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Bones, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

On the treadmill monday night, I was watching this amazing documentary on PBS on the Donner Party and it totally freaked me out. There I am, trudging along on the road to nowhere, while on the screen, doomed pioneers in 1846 are trying to WALK from freakin’ Illinois to California. All their shit was breaking down and native tribes were killing their cattle with poison arrows, and they were getting into fights and exiling each other and killing each other, and freezing in the mountains and boiling in the desert. I was almost at the part where they were gonna start starving and resorting to cannibalism in the Sierra Nevadas when I reached my alotted 30 minute time limit and got nudged off the hamster wheel by some shrimpy guy guzzling Vitamin Water like it was his job. LCF says he’ll netflix the doc for me so I can see the grisly conclusion, but in the meantime, I can’t stop thinking about it. By the end of the trail, 2/3 of the women and children made it all the way to California, but only 1/3 of the men did. I wonder why. Was it because the women and children could reserve their strength earlier in the trip before everything broke down? Is it because women will fight through absolutely anything to protect their children? Are women and children just cooler with the idea of eating human flesh? It’s hard to speculate since it was such a different world, but it makes me wonder if humans are just bred to be wussier now. I’m so tired these days that the alarm clock makes me cry and I’m considering ingesting my diet coke intreveinously just to get through my work day. But in 1846, women hit the road with babies strapped to their backs, fully knowing that the end of the road was 1600 miles away, and totally did it anyway. They didn’t know they’d be eating pioneer tarre tarre, but they knew the voyage would be enormous and they faced the challenge optimistically. Honestly, I can’t even imagine living a life like that. It’s not like any form of humanity I’ve ever seen.

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