Volkswagen Blues

In early July, Jack and the girl reach the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Jack is driving, and as they climb the steep mountain road, he whispers encouraging words to the old Volkswagen. The girl is reading “their favorite book” (158), which catalogs the many emigrant graves located along this stretch of the Oregon Trail. Troubled by all the names of the dead, the girl cries out, and Jack quickly hits the brakes. She apologizes for alarming him, especially when the road is so perilous, and says if he were not such a gentle man, he would have become angry with her.

Jack disagrees. He argues that, to be truly gentle, one must possess sufficient self-confidence, so that kindness is a deliberate act, not a reflexive show of submission. Because he has little confidence in himself, Jack claims his gentleness is phony and derives from being “weak and timid” and anxious to prevent conflict (159).

They stop to look at an enormous rock on which many of the emigrants carved their names to memorialize their passage through the mountains. Although most of the inscriptions bear dates later than 1850, they do see some “from the 1840s, among which they recognized, with pounding hearts, some of the men and women they had got to know from reading excerpts from their diaries” (160) in The Oregon Trail Revisited.