Читать книгу Drago #3 - Art Spinella - Страница 3

Americans are constantly barraged with information. More than most need or want. So it’s often difficult to take a step back and in hindsight look at what our ancestors had to do to simply survive. This is especially true among those rural folks in places like Oregon where distances are far and travel until the 1930s perilous.

On a trip through central Oregon, my wife and I ran across a small, worn and weathered plaque telling the story of a man whose “day job” was delivering mail on horseback between two distant towns. The trip would take days in each direction. The weather ranging from scorching hot to bitter cold. Toss in a few massive thunderstorms or the constant, irritating Oregon rain just for kicks. Living alone in the wilderness meant his second job was hunting and trapping for food to last through the long, frigid high-desert winters.

For farmers and ranchers in the 1800s and before, households didn’t survive on a single worker. They relied on both adults and all of the children busting sod or raising cattle or sheep or sowing a variety of crops or picking those same crops in order to sustain themselves.

Loggers’ wives nailed down the homestead because the man was often gone days at a time doing the often deadly work of cutting timber. Women not only raised children, they worked for a pittance as teachers, shop clerks, laundresses, and even some in the darker skills.

Ships’ crews spent weeks, often months, without benefit of communications with loved ones at home while wives and children earned meager income from performing what would now be considered menial chores for others.

Reading school history books provides a one-dimensional glimpse into the lives of Americans before the 1940s. To get the real picture of this country’s hard men and hearty women requires time in the many small-town historical museums. This is where true history is displayed, one village at a time. Look at the photos that hang on the walls. The rail-thin laborers, the rickety equipment, gritty towns, shabby houses and faces aged beyond their years.

Surprisingly, you won’t feel sorry for those rural folks. They somehow look stern, strong and independent. You might even find yourself admiring their guts, stamina and resiliency. I know that I do each time I roam through places like the Bandon Historical Society’s Museum.

Drago #3 is rooted in Bandon’s history with a parallel story line planted in today’s world of high tech. Let your imagination roam and wander the past and future. And if you get the chance, when in a small rural town that happens to have a history museum, drop in. It’s uplifting to see how far we’ve come and enlightening to see the lengths our predecessors went to survive. --- Art Spinella

As with Drago #2, we have included a User ID and Password for access to a hidden Drago #3 Page on our www.cnwmr.com/DRAGO website.