After 8 months of traveling across the country, the Hekawie made it to the Pacific!!
Getting to the state of Oregon brought a lot of memories of my childhood - ironically I've never been to this state before but it came up twice in my adolescence.
If you are a late Gen Xer or old millennial, you’ll remember the “educational” computer game
that took the public schools by storm – The Oregon Trail. I remember begging my parents to buy it for our home computer, since I never got enough time to play it at school, I even remember the tune it played. The educational element may have been lost on some, but while your digital covered wagon traverses the trail to the state of Oregon, you learn a lot about how devastating a trail it truly was for early pioneers. When you are eight years old, you don’t completely grasp the epic journey the Oregon Trail truly was back then. For us, however, 10 months of navigating across the country to finally end up on the Pacific coast in Oregon, I am impressed by the early pioneers’ fortitude. We visited the Oregon Trail museum in Baker City which has various exhibits with models of pioneers, horses, oxen, and their meager possessions strapped to carts bouncing across open country towards salvation.
There was an exhibit highlighting all the items pioneers wanted to bring with them – clothes, food, books, even stoves. Each item was tagged with a weight and dimensions, you were asked to try to fit all these items into the cart, but not overload it. If you couldn’t fit it, it didn’t come with you – I found this somewhat reminiscent of the struggles I had deciding what to bring in our RV and what to leave behind. Unlike the pioneers, we have a storage unit back in DC to store what we couldn’t bring with us, but we did have to relinquish some possessions since they wouldn’t fit in the RV or our storage unit. Remember, in the game, when members of your party died of diphtheria and it was a joke? Sadly, in the real world, children, adults, and the elderly were all susceptible to diseases on the trail and were devastating losses to these families, who had to bury them quickly and move on with the group. Thankfully we’ve only been sick on the road – Mike had the flu in Texas and both of us caught a bad stomach bug in Washington state. Traveling while sick is the worst, but when movement means survival, you keep plugging along. Outside the museum was a ring of carts similar to the ones used on the trail, this exhibit put a lot of things in perspective for me. All of the possessions of these various groups of people are packed into a small wagon and hauled over open country, sometimes discarded due to the terrain or weight limits. As a kid, if I lost items on the Oregon Trail computer game journey, I remember thinking, “No worries, they’ll just buy what they need when they reach their final destination.” Sadly, Bed Bath and Beyond wasn’t around back then to supply these early pioneers with household items, nor did they have the money to even buy what they needed much less wanted. This museum made me think about our own trek across the country and how we really couldn’t just turn around and go back “home,” our RV is our home. We have been living the nomadic lifestyle for 10 months now, and while it’s been surprising, fun, and amicable, it’s also been difficult, costly, and lonesome.
The second time I learned about the state of Oregon, was in my fourth grade Regions Fair. In researching the state, I decided to write about Lewis and Clark’s epic journey across the country to find passage west of the Mississippi. I even dressed up as Sacajawea for the fair (if I had a
digital copy of the picture of my costume, I would include it). At the tender age of 10, I don’t think I fully understood how impressive a voyage of discovery it truly was in the 1800s. They started out in Louisville, KY (which we visited on our own journey) onto the Pacific Ocean. We visited York park in Louisville – named for William Clark’s black slave York who traveled with the Corp of Discovery. It was a great start for us and them on their expedition.
Both Mike and I read (listened to the audio-book) Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose while driving through Oregon and Washington state, which details the trials and tribulations of The Corp of Discovery journey across the Louisiana Purchase to the Pacific Ocean led by Merriweather Lewis and William Clark. While reading, we realized that after such a long and trying journey to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark had to make sure all the maps, specimens, and notes they drew, collected, and took had to come back with them. Despite the difficulties of their various means of transportation, they were adamant about preserving logs, books, and specimens for the return journey. If they left these materials behind to make space for other supplies, their entire journey would be pointless without any evidence from their journey.
We are thinking about heading back East and we too have to bring back all the novel experiences, valuable lessons, and fresh attitudes we’ve unearthed on our journey. Even if we don’t live the rest of our lives as RV nomads, this trip has inspired us to keep traveling to new places and stay open to new experiences. Lewis and Clark were assigned by Jefferson to make their journey, but maybe fate assigned us to our journey in order for us to grow as individuals and partners. While Lewis and Clark made new friends like Sacajawea and various Native American tribes, we’ve made friends at campgrounds or on the road. Just as Lewis and Clark filled in the blanks in the vast country of the US, we have filled in details of the various states we knew little about. Our journey may only we written about on our blog, but it will hold a special place in our personal of our lives.
