and legs. Nothing worried me and my brain wouldn’t engage with my old obsession for detail and following maps. At sunset, we finally found the BLM dirt road that followed the final stretch of the Sublette Cutoff ruts.

  It was dark when we reached the asphalt road along Spring Creek, and the valley leading to Cokeville was grassy and cool. The evening inversion of colder air replenished our oxygen supply, and I felt better. The mule shoes clopping on tar soothingly mixed in the air with the splashing of the creek as it raced through the oxbows below the road. Water sprinklers hissed back and forth on the lawns of the horse farms, catching the light from the barns as thin, silvery fans.

  Cokeville was quiet, except for the occasional rumble of a diesel semi or a freight train. The Union Pacific line running up from southern Wyoming rejoined our route on the west banks of the Bear River and, on the east banks, the shortcut between the big interstates of Wyoming and Idaho, Highway 30/89, had been paved right over the main ruts. After 350 miles of the desolate, original ruts, we had returned to the sandwiched transportation corridor of the modern trail.

  Ahead of us, the only thing I could see was a familiar lit sign, the purple and orange logo of a Flying J truck stop. It was the only place we could camp and we pulled in, fenced the mules inside a dry, brown-grass field behind the truck parking lot, and then went inside to feast on hot dogs and fried chicken.

  Exhausted, I climbed over the end boards of the wagon, flopped onto my mattress, and untied my bootlaces lying down. Behind me I could hear the humming of the truck stop and, now, instead of rivers flowing, I listened to the low rattling of air conditioners cooling the sleeper berths in the parked trucks. Through the wagon cover I could make out the high purple-black rim of Dempsey Ridge and the profound blackness of Rock Creek gorge. It still didn’t seem possible that we’d come down through there. My stumblebum performance while watering the mules, and my bizarre longing for Nick when I hiked away from the wagon, seemed like mental lapses that had happened to someone else. That is the nocturnal Oregon Trail, just before welcome sleep. Time and distance seem implausibly stretched, and the day just experienced seems a long time ago.

  O, Wyoming. I have always given my all to you, but you have paid back even more. But this time, Wyoming, you took everything I had.

  A Union Pacific whistle shrieked at the Cokeville crossing and I listened as the clacking of the iron wheels faded north behind me. The whistle sounded at a few more road crossings, a receding, meditative wail that evoked space, the passages between mountains and rivers, the enormous energy and drive unleashed by the trail. Persistence is a drug that delivers strength, but it also dulls our sense of reality. My last thought before falling asleep was that we are all a lot more capable of conquering obstacles and fears than we think.

  28

  IDAHO BECAME OUR DAYS OF heaven stretch of the trail. The balsam vastness of the Bear River valley and then the Martian emptiness of the Snake River Gorge entranced us as the breezy afternoons of August passed by. There was nothing left to prove after five hundred miles of original ruts, and Nick and I happily rode along the two-lane highways and dusty back roads that crossed the surreal corridor of beauty that the pioneers saw. The old covered wagon stops—Register Rock, Three Island Crossing, Bruneau Dunes—were now comfortable state parks with barbecue pits, water hydrants, and horse corrals that conveniently appeared ahead in the early evening when we needed to camp. Oregon was just a month’s ride away and now we wanted to live spontaneously and enjoy what the modern trail had come to be. At Soda Springs, we camped behind the ninth hole of the Oregon Trail Country Club. At Grand View, we hosed down the mules inside the car wash at Gus’s Gas. In Lava Hot Springs, we rolled the wagon into the parking lot of Riverwalk Thai and I bought us a take-out lunch of drunken noodles and beef satay.

