Best The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey Quotes by Rinker Buck

"The expansiveness of the landscape was hypnotic and physically exhilarating."

"The dreamscape chain of natural landmarks and river views that the pioneers saw is all still there, virtually intact."

"Seeing the elephant was the popular symbol of the Great Adventure."

"The pioneers and their new Indian partners amply displayed the American penchant for technological prowess."

"The Oregon Trail had clarified our destiny and national character."

"To escape in fact, I had to escape first into books."

"I felt an irresistible urge to forsake my life back east for a rapturous journey across the plains."

"Mules endure heat much better than horses and can travel long distances without water."

"America’s 'westering' urge after 1843 was a mobile banking network. Cash for mules, cash for mules."

"I had become that familiar subspecies of the North American male, the divorced boozehound with a bad driving record and emerging symptoms of low self-esteem."

"I knew that I had to escape again—this time in a big way."

"To cross the Oregon Trail, my job would be to suppress as much of myself as possible, to manage the trip by never appearing to be a manager."

"I had never felt departure as strongly as this, as if I were leaving one form of existence for another."

"The reenactors, the self-appointed protectors of our past, hate this. They don’t want to run their shiny Schuttler or Studebaker wagons on asphalt, down past the Dairy Queen or the Sinclair convenience store."

"The reasons the trail has changed are the story of my country."

"We were jumping off. Uncertainty was my life now and I had to learn to improvise day to day."

"I am emotionally connected to my past as a covered wagon traveler—a time when my father was so strapping and young, fun-loving and emotive, a man so wonderful to love."

"The sight of our wagon rig finished off with the SEE AMERICA SLOWLY sign possessed me with jumping-off fever."

"The landscape reaching up to me was a diorama of the wagon routes that had defined the history of the West."

"Why are some cameos from our past always there, while other, important ones are repressed and require a prompt to revive them?"

"Our manner of living is far preferable to any in the States. I never was so contented and happy before."

"We had reached Jamesport on a Monday and launched today, the following Saturday. We had spent only five days jumping off."

"In the morn as soon as the day breaks the first that we hear is the word—arise, arise."

"It's impressive how, even then, America was so superlatively organized for producing waste."

"Nobody knows and we would have to figure everything out ourselves."

"The art of horsemanship has been lost. We've got to reinvent that ourselves."

"It would have been a mistake, big-time, to come out here without that dog."

"Bridges are notorious runaway zones for teams."

"The idea that I could be doing quite a lot by not doing anything at all, just by not quitting, was quite beyond me at the time."

"With a length of rope, he said, he was going to lash the pole of the wagon to his shoulders and pull the rig across the bridge by hand."

"The constant, rolling thunder nearby shook the ground, passing up through the wheels and gently rocking the wagon."

"A horse will never go far. Once they’re past what they’re afraid of, they stop."

"We are losing more and more trail every year, and you lose the trail experience as you lose the authentic visual environment that it once had."

"A single covered wagon carrying five or six pioneers, drawn by thirsty oxen or mules, required up to seventy gallons of water a day."

"Every time we drove into town my brothers and I were jumping into and out of the car like circus clowns."

"Oh, God. I am never going to be able to do this alone. God, I can’t do this alone."

"It was refreshing to feel so abandoned, wrapped in solitude."

"Perhaps the best account of the dangers of traveling in stormy weather with mules was written by Niles Searls, a 49er from Albany, New York."

"The image of a disconsolate but determined husband pushing a heavy wheelbarrow across the trail certainly implied true love."

"In the short space of ten minutes no less than three inches of hail and rain fell."

"Government didn’t do this; he did it, with his own money."

"Screw you, crazygirl mule. I am going for more miles this afternoon, a lot more miles."

"He’ll pull in tonight when you’re asleep and be delighted to see a wagon parked in his yard."

"The endurance required should have been too much for us, but across these Nebraska plains endurance just begat more endurance."

"Fucked up is the universal condition of man."

