You Mean the Oregon Trail Goes All the Way to Oregon?

By the thousands, they traversed the plains and crossed the Rockies, many walking the whole way. All worldly belongings were crammed into wooden wagons covered by tarps. Heavy or extraneous possessions, once considered too valuable to leave behind, became too heavy and unwieldy to carry any further, and lined the trail as visibly as wheel ruts. Grave sites also marked the route where migrants succumbed to disease or accident, much too often crushed by the wheels of the wagons. All sought a better life in the west, a distant, imagined paradise that was, before the railroads, too far from home to ever dream of returning.

Ah! The pioneers! Those sturdy individualists (though they traveled en mass), representing the American spirit which constantly seeks that which is beyond the horizon, greener pastures, freedom from old troubles.

Of course, they slaughtered the once gigantic herds of bison nearly to extinction. They also wildly overreacted to every story of supposedly hostile indigenous people who, in fact, were already in decline because of diseases like cholera that earlier migrants brought with them from the east.

We European Americans have a love-hate relationship with our history. We both romanticize and revile our ancestors, celebrating their hardy bravery while meekly apologizing for their excesses.

As a Nebraskan, I literally grew up on the Oregon Trail, the route taken by American migrants from Missouri to Oregon before planes, highways, or railroads. I was reared on stories about travelers so exhausted by months of boring, flat land that they happily greeted the silhouettes of  geographically unique Chimney Rock, Jail House and Court House Rocks. The sculptures of earth climaxed at Scotts Bluff, considered the gateway to the Rocky Mountains and the origin of the name of my home town, Scottsbluff.

What prompts this reminiscing about the place of my roots?

I'm reading a really great book: The Oregon Trail, by Rinker Buck, who with his brother, spent a summer in a covered wagon, tracing as closely as possible, the Oregon Trail. Both in their 60's, the men relived the dangers of flooding, wind, fatigue, and wagon accidents suffered by those migrants of yore. They also encountered modern hazards such as highways, barbed wire fences, cattle guards, and obnoxious tourists in obscenely huge motor homes who frightened the mules as they zoomed up along side to take pictures out the window as they passed.

The Buck boys also enjoyed the hospitality of modern ranchers, farmers, and communities who provided food, corrals for the mules to rest in, and facilities to service and repair the wagon.

I highly recommend this book. Buck is enchanted by the west but writes realistically without sentimentalism. This is not a child's book about the Oregon Trail. Buck makes free use of the "F" word, for example.

It's no small matter to me that he speaks highly of Western Nebraska. I loved reading about the comfortable pair of shoes purchased at the Scottsbluff WalMart. I can picture exactly the museum in Gering where he lost an entire afternoon caught up in history displays.

There is one fact which still jars me in spite of all my OT study through the years.

When I visited the Oregon state capitol in Salem, I was stunned to see many paintings and murals depicting, yes, the Oregon Trail. There were even some scenes of Nebraska.

The fact is, in all my childhood immersion into Oregon Trail history, countless field trips to pioneer Rebecca Winter's grave and the visitor's center at Scotts Bluff National Monument, it never once occurred to me that Nebraska wasn't the end point of the Oregon Trail. When I was a kid, the myth was that the pioneers set out from the east for a better life and (naturally) settled in Nebraska. The story always ended there. I was in my 20s before I realized that the Oregon Trail was called the Oregon Trail because it went all the way to Oregon. It's a little like living in Colorado and being surprised to learn that other states have beautiful mountains too. Oregon, for instance.

I'm not exactly disillusioned, but I had to come to the grips with the fact that a lot of those people settled in Nebraska because they were just too tired to go on. It took a couple of generations for my parents to finally reach Oregon on vacation, in their motor home.

Surfing the Stratosphere

I remember staying up all night with my friend John listening to the radio. This would have been in the mid to late 1970s. We didn't just listen. We ran the tuner up and down the AM frequencies and counted how many distant stations we could find from far away.

In a smaller town like Scottsbluff, Nebraska, there weren't a lot of radio stations so the airwaves weren't cluttered with local stuff. At night, there was nothing between us and the sounds which stirred our imaginations from places such as Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and Denver.

In those days, AM radio was pretty diverse. There was music, of course, news, and talk shows, as well as advertising and weather. The Omaha stations featured farm reports and something about hog futures. Sometimes the smaller town stations had a hospital report where you could actually hear a list of who was in the local hospital that day. HIPAA regulations hadn't yet been invented.

One of the Chicago stations had a great late-night review of the newest porn movies and a psychologist who answered all kinds of questions about sex. Boy did I learn a lot on those nights. In the 70s, I found sex to be a thrilling and exciting subject.

About this time, cable television was starting to catch on. We got it before larger cities because we needed it. Scottsbluff's two local stations couldn't carry all the national network programming, but cable enabled us to get ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates from Denver, as well as Channel 2 which in those days was known primarily for Blinky the Clown and reruns. Cable fixtures such as MTV and CNN were still a few years away.

In the late 70s, John's parents sprung for HBO. We didn't care that this radical new pay channel showed recent movies with no commercials. We were more interested in the R rated movies and seeing naked boobs. Yes, I know what you're thinking, but for me it was just a phase. That obsession kind of replaced the radio during sleepovers.

Nowadays, it's easy to log onto the internet and listen to a radio station from anywhere in the world. Not that I ever do it. It doesn't seem like such a big deal now when it's so easy. But I remember that magical feeling of awe when I was a kid, listening to sounds from far away. Just because we couldn't yet surf the net doesn't mean our imaginations were stuck in Scottsbluff. We were surfing the stratosphere.