  We could see right away how Idaho’s spectacular geology had bedeviled the pioneers. At the end of the last ice age, fifteen thousand years ago, much of Utah and southern Idaho had been a vast inland body of water, Bonneville Lake. But the lake had suddenly breached above American Falls and sent millions of cubic feet of water crashing over the volcanic landscape at seventy miles an hour, carving the dramatic basalt gorges along the Snake River. The breakage from the gorges was carried away by the racing water like shattered china and distributed as thick debris fields of lava rock that extended for miles along the riverbanks. The pioneers, dependent on the river both for navigation and for water, were trapped inside this volcanic skillet, just as they had been trapped by the cholera swamps along the Platte. Following the rock fields along the Snake exhausted the pioneers and their draft animals, and after just a few miles mule shoes and iron wheel rims were reduced to slivers. The river itself was close, but maddeningly inaccessible—the only route to the water was straight down perpendicular cliffs.

  The pioneers struggled during the hot weeks of August over the lava-rock fields and steep mountain buttes along the gorges of the Snake River in Idaho.

  In peak migration years like 1852, when sixty thousand pioneers crossed to California and Oregon, the calamities of overland travel were multiplied by the sheer number of wagons occupying the same narrow space along the river. By August the animal boneyards along the Snake exceeded what the pioneers had already seen on the alkali flats of Wyoming. Esther Bell Hanna was a Pennsylvanian who crossed that year, and her narrative is considered important because she typified the thousands of ardent Christians who migrated in wagon trains strictly segregated by denomination, motivated more by religious zeal than financial necessity. At the age of eighteen Esther married a Presbyterian minister and left for the frontier the same day, joining a wagon train group planning a “Presbyterian Colony” that would populate the Pacific Northwest before rival Baptists and Methodists could establish too strong a foothold. (The more pious, the more schismatic, and the Hannas left the Presbyterian wagon train when the other families refused to stop their wagons all day to observe the Sabbath.) But there was no dispensation for the faithful from conditions on the trail. In her narrative Canvas Caravans, Hanna described the combined carrion field and invalid ward that stretched for three hundred miles after the wagon trains left the Bear and climbed for the Snake.

  I do not think I ever shall forget the sight of so many dead animals seen along the trail. It is like something out of Dante’s Inferno—this barren waste of lava peopled with the skeletons of animals. . . . Lost two more oxen today out of our train, one drowned in the river, another died from fatigue. A camp near us at noon had 12 sick in it, all the same disease, some of them very low. . . . O for more patience to endure it all.

  Every draft animal or head of beef that dropped represented a privation for the owner, either in terms of additional possessions that had to be jettisoned from the wagons, or lowered exp
ectations of establishing a herd in the Northwest. In Hard Road West, historian and geologist Keith Heyer Meldahl describes how, by the time the travelers reached Idaho, “the accretion of hardships inevitably wore down spirits and civility.” Meldahl quotes one particularly colorful 49er, Illinois pioneer Israel S. P. Lord, whose trail account was patched together from articles he sent back to Illinois for the Western Christian newspaper. Lord was one of the first pioneers to travel the Hudspeth Cutoff, a popular shortcut to the California Trail blazed in 1849 between Soda Springs and City of Rocks in southern Idaho. Lord described his fellow travelers as “cross, peevish, sullen, boisterous, giddy, profane, dirty, vulgar, ragged, mustachioed, bewhiskered, idle, petulant, quarrelsome, unfaithful, disobedient, refractory, careless, contrary, stubborn, hungry and without the fear of God and hardly of man before their eyes.”

  The Hudspeth Cutoff that we followed ourselves before picking up the main route along the Snake had been considerably softened over time, mostly by the extensive irrigation projects built during the homesteading years, and then by the paving of roads after World War I. Occasionally, cattle fences forced us up onto the plateau near the river and we spent long afternoons easing our wheels over fields of pumpkin-shaped lava rock. At the higher elevations along the Portneuf Range, the mules struggled through the passes and I was forced to empty our water barrels and walk behind the wagon to lighten our load. But by the evening the trail always seemed to deliver us to the hospitality of a Mormon ranch or a riverside park with spacious views toward the mountains. We were inured to the hard work and long days by now, and our passage along the Snake felt like a vacation.

