Morning Thanks--old stories

"Over the next several days, . . .heaps of ungainly and impractical objects strewn throughout the plain became a frequent site."

Even though Hernan Diaz's In the Distance tells a story that seems, at time, inside-out, Diaz uses long-established places and themes throughout a novel that became a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2017. He sends his protagonist, Hakan, or "Hawk" as Americans name him, across the country, circa 1850, on the Oregon Trail, for one thing. But, strangely, Hawk travels it backward, west to east. 

The effects of such little literary magic is fascinating; we see altogether familiar sights in the canon of literature of the West in a new guise. That Hawk finds "stuff" strewn along the trail, when the load had to be lightened, bulk had to be disposed of, isn't new.  The Oregon Trail was, in some places, an immense junkyard.  As the way west got more and more difficult, Hawk's finding discarded valuables isn't surprising. A little museum along I-80 in west-central Nebraska illustrates that phenomenon touchingly.

But Hawk isn't aboard some generic wagon train. A giant of a man, he is traveling alone, against the grain, west to east, bound not for gold fields or abundance in Oregon, but for New York, where his one goal in life is to find an older brother from whom he was separated when they left Sweden and emigrated. 

In the Distance is an all-American story that deconstructs the mythic proportions of America's western movement and the tainted glory of "Manifest Destiny" without bashing what is, in many ways, the quintessential American western saga. Maybe the best way to say it is he reminds you to see what you may have forgotten. 

Hawk's sheer physicality is worthy of a Western, but he knows little English and has no rich language skills. His old country childhood was immensely isolated and sheltered. He's a blonde giant unloosed on a frontier world he doesn't begin to understand, an innocent in a landscape peopled with kooks and criminals.

He's a child really, and that's part of his appeal. When he finds graves along the Trail, he's startled, then saddened.

One morning, he woke up to find that he had slept a stone's throw from a makeshift graveyard. The tombstones, three planks stuck upright in the ground, bore words that had been burned into them with a hot iron. Although unable to read them, Hakan could see the despair in those unsteady lines.

Even if you've seen such things before or read about them, a man/boy like Hakan stumbling on a makeshift cemetery along a highway of dust a mile wide moves you, regardless of how many books or movies have told the same story. Hawk wasn't there for the burials, but somehow he feels the same darkness.

Two of the plots must have been for very young children. The earth on all three had been torn up and raked by hungry paws. Hakan found the contrast between the improvised, impermanent nature of the graves and the final, definite condition of those in them immensely sad. 

In Omaha, high on a bluff above the river, the Mormon Trail Center remembers just that kind of devastating moment with a looming statue in the cemetery set there way back in 1936, a young couple cowering beneath the weight of their loss, somewhere along the windswept prairie. He's holding her up, but look at his legs and feet--he is barely able to stand himself.

There, in the ground, faintly visible, lies the body of their child, a child the Mormons would name "a saint."

I'm thankful, this morning, for the humbling stories that take us deeply into the difficult lives of others.