PostBlog from Scottsbluff – Pigging Out in the Panhandle

You might think it strange to take a 24 hour road trip to Scottsbluff, Nebraska with the primary goal of eating a lot of local food. Well, I never denied being strange. This is what my friend Brian and I did a couple weekends ago.

Highlights of the eat-fest included a Scotty’s cinnamon glacier - ice cream mixed with a slushee and flavored with cinnamon. It tasted like Christmas. It was totally worth the drive.

Of course when in Nebraska, one must have a Runza - seasoned beef and cabbage cooked inside delicious, doughy bread. We also sampled some of the delectable local Mexican cuisine, and had a delightful breakfast at a greasy diner.

We were pleased to be accompanied by my niece and sister-in-law who reside in the area. When it comes to eating, I can always depend on my family. Every event with my dad or my siblings centers around food. Every holiday, birthday, actually any gathering for any reason – we never miss a meal. Even when one of us is in the hospital, we don’t  forget to eat.

Wherever two or three Calkins are gathered, I always say, there is food also. Our obsession with food isn't limited to just consuming vast amounts of it. We use food to show love.

 After going through surgery a while back, before he was fully conscious, my dad sent me out to get him a chocolate malt from Cold Stone. I got one for myself as well so he wouldn’t have to eat alone. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

The afternoon of a different surgery he asked for two éclairs from Lamars - the kind with frosting filling, not pudding, per his exact specifications. The nurse said he wouldn't be hungry so soon after surgery. Clearly she didn't know who she was dealing with.

I've been more or less on Weight Watchers for the past year. I do weigh less than when I started and I look pretty good. When, after losing 30 pounds, I visited my dad, he said he was proud that I'd lost so much weight. He then proceeded to pull out cheese and crackers, chips and dips, olives, and beverages for us to consume before heading out for dinner.

It's not just my dad. It's all of us. On those rare occasions when my sister comes to visit me, the highlight is often a trip to Whole Foods where we buy little samples of cheese, some crackers, maybe some potsticker dumplings to snack on. One time we bought an entire cake (moist, with fresh berries in the whipped cream filling) for just the two of us. And let me tell you, it was good.

I have to admit that it's not just when I'm with family. I make food part of many routines in my life. For example, one of the locations of my gym just happens to be next door to Whole Foods. It seems only natural that after working out, I should head over to the store's deli for a specialty sandwich (turkey, fig jam, greens, and brie on a club roll). And while I'm there, how can I not go by the bakery and pick up a couple of those big, fresh chocolate chip cookies? I have just come from the gym, after all, so eating these treats won't make that much difference.

You see, while showing love to others with food, I've also learned love myself.

You Know You’re from Scottsbluff If …

There is a big new trend on Facebook: hometown nostalgia pages. The one I'm interested in, You Know You're from Scottsbluff If ..., has become so popular I can't keep up with all the posts.

Not surprisingly, food figures prominently in the discussions. It's not for nothing that the Nebraska city was once named one of the fattest in the country. It seems people scattered around the world savor the memory of  Scotty's burgers and fries, rumbas, a rum flavored Coke beverage from the Dash In (Dash Out to the Dash In), and Taco Town.

Of course, non-food things are also remembered such as the elevator at Penneys when Penneys was downtown, stores staying open late every Thursday, the zoo being free, and a hair salon which used its phone number in a catchy radio jingle that remains entrenched in our minds four decades later (Six Three Two, Thirty-Two Ten, The Barber Den).

I only lived eight years in Scottsbluff, compared to 22 in Denver, which I consider my home town. But I have to admit that those eight years were formative, and since I was graduated from high school there, I suppose Sco-blo deserves at least honorary hometown status.

In the 70s (maybe still today), bluffers were a very proud people. We were different from, better than, the rest of Nebraska which was flat and humid and boring. Our town was built, along with twin city Gering, at the base of the magnificent bluff where trapper Hiram Scott was said to have died in the 1840s. Easterners (that is, people from Omaha and Lincoln) had no idea what a treasure existed way out in the panhandle.

 Scottsbluff wasn't huge but it had two TV stations (both now defunct, I think), an airport, traffic jams (when you had to wait for a long coal train at the crossing), movie theatres, a symphony, an art center, and lots of shopping which attracted those unfortunates who lived in smaller panhandle towns. Around 1980 when the mall opened we thought we were really big stuff.

Scottsbluff was a good place to be a kid. You could ride your bike everywhere including the zoo and the movie theatre. There were enough people there to make a lot of friends, but few enough that you always saw someone you knew when you were out.

Certainly there was no anonymity. Corporal Paul Manley of the Nebraska State Patrol (who had his  own radio spots – think the Shane Company but about driving safely) went to our church and reported to my mother that I'd run a stop sign. Yeesh. There was another time when I was goofing around in the street with a friend and a woman yelled out her front door, "Bill Calkins, does your mother know what you're doing?" I'm not going to say what it was. You'll have to guess.

Coming out as gay in Scottsbluff was very public regardless of whether I wanted it to be. Like all small communities, tongues wagged. Minds weren't always open and many of us fled at the first opportunity. I couldn’t wait to escape to the urban east, Lincoln, where indeed I did experience more diversity. I've since learned, however, that closed minds and gossip aren't limited to Scottsbluff or small towns in general. You can find ignorance everywhere.

I suppose we get nostalgic about hometowns because they help define who we are. The common experiences of a having shared a high school, dragging Broadway, and eating cabbage burgers at Bailey's Town and Country unites many of us who otherwise would have very little in common.

Bailey's and the Dash In no longer exist. But I understand Scotty's is just as good as ever. I feel a road trip coming on ...