Whoa. My wife and I recently watched a PBS show about the famously ill-fated Donner party. Everyone knows that they had a bad time of it and that some members of the group ended up eating other members, and everyone knows a few morbid throwaway one-liners about the episode. But dear god, how truly horrible their experience was! The story in its entirety is an appalling glimpse at the extremes of human suffering and the extremes of human responses to it. That, however, is not the main observation of the day.
Here's what really got me, okay? These people, good or bad, were tough. I mean tough.
At one point, a member of one of the rescue parties came upon this grisly discovery: a woman, dead of starvation, was stripped of all clothing and all the flesh from her arms and legs. Her breasts had been cut off and her vital organs removed and eaten. Her eighteen-month-old daughter was still clutching her dead mother's hand, wailing, "Mama! Mama!" and sobbing. No one thought to hasten the child to a psychiatrist for lifelong regression therapy sessions...even though they were going to California. No one thought it necessary to express more pity than a pat on the head for that hapless child. There was no time for pity; they had to trudge on. Can you imagine a more traumatic childhood memory to live with? Yet live with it, the girl did, and productively, too, for what else was there to do? If modern psychotherapy had been practiced in the Old West, surely the girl would have turned out differently--say, dead from an overdose at twenty-five after years of viciously irresponsible behavior and numerous faux suicide attempts, all excused knowingly by her various counselors. Think of all the people who spend their entire lives indulgently re-living being fondled, then return to the image of the child holding the hand of her mother's half-eaten carcass.
Another woman in the party held her husband in her arms as he gasped his last, then watched the other men roast his heart on a spit. When she finally made it to San Francisco, she immediately remarried and bore several children. Now that's pluck! The optimism inherent in the survivors' subsequent actions is even more amazing than the stark circumstances of their journey. Almost all of the survivors went on to start successful businesses and raise more children, and none expressed regret at choosing to go West. They even encouraged their friends to follow them to California, with only the proviso that they avoid any dubious "shortcuts."
When did our people stop being so tough? I'm sure that it is an instinct of preservation, called upon only when needed for the human organism's survival, discarded in times of ease and safety. I could never in a million years accept that kind of hardship willingly and don't really think I know anyone who would. While I am grateful for the relative ease and safety of our lives, still I can't help being sorry that we have shrunk to fit the smaller needs of our times. We've become soft and mushy and weak, and ironically, we'd surely make better eating. The original Donners were stringy.