  The pleasant night sounds of our wagon camps in Idaho—mules eating, water spraying through irrigation sprinklers in the fields, our white-top creaking in the wind—made me feel dreamy, contemplative, more willing to accept my motivations for making this trip. I was reminded of the same kind of overnight stops that I had made as a boy with my father. In the orange embers of our charcoal grill I could see the flames of my father’s fires at Valley Forge or along the Delaware Canal. That was a half century ago, thousands of miles away, but the joyful vagabonding I had shared with him that summer felt here, now, joined, shared across elastic time. Maybe the Mormons are right about the living actively communicating with the dead and I was united forever with my father on an eternal covered wagon trip. I didn’t understand now why I had spent the last few years worrying about turning out like him. Night after night in camp, while the sun fell as an orange disc against the distant Sawtooths, I was filled with acceptance, a soothing accommodation with aging and the passage of time. I was camping beside my covered wagon in Idaho, once more sealed with my father, enjoying the sunset in Pennsylvania along the Snake.

  • • •

  In Idaho, our tempo also changed. We had visitors, and we quickly acquired modern trappings of the “community vehicle” that Daniel Boorstin had described. I was grateful all summer about my decision not to include family members and friends on our ride, mostly because I quickly realized that very few of them could endure the regimen of filth and drudgery that Nick and I by now embraced, and I was too obsessed with reaching Oregon to want anyone along who might slow us down. But I made one exception, knowing that by central Idaho I would feel more relaxed and willing to make compromises, curbing my mile-Nazi tendencies now that Oregon was almost in sight.

  Two of my closest friends, George and Cindy Rousseau, a flying couple from the eastern shore of Maryland, had begged to come along on the wagon ride as soon as they heard about my plans. I temporized at first, but still I considered them excellent candidates for covered wagon travel. George is a mechanical ace and nonstop tinkerer, and he could take a lot of the burden of wagon repairs off Nick. Cindy, a trim, brown-faced brainiac out of the Jewish suburbs of Baltimore, has fabulous life skills. She harvests wild mushrooms and berries, hunts rabbits with hawks, and her favorite hobby is collecting and restoring fucked-up friends. In the woods, her map reading and scrappy, sarcastic banter are top-notch.

  When we talked on the phone one night, about a month before they were going to come, however, Cindy told me that George couldn’t get vacation time in August. She had decided to bring along a friend of ours, her current project, Donna Moran, who was in the middle of a divorce and, Cindy said, could use the “covered wagon cure.” We agreed that they would fly to Salt Lake in mid-August, find a rental car, and track us down on the trail.

  We were up early to hitch the wagon the day Cindy and Donna were scheduled to arrive and I was happy about the timing. We would be spending most of the day climbing up and down the foothills west of Lava Hot Springs, on a section of original trail called Old Oregon Trail Road, and so our guests’ first impressions would be formed by the kind of authentic surroundings we’d seen all summer. But as I pushed the mules through the canyons behind town to reach the trail, Nick’s Forward Sensing Olfactory Radar picked up a strong signal below. He pointed two fingers south, toward the Sunnyside Sinclair and Deli along the highway, where the rooftop fan was discharging a big lardy cloud of cooking exhaust.

  “They’re cookin fried chicken down there,” he said. “It’s real good fried chicken too. I can tell.”

  I was disgusted because I wanted Cindy and Donna to see us first on real trail, but Nick insisted that he needed a “healthy breakfast.”

  So, we took the Fried Chicken Cutoff for Nick. As we clattered down the hill and crunched across the gravel parking lot of the Sinclair, we saw Cindy and Donna leaning against the hood of their rental car—they had seen our white-top from the highway. They had left Salt Lake very early and they both looked eager for trail. Cindy, dressed in camouflage cargo shorts and a rimmed sun hat, had water bottles dangling from her belt loops, and she was testing a new solar charger that she had bought for the trip, so she could charge her smartphone and track our progress across the trail via GPS. Donna, the ultimate tall, skinny blonde, was applying suntan oil to her long, thin legs. Stereoscopic images of the mules reflected in the lenses of their sunglasses as we approached.

