Jan. 02, 2006 - 18:58 MST

COMPARISONS

There is a section in the Rocky Mountain News called "Speakout." I would guess they often are the best of the letters sent to the paper. Today's is by Harry Puncec of Lakewood, Colorado ( a Denver suburb ). In full then here it is :

THEN AND NOW, ST. LOUIS TO DENVER

"Three days after Christmas and it's time to pack up for our drive back to Denver from St. Louis. Inter state 70 beckons and cannot be ignored. So an event of historical destiny must be re-enacted -- migration westward with its manifest difficulties and triumphs relived."

"The 850 or so miles from St. Louis to Denver reminds me of life itself; first there is the fertile countryside of youth as you travel the rolling hills and lush fields of Missouri, then you encounter the long mind-numbing middle-ages stretch across Kansas and eastern Colorado, bringing you, at long last, to the happy view of the eons-old mountains of our fulfilment."

"Nah, that won't work too simple and doesn't take long enough. It's just the kind of thinking your mind engages in when you are deprived of any visual sensory input. Driving the empty miles provides the brain with far too much time to think, leading to fantasies not experienced since the days of magic mushrooms and LSD. My own hallucination took the form of comparing pioneers of the 1860s to the traveler of 2005."

"Traveling at 80 mph lets you cover within minutes the distance traveled by a wagon train in one day. They would walk -- and the trip from St. Louis to any destination in the west was a walking trip -- beside their wagon as it covered 15 to 20 miles on a really good day. The only sound they heard was the squeaking of wagon wheels, the soft murmur of other human voices muddled by the cathedral sky and windswept prairie grass, and the cry of circling birds waiting to feast on those who fell away. I, in turn was listening to Fat bottomed Girls by Queen on a CD turned up high to drown out the sound of wind buffeting the van."

"The last view of St. Charles, Mo., seen by the departing pioneers may have been their last contact with family, friends and the land of their life forever. Years later, should they survive the trip and should the mail find them, they might receive a letter telling of the death of a beloved parent, the fire that consumed the barn where they used to play, and the factory going up over in Springfield that was rumored to be hiring 100 young girls to operate the spinning jennies."

"My reflections on this were interrupted by the ringing of my cell phone -- the ringer plays the sound of a cho-choo train whistle blowing. It was our daughter back in St. Louis saying our grandson's favorite toy had turned up missing and asking if we had seen it."

"Back to dreamland, and waiting for me was the thought of death. If you ever walk the old pioneer trails leading west you encounter graves off to the side; most are unmarked and you can't even be sure that bones still lie beneath the stacked stones."

"Others may have a note affixed telling of a 3-day-old baby, a young mother taken in childbirth, or a father dying from gangrene after a fall. It wasn't just old buckles and ribbons or used containers littering the trails; sometimes it was the remains of those too frail or too unlucky to make it. The modern equivalent is the shattered remains of blown tires on the shoulders of the highway and the occasional wreath propped up along the road to mark the site of a fatal accident. At least those deaths were known to family and marked by services. The pioneers could only pause the train for a brief time while words were spoken from an old family Bible. Perhaps they wondered what would befall the far-too-inadequate grave when they left, but they had to turn away and try to make a couple more miles before night fell."

"We spent the night at the Comfort Inn in Hays, Kan., enjoyed a tasty breakfast the next morning, and rejoined the flow heading west. At the end of the road that afternoon stood home. The electric garage door opener operated to let us into our house where I found a full refrigerator and freezer, a VHS recorder that saved all the missed Dr. Phil shows, and a toasty temperature assured by a computer-driven thermostat. But before I started to drag in the suitcases I paused to think one last time about those people who first came to create a fledgling Denver, and to silently salute."

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I remember traveling from Denver to Hurricane Mesa, Utah on I-70 while it was still building, it going from super highway to plain old road time to time. Off in the distance I could see an occasional house, barn, corral and an outbuilding or two, obviously long unoccupied and going back to the earth from which it arose. Wondering about those folks who migrated west, wondering how they got from the place they settled to the nearest town, which would have been one heck of a trip for a man on horseback or worse yet horse and wagon. Wondering about the degrees of privation before new supplies could be brought back from town. Marveling at the knowledge of Grandma's remedies that kept the family going most of the time. And thinking about the times when a doctor would be brought from town, arriving too late to be of help.

I remember a stretch of I-70 where it is posted that there is no service for 110 miles and checking my gas guage and temperature guage, hoping that they would show I was on safe ground to make that 110 miles. Seems to me that it was that stretch before Green River, Utah. One hundred and ten miles, what a piddling distance compared to the trip from St. Louis to places west when there were no services for hundreds of miles.

There are many places in our part of the country where evidence of brave souls chose to settle. Little evidence why the domiciles were and had been deserted for a long time.

I remembered riding the train from Denver to Portland, Oregon, AMTRAK it was, think they called it the Pioneer. We rode it before it was discontinued. It was an overnighter rather than the other route through Sacramento which was two nights. The Pioneer pretty much paralleled I-80 through Wyoming. Alongside the tracks now and then were the corrals, cattle loading chutes and outbuildings associated with shipping cattle to Chicago back in cowboy days.

I spent some time working at Hurricane Mesa, Utah, going to St. George and poking around, nosing around with friends into the back country around Virgin, Utah (on the road to Zion) where we were shown early settlements back in places unknown to tourists. Cabin, barn, corral, even some had water wheels. Long empty, no history of who or why.

So here am I in modern times, warm, well fed, comfortable, medically stable. Yet I wonder, am I as satisfied and proud as those early settlers at the end of the day ?

There are times I think that one must stop by the side of the road and make COMPARISONS . . . . . . . . . .

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