Frontier life vs. Modern America

It's snowing today, a Nor'Easter. If you aren't from New England, a Nor'Easter is a storm that travels up the Atlantic coast and usually ends up as a pretty good blizzard. I check the weather on the NOAA.gov website, and as of last night they were predicting 10"-18" for Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Hopefully, we are just outside of the "Southern" area in NH, and will get less. They were predicting 4"-6" for our zip code, which is located just 30 miles north of the 10"-18" area!

This is only relevant to today's post because we had planned on taking Caleigh out for the day to celebrate her success at learning to read, and in light of the storm, chose to play it save and stay in today. I took the opportunity to stay in bed late and read the story of Mary Rowlandson's captivity.

Here is a synopsis of the Mary Rowlandson story: http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/conn.river/mary.html

While King Phillip's War raged around her, this 40 year old wife and mother was taken captive when her little New England village was raided by a Native war party. Thirteen people in the town were killed and scalped before the town was put to the torch. Her husband, a preacher, was out of town at the time. Mary and her baby were wounded in the attack, and her two older children were taken captive. Twenty four people were taken captive that day.

Her captivity lasted 11 weeks and five days. In the time she was held captive, she was able to earn some food and trade goods by sewing and knitting for Indians in the party. A week into the trip, her wounded little one died in her arms and was buried in the forest. She tells of starvation, of exhaustion, of despair. Her son was held captive with another Indian family in the party and they were able to talk on occasion. There is one instance where an Indian, apparently as a joke, tells her that her son's master has killed her son and that they have eaten him but he has only eaten a little, and that he was very good to eat.

Her "master' treats her well, but his wife treats her badly. Some Indians give her food, others refuse. The story is told from her perspective and it is interesting to see how the Native culture was structured. Ultimately, she is brought to Mount Wachusett (today a ski area) and ransomed for twenty pounds worth of trade goods. She passes through the ruins of her town, Lancaster Massachusetts, on the way to Boston to be reunited with her husband. They got word that her son was ransomed at Major Waldron's in the seacoast New Hampshire area and head North to get him. While on the road, they learned that their daughter was brought tot he English in Rhode Island, so with the exception of the baby who was lost on the trail, the family was made whole again. Destitute, but whole.

The ransom was raised by townspeople in Boston and Portsmouth. Englishmen banding together to help out a stricken family. I wonder if we would do the same today?

There is a paragraph in the story where Mary talks about meeting with a relative (brother in law?) on the way home and he asks if she had seen his wife. She had, the unfortunate woman had been shot and killed while leaving the house, then burned beyond recognition. It turns out the poor husband had helped to bury her without even knowing that it was his wife! Such was daily life in wartime New England. These are just a few of thousands of stories of deprivations that took place in the era. In the 1740's, hardly a day went by without news of a raid somewhere in New England.

Please don't read this post and think I am Indian bashing. Atrocities happened on both sides. I'm just looking at the experiences of a typical New England family and viewing it from their perspective because it is easy to compare my home of the frontier to theirs at this moment.

When Mary told her story, she constantly refers to how thankful she is to God that she has as much as she does when she gets nourishment, no matter how meager. By meager, I'm talking about some crumbs of a journey-cake that she found in the bottom of her pocket, a horse hoof, etc. Things that even she knew a dog would pass by.

I look out my double-paned window and watch the storm. Upstairs it is seventy degrees thanks to the oil furnace. Down here in my office, it's a bit chilly, so I've got an electric space heater going, aimed at my desk. I am trying to decide what to eat: leftover roast chicken, leftover American Chop Suey, or maybe I should make a soup out of some other leftover chicken and a leftover pork roast? She was thankful for crumbs, and here I am today which leftover food to use.

In one instance, Mary talks about getting in trouble with her captors for moving a branch that was keeping the heat of the fire from her tired, starving, aching body (that had a bullet hole in it, by the way) and I have turned on an extra heater because it's "chilly" down here.

When we don't have the latest, the fastest, the biggest or the flashiest, we think it is the end of the world. With very few exceptions, we, as modern Americans, live overly comfortable lives with nothing real to complain about. There are no warring tribes roaming our countryside, raiding, pillaging, killing babies that are too young to travel and capturing family members to ransom. It does happen elsewhere in the world, but not here. Our biggest inconvenience is a traffic jam that makes us wait five more minutes to get to the fast-food restaurant. Now we can watch TV and play satellite music on our cell phones and if we don't have one of those phones, it's just a tragedy.

We are pretty spoiled as modern Americans, yet we find things to complain about. We have so much that we don't know what to do with it all. Look at the landfills, drive around on trash day and see the massive piles of stuff that get thrown out simply because it has gone out of style. Nothing is ever good enough for us. No matter how good we have it, we always want more. Why? Is it a drive within our psyche that makes us keep pushing, trying to do better than the generation before? Of is it just plain gluttony?

The Rowlandsons had the same drive, they moved to the frontier in an effort to improve their lives for their children. That was the spirit that built America. What happens to us now that we have conquered all of the frontiers and still have that drive? We seem to constantly need to improve what we have: bigger TVs, faster computers, bigger SUVs. We cut down orchards to build McMansions and then need to import fruit because the orchards are gone. As a society, we have conquered the frontiers and are now trying to conquer each other in a self-destructive show of conspicuous consumption. When we have it all, we still aren't happy.

The CDC says that 64% of Americans over the age of 20 are overweight. Not starving, not digging for groundnuts and eating tree bark: OVERweight. In just over three hundred years we have gone from a seminal population that was barely surviving the odds to a nation of people who are too well fed. Americans spend $30 billion each year on weight loss products. That's just over $100 for every American. $100 is three times what it cost for Mr. Rowlandson to buy back his wife from her captives.

What would Mary think? Would she be proud that the nation she helped to grow has become so prosperous that we spend $30,000,000,000 every year to keep our prosperity from killing us, or would she be saddened to the point that she would encourage her family to seek out a new frontier where people were a little more real and a little more thankful for the prosperity that they have been blessed with?

I've got work to do today, but part of me wants to go out into the woods and try to find some groundnuts, then spend the night huddled by a little fire just to get a little feel of what my forebears went through. It won't even come close to reality. My daughter is still alive, I don't have a bullet hole in my side, my wife won't be lying dead in the snow outside my front door, burned beyond recognition, my nice warm house will still be standing when I return and well stocked with food.

We must never forget the lessons history has taught us. Our forebears suffered immensely in way we cannot even imagine, yet we are never satisfied. The sacrifice of those who went before us has lost it's meaning to us today, and that is the biggest tragedy that we have to deal with.