Pioneer Womans' Grave, Government Camp, Oregon
Shafts of sunlight filter through the trees and onto the old wagon trail at Barlow Pass. Pilot and I skip through the forest, light-footed and energized after yesterday’s 8 mile hike in the wilderness. It’s a short trip this morning on the old Oregon Trail, a mile downhill to visit a marker for an unidentified pioneer woman’s gravesite.
My interest in US human history comes and goes these days. For many years and many reasons I had difficulty relating to it, most often feeling too convoluted in my own emotional instability to focus and connect, or too sensitive to the abundant accounts of racism, sexism, violence, and genocide. I’d learned early on about the smallpox-infected blankets given to the natives by white settlers. When Thanksgiving rolled around each year and the school teachers broke out the crafts for decorations, I stuck with cornucopias, turkeys and autumn leaves, refusing to make anything that looked like those creepy pilgrims clad in clothing as black and white as my young thinking. In my twenties I studied Native American history and culture, perpetually teetering on the precipices of interest and overwhelm.
Years of my own pilgrimage toward personal growth have changed my perspective on history. Racism, sexism, genocide, and forcing one’s religions upon another will always be painful facts of my country’s history, but I recognize now that those who embarked upon the movement west were not all bloodthirsty conquerors intent on spreading the word of god. All of them were, however, humans, willing to face the high mortality rate of the Oregon Trail because the life available to them on the other side of this country or any other country was not enough. There must have been families, individuals, outsiders and misfits alike, who joined the caravans for the safety they provided, dreaming their own dreams about what a “new frontier” might offer their sanity and their souls.
The trail opens up to a campsite, and then a road, where it ends. We climb a short set of worn wooden steps to the gravesite, a large pile of rocks commemorated with a plaque on a boulder and a roadside interpretive sign. I’ve read that passersby will leave items on the grave: flowers, trinkets, toys. Today there is only a bundle of rope, a rough piece of orange quartz, and a small plastic dinosaur toy. I find myself wishing I had something to leave, but I have nothing in my pockets but a wallet and a doggy bag. What would I gift to this grave if I could give anything? Water? Salt? Penicillin?
I linger for a minute, placing my palms on the stones, and encouraging Pilot to climb them, which he does, if only to please me. Then we turn back toward the trail from whence we came.
My mind is curious, now, intrigued by this woman’s grave. Who was she and what was she looking for to take a such a perilous journey? It had to be something momentous. On my own journey, the goal has always been self-love. Freedom to embrace who I am without hurting myself or others. Freedom to be an unapologetically empowered and educated woman, self-loving and self-sufficient, creative, queer, and ambitious. Is that what she wanted?
Pilot invites me to follow him off trail, and we wade through wet ferns and sorrel to a clearing, where a shifting veil of clouds offers patchy glimpses of a bashful Mt. Hood. Two fallen trees have been moved to make a comfortable bench, and I sit and take in the view. Perhaps this same vista was seen by the pioneer woman in her final hours, before her quest towards what she’d hoped would be freedom took her life.
I do not have pioneer ancestors. My great grandparents on my paternal side are Lithuanian and Russian Jews, and on my maternal side, German, Dutch, and a mix of a few other Old World bloodlines. But though my lineage is not tied to the early white settlers of the Western United States, I am here because of women like the one in the grave. Here because my ancestors wanted a better life and journeyed across oceans and continents to find it. Here because I wanted a better life, not just for myself but to be a good person in this world. Here because history created the city of Portland in which I reside, 60 miles away.
My own journey is modern by comparison. I face few, if any, risk of disease, starvation, dehydration. I have come close to death, but only because of an imbalance in my own mental health, a threat which I overcame by understanding when I needed help from others and absolving myself of shame in asking for it. Even on my external journeys to unfamiliar places, even out in the woods and the wild, I am never far from help, never far from cell service or another human, a gas station, hospital, clean running water. Would I push myself into peril to achieve the freedom I have now? Would I have years ago in order to overcome the source of my suicidal ideation if I had believed it to be the only way?
The clouds pull generously apart, revealing the mountain, a grey queen in her glacier crown, framed by blue sky and boughs of pine. I breathe in and stand up, make my way back to the trail towards my car, my own covered wagon that has led me again and again to the promise lands that fill my soul. I know my own story, its achievements and discoveries more than I would have dreamt being worthy of less than a decade ago. I do not know the pioneer woman’s story, but in spite of her death I struggle to see it as a tragedy. The Oregon Trail must have changed her; the long and perilous pilgrimage opening her up; the very fact that she took such a risk a testament to her strength and will.
I want to know her, understand her, but she is but bones and cloth under a pile of rocks, one of many of the now unknown who died along the Oregon Trail. I want to give her story, one based upon my own dreams, my own challenges as a woman, as a human, as an individual. I write it, in my mind, as I hike up the hill. I write it, perhaps, one day in the future, for her, for myself, and for others like us who are brave enough to consider and strive for a better life.
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