Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]> Ah! You live at the end of the Oregon Trail. One of the oddest experiences of my life took place at the end of the Oregon Trail. Some years ago I took 3 of my children and traveled the Oregon trail. We had a car, but we tried hard to travel about as slowly as we could afford, and we never slept anywhere but on the ground (often in a tent) for the entire month. We started out in Independence, Missouri and ended up in Oregon City. There are several routes called the Oregon Trail; we took the one that finishes by going down the Columbia River. We spent a month doing this. We read history books every day; we visited the tombstones of people who had died traveling the trail, we ate food, as much as we could, that was like what people ate in those days. We took thousands of pictures. We kept journals. We spent an entire day at each one of the major landmarks. It was wonderful. The day we arrived there was a giant festival going on called "The End of the Trail". There were many thousands of people. There was music and dancing. We went in; it seemed perfect, because we had just finished traveling the trail and we thought this would be a fitting end to our journey. It was a nightmare. It almost ruined our trip, but we had the good sense to get out quickly. Nobody at the festival actually cared about the trail; they had collectively lost their roots and were just trading on the geographic identity of the place. All of the people who were dancing and partying at "The End of the Trail Festival" had in fact forgotten the trail, forgotten why they lived in Oregon, forgotten the forces that made their festival possible. I think that this month-long trip traveling the Oregon Trail with my children is just about the best thing I have ever done. I know I will never have time to do it again. They are older now and interested in other things. And seeing those thousands of people at the end of the trail, who didn't seem to care about it at all, was an amazing re-entry into modern life.