  Cindy started flashing away with her smartphone camera.

  “Oh, look at you guys!” she said. “This is so cool! I’m posting these pictures, right away. No one believes that I’m really going on a covered wagon trip.”

  Having visitors along was fun right away. Nick and I couldn’t believe how quickly Cindy and Donna were able to identify each mule, just from the descriptions I’d sent in my occasional emails. Olive Oyl, ecstatic to have girlfriends around, was dancing on her hind legs and begging for scratches. Nick loved the company and was wonderfully hospitable. The arrival of two upmarket women from the east coast naturally drew out his Wagon Professor Buck. He patiently gave them mule-driving lessons, explained every piece of harness, and regaled them all day with his fishing and sleigh-driving yarns.

  Cindy was aware of my worrywart reservations about having company and determined to fulfill one vow she had made about the trip.

  “Okay, what’s our goal for the day?” she said. “I promised you, Rinker. We are not slowing your ass down.”

  “I’d like to make the rodeo corrals at McCammon by late afternoon,” I said. “Most of it is original trail along the Portneuf River, and then we follow that to the Snake.”

  “Okay. I’ll GPS it,” Cindy said.

  “Fine, Cindy, but we have maps. That solar charger is going to conk out within an hour and then you won’t have GPS. Chill. We have maps.”

  “Luddite. Just because we’re on a covered wagon trip doesn’t mean we can’t use GPS. I really don’t want to put up with your technophobia all week.”

  “Cindy, I’m the one who just came fifteen hundred miles with this rig, but now I need your GPS?”

  “Dickhead.”

  “Cindy, you just got here, and you’re already calling me ‘dickhead.’ That’s probably a record.”

  “Oh, look, I’ve got it,” she said, waving her index finger to move the GPS map forward on her phone. “Old
Oregon Trail Road to East Sublette Road, and then we turn north for the river. This is going to be fun!”

  We decided to divide into teams. Nick would take Donna in the wagon for a long mule-calling lesson in the morning while Cindy and I scouted ahead in the rental car. Then Cindy and I would run the team the rest of the way up the Portneuf in the afternoon while Nick and Donna took the rental car and shopped for dinner.

  It was a delightful day, not simply because I enjoyed the reunion with an old friend and Nick and I needed time away from each other. Cindy had always been skeptical about my claims about the West and thought that I exaggerated the Riders of the Purple Sage splendor of my surroundings, but that was just the kind of day we had. In the afternoon, as Cindy and I climbed the old wagon road toward McCammon, low cottony cumulus clouds raked the peaks and a cowboy herding steers on a gorgeous dapple-gray horse galloped over, asked about our trip, and gave us directions for a shortcut around the interstate into McCammon. Children on bikes circled the wagon as we pulled into the outskirts of town and I borrowed a barbecue grill from a couple sitting on their porch, stowing it in the back of the provision cart.

  When we reached the rodeo corrals, Cindy and Donna were great about falling into the routines of camp. They helped us unharness the team and cooed at the mules and babied them during washes, giving them extra-long shampoos. Olive Oyl had completely transferred her loyalty to the girls and wouldn’t leave their side. It was great, introducing some femininity to our wagon trip. But we nearly had a trail mutiny when we started unloading the wagon.

  Back in Annapolis, Donna is a marathon entertainer and chef, and the kitchen in her McMansion sparkles like the glass counters at an Apple Store. Cindy had warned me about that—Donna needed a covered wagon trip, she said, to cure her neat freak—but I had forgotten what she said. When I handed out the plastic dairy cases that we kept our kitchen gear in, Donna looked at our pots and pans and dishes and stood straight up with one hand on her hip and the other pinching her nose.