Modern-Day Pioneers

As we drove across the country, I was fascinated over and over by the towns that seemingly appeared out of nowhere.  Through Wyoming and Utah, we would drive across hundreds of miles of uninhabitable land, and then *poof!* a town would spring up in the middle of all of it.  I would constantly ask myself, "How did these people come to live here?"  "What made them stay?"  "Why did they decide to travel all the way out here?"

Unlike other countries, where your family's roots have been firmly planted in an area for centuries, the United States is different.  No one was in this part of the world 400 years ago.  People had to make the conscious choice to leave everything they had known, to move to another part of the globe that was untested and untried.

I tried to explain this over and over to my students.  I even asked them to write a journal entry once about what would make them move someplace completely foreign and new.  Most of them responded about wars, or some kind of natural disaster.

It was really interesting--an invaluable insight into the mindsets of our students--that none of them said "to make a better life" for themselves.  It is such a historical notion to create a better life for your future generations than you have presently.  I don't know where I heard it recently, but there is some statistic out there that says that most kids don't think their children will have better lives than they did--something like it is the first time in American history that it is like that (I'll have to try to find that statistic somewhere, instead of butchering it like I just did).

We went through the westward museum, and around the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and I found their journey fascinating.  Read the article here for more information about the Mormon pioneers.  These people were so inwardly motivated to make a better life that they dropped everything and traveled 1,500 miles across the wintery desert/plateau--to a destination that they didn't even know for sure existed.  I mean, who does that??  I don't think anyone these days would consider making a journey like that.

Our journey was completely non-life-threatening.  We had the safety of our car.  Our possessions were guaranteed to arrive complete and intact--and on a date of our choosing, no less.  We had hotels and family to stay in and with along the way.  We had restaurants to be able to eat plenty of food, and gas stations to help our "oxen" (aka Jeep) continue its journey.  We had paved roads and highways to journey on.  We traveled through a desert (107 degrees), but maintained our frosty 67 degree temperature inside our vehicle.  We had a GPS map to guide us, and the Internet to entertain us.  We met no unfriendly natives, and we arrived a couple of days earlier than anticipated.

How times have changed!

But in other ways, times have not changed so much.  Nick and I still left the safety of everything we have known.  Best friends, our beautiful house, a secure job (for me), and our families.  We traveled across a vast country with all of our possessions.  We did not have a home when we arrived at our destination.  We have to make a new life for ourselves away from everything that is familiar and safe.  There are many times when I want to turn around and go back.  Go back to the familiarity of Ohio, the safeness of it all.  I know that the historical pioneers must have felt the same way.

But the other part of me is longing for the adventure, and a release from the routine that is so easy to become trapped in--something I am sure that the pioneers experienced, as well.

I am both terrified and exhilarated.

Until the next...