By
Marian Calabro
Probably
the Hares' biggest family vacation when I was a kid was ten days to
two weeks to Colorado and Wyoming in June of 1970, I believe. I was
about eight years old. I have a lot of “flash-memories” of that
trip: My dad driving almost a thousand miles, all the way from north Louisiana into
Colorado, on the first day. Taking an enclosed ski lift up to the
top of a snow-covered mountain. Seeing Colorado's Royal Gorge.
Staying in rustic cabins at several different locations. Yellowstone
Park. My kid brother (four years younger) belting out Home
on the Range (I think)
incessantly, giving us someone to blame when we didn't see any
bears in Yellowstone. “Home, home on the range! Where the deer
and the cantaloupe play!” Old Faithful. Hippies departing from
the marked routes along the wooden walkways through the geyser field,
my father filming them as they leaned over bubbling pools and
commenting that if they fell in he was sending his 8mm home movie to Walter
Cronkite. Buffalo Bill Cody Museum. Jackson Hole. My father
fishing on one of those lakes. My father gritting his teeth in the
night and breaking a tooth. Playing in the snow along the side of
the highway … in June! And I'm sure I could come up with more,
even though I also remember being fussed at because – laying on the
back seat of the green Oldsmobile with the white top as I was,
reading and rereading the stack of comic books I'd brought along –
I was missing everything!
But
among those disjointed memories is a clear recollection of first
hearing about the Donner Party. I have no memory of why or where
exactly, because we were nowhere near where those horrific events
transpired. I have a clear
memory of laying in bed in one of those rustic cabins during that
trip, being scared spitless. Stranded in the snow! Cannibalism!
The stuff of which an eight-year-old's nightmares are made!
Of
course, the Donner Party is one of those cultural touchstones that
everybody has heard of, that has given birth to a myriad of macabre
jokes. It's a subject of endless fascination – how civilized
beings can be reduced by desperate circumstance to breaking “the
final taboo.” But I have known nothing more than the basic fact of
a wagon train snowbound in the mountains through a grueling winter,
slowly starving to death, until now.
A
couple of weeks ago, our local parish public library (remember, this
is Louisiana, so a parish is a civil unit, basically what all you
other states call a “county”) had its annual book fair, selling
off both discards from the library's own holdings and donated books
for next to nothing to help finance buying new books. My wife and I
try to hit it whenever we have the chance. This year my haul
included (in addition to an almost complete and pristine set of Ian
Fleming's James Bond
novels in paperback – fifty cents apiece – each of the two that I
was missing cost me more than all those I walked away with combined
when I compulsively picked them up later, one in a bookstore, the
other off Abebooks.com) a slim volume, ostensibly a discard from the
youngsters' section of the library, Marian Calabro's The
Perilous Journey of the Donner Party.
At
about 180 pages, it's a quick read – I flew through it in about
three hours. Partly it's the compelling narrative compounded with
the horrific subject matter. Calabro bases her account mainly on the
observations of Virginia Reed, the thirteen-year-old daughter of one
of the leaders of the ill-fated group, but succeeds in bringing many
of the other characters in the drama to life even as the reader knows
that many of them will be snuffed out, one by one, mostly by
starvation and exposure, in a few cases by more direct means. She
analyses very well the varying emotional costs the experiences had on
the survivors – somewhere around half of the number who had begun
the journey early in 1846. And she augments the narrative with a
wealth of photographs of individuals, the landscape, their (or
similar) tools and transportation, several helpful maps, charts of
the members of the various groups who made up the “Donner Party”
(named for one of the other men, who was ultimately elected leader
but who did not survive), a chronology, and a list of the victims
along with the date and circumstance of their demise (whenever that
can be determined).
Going
into the book with nothing more, as I said, than the most basic
knowledge of the event, I can say I've learned a lot. Among many
other things, I had no idea where the events actually took place, and
how close – on a map at least – they had actually come to their
destination when winter slammed shut their way forward and locked
them down, many of them to die. As I said above, they were nowhere
near where I was during that 1970 trip in the Rocky Mountains but
much further west, just west of modern Reno, Nevada, within their
destination territory of California, just shy of the eastern ridge of
the Sierra Nevada.
Its
late, I'm headed to bed … but 42 years later I admit that after
this gripping read I dread the darkness just a little. I find myself
shuddering a little when I think about being placed in a similarly
desperate situation.
Thanks for reading. Good night.
