“It is nearly impossible to surprise ourselves,” the poet Jim Harrison wrote, but on the twelfth day of their exodus Sadie, Fred, Lucile and the others would do so repeatedly, and with such dire consequences, that it made the previous day’s foibles pale in comparison. As if to compensate for … More XV: The days are stacked against us
Someday I’d like to see a scientific study conducted for possible correlations between obnoxious behavior and nominal (in some cases, theoretical) counts of brain cells. Surely there’s a link there somewhere, a kink in the DNA, a devolution toward single-cell organisms and primordial muck that miraculously not only failed to die off … More XVI: Among the lower orders
They rose in the gloaming, at first a faint whine barely audible above the snickering horses, the clatter of pans and the quiet conversations around a crackling fire, followed by an ominous mounting drone that spoke of numbers beyond counting or imagining, numbers sufficient to eclipse the stars. They massed in the gathering … More XVII. Fort Scott
October 17, 1912, campfires smoldering to ashes with a few red coals glowing in the dark, a low undercurrent of cricketsong rising and falling and rising again in a lullaby as old as time and something tugging at Sadie’s hair. Her eyes shot open taking in the canvas rigging and beyond the opening … More XVIII. Lanterns along the creek
In the night the lights of a smelter glowed like a fallen comet throbbing and pulsing beyond the crenated ranks of silhouetted trees. Looking from the wagon Sadie saw inky shadows stretching from the woods and their own tripartite assembly, the pallid bowed canvases so graceful above their blocky undercarriages, the horses with … More XIX. Misery
Up at dawn and gone. The night had passed blessedly uneventful minus ruffians, raccoons, foundering horses or caterwauling whistles leaving them refreshed and encouraged what with Arkansas now within their reach. Crossing a border however intangible never fails to create a sense of unequivocal progress as anyone who’s traversed eastern Colorado, the Texas … More XX. Whereupon we part ways
Odd, the town. Mansfield, final abode of Laura Ingalls Wilder who followed much of Sadie’s route through eastern Kansas including a potential resting spot at a spring not far from our house. It seemed unusually contemporary with a fondness toward steel siding construction and few hints of antiquity, mostly in the downtown area … More XXI. Interlude
We left Mansfield with the sun lifting from the hazy east as did Sadie from the outskirts of Joplin though our modes of transport were so very different, and the roads, too, ours smooth and relatively level to facilitate speed and hers a latticework of straight lines and ninety-degree bends and the Center … More XXII. Fish crows and the opening of the South
All night their sleep was punctuated by the shrill clatter of rails and the foghorn bellowing of trains blasting through Pierce City’s innards, the reverberant echoes rebounding off the rocky ridge at their backs so that the sounds fully and inescapably enveloped them before slowly trailing away down the Clear Creek Valley. By … More XXIII. Are we there yet
