Dysentery on the Oregon Trail

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• September 15, 2024

Back when I was in middle school, I remember the library suddenly having a computer room and computer classes becoming a regular part of life. The Oregon Trail game was considered a ‘learning’ game and it was one of the things we looked forward to doing in-between honing general computer skills.

Calling Oregon Trail a learning game is a stretch, but I guess it did teach you how hard life was back then because your chance of dying was higher than living. And there were so many ways to die! Fevers, dysentery, measles, cholera, typhoid, exhaustion, a snakebite, a broken leg or arm, drowning.

When I was in Montana, I was inspired and a little bored in the hotel so I decided to relive my childhood video game adventure and play some Oregon Trail (free on the internet!). If you’ve never played the game, you name your characters before taking off. The first time I played, I made some of my closest friends my crew. We did not make it (they died in this order: Katrina Reese, Greg Bermeister, Dennis Rooney, Mike Toohey). I played a second time with my family. We also didn’t make it. I decided to play a third time, casting my top celebrity crushes. There were some casualties but I made it with Austin Butler and Bill Skarsgard. And you can guarantee if I’m going cross country with Austin and Bill, we’ll be grokking the whole way. Thy be the most beautiful water brothers (I just read ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ if you don’t understand that reference. Here’s another reference you probably won’t get, “squanching” from ‘Rick and Morty’ is a reference to grokking).

No one dies by suicide on the Oregon trail, which seems a little unrealistic to me. Especially in those first two tries when my friends and family died, I for sure would have shot myself in the face. Hell, I have a pretty good life as is, and suicidal thoughts still have their way of creeping in on me, all of my days.

If you do win the game, it’s just like, “you made it, here is the condition everyone is in, how much money you have, and what’s left of your supplies.” There’s a brief moment of happiness that you’ve made the right decisions among rest and travel and hunting that you did. You made it on the Oregon trail, but it’s mostly anticlimactic.

Perhaps, though, that is the greatest lesson of the Oregon trail. As so many have said. It’s the journey, not the destination. It’s the people with  you along the way.

I, though, am a fan of destinations. Be it real or unreal. Physical or states of mind. People, too, can be destinations. No one loves sitting on an airplane. But it’s at least tolerable. Especially if knowing where you’re going to land is gold.

It would be up for great debate if I actually learned to healthy manage my mental illness, but I guess as long as you’re living with it and not shooting your head off, you’re winning to some degree. As for me, well, I’m a little reckless. A dreamer. A counter culture phenomenon. Knowing thy self, they say, and I just want to grok. November unfolds, year after year, with the same seasonal melancholy. A depression to which there is no cure. But you can side step it. If you know the bull is heading directly at you, hold up a red flag and step to the side. I’ll scrape up my pennies, with no money saved for a rainy day, no plan for the future, and head to Hawaii to save a little mind, surf some swell, write among mountains and leave my troubles on a stoop in New York. Why take them with me on a trail to paradise?

I could lament a plateauing career or love life that lacks any sort of luck, but without these things I desire and dream of lends me a freedom. I could cry that there’s little keeping me here, or I could just go. So I might as well go. Life is the Oregon Trail. Difficult. Hard work. Ups and downs. Sometimes sick, sometimes healthy. And I’ll kill myself, happily, before I’ll let dysentery shit my brains out to death. I’ve this reoccurring dream of swimming with manta rays. Color me a fool for not settling down, not committing to anyone or anything. But what a fool I’d be in my own eyes knowing I can be with manta rays with my eyes wide open and didn’t take opportunity to live when I can.

Do you grok?