"But I had to get away from you. Can you accept that?"

"Fathers do not let go, and memories of them condense with age."

"The demographic impact of cholera alone among the [tribes] was considerable."

"In the cemetery quiet of these places, all the clangor and hell of actual history has been sanitized away."

"The pioneers could instantly sense that they had entered a vastly changed landscape—the real West."

"After we left Laramie we came to the Black Hills, the worst of all traveling."

"But the trail experience reinforced a natural American bent toward waste, followed by avid recycling."

"The trail, essentially, had vanished."
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"The trail was my inebriate against depression, my hedge against boredom with life."

"The hills rang with purpose each time Nick brought the wagon up."

"Escaping the wagon seat for long stretches of the day and scouting up through the ponderosa pines was immensely satisfying."

"I had the emotional intelligence then of a lawn mower."

"Why don't you just think of these talks with your father as ordinary conversations?"

"We emerged from the Black Hills a few miles below Glendo, finding an improved dirt road marked on the maps that led us to a state highway."

"We were making steady progress along the North Platte."

"The mule that I could tentatively identify as Beck stared back toward me with a sublime look of utter satisfaction."

"I didn’t care what happened next on the Child’s Route."

"The Oregon Trail was the best anger-management therapy I’d had in years."

"The jurors were selected from the men of the company and stood in a semicircle around the accused."

"It seems that there are some demon spirits near us & the reflection is not very pleasing."

"For the rest of this morning, I am ‘Brother Rinker’ and you are ‘Brother Nicholas.’"

"The brains of American tourists will accept practically anything as truth because there is nothing else up there to compete with new information."

"I fall in love with the Mormons every time. They are divine exhibitors."

"Americans on summer vacation, especially the RVers, are idiots, and haven’t read anything in years."

"Just say something, anything, preferably in bland, thirty-six-point type, and it will stick."

"The importance of marking forks in the trail has been completely lost."

"Following a giant landmark fifteen miles away was too vague."

"In the vast West, the sensation of being lost usually arrives long after you are lost."

"The mules were jaunty after two days of pasture rest and pounded their front hooves into the pink sand of the ruts."

"My theory about religion is that we should believe in every one of them."

"Screw doctrine—it’s all made up anyway, and too divisive."

"Fear was just a deceptive veil obscuring the unknown."

"There were a hundred wagons here every day when the pioneers were coming through."

"This was our last reliable fix before South Pass."

"We had saved half a day by crossing Rocky Ridge."

"But nobody knows. Nobody had taken a wagon over those rocks in a century."

"There is no definable, marked Seminoe road anymore."

"The wagon box gently bumped over the sandy ruts and the oak bows creaked in the wind."

"The Twin Mounds, marking the entrance to South Pass."

"In two months we had traveled almost a thousand miles, confirming my estimates from the winter before."

"I was exhausted and filthy after two days without a shower."

"In the thin air of the Rockies, I had lost all sense of time."

"The preservationists and BLM managers responsible for trail upkeep seem to have thought of everything, except the possibility of a real covered wagon coming through."

"The right wheel of the Trail Pup had shattered, and several of the spokes were scattered on the trail like fallen juggling pins."

"The starkness of that moment took my breath away, and my mind seemed completely empty of solutions."

"I have never been so happy to see green again."

"Persistence is a drug that delivers strength, but it also dulls our sense of reality."

"I don’t ever want to go back home," Nick said. "I want to live out here in the wagon for the rest of my life."

"Deserts are a planet of sameness offering only false turns and dashed hopes."

"We are all a lot more capable of conquering obstacles and fears than we think."

"I don’t even remember that person. I don’t have time for reading."

"Rinker, you may be the first wagon traveler in a century to cross the trail, but you are also that century’s most gullible dunce."

"This Trail Pup is like a bad girlfriend. She never goes away."

"Why don’t you go somewhere and take a shower!"

"Ah, shit, Jake. Shit, shit, shit. You’re my boy."