At various points on my journey, the Plains appeared endless, but never so endless as the paperwork my re-entry into America required was bottomless.
To throw one's life into that pit! The thought sickens me! To devote all of one's life to the insanity of repetition with all willful obliviousness to the certainty of failure and decay! For what is more illusory than the steadiness of an occupation? Is it any wonder that the word "job" shares its spelling with the name of that most beleaguered of Biblical patriarchs?
The life of the bureaucrat seemed an especially stifling and even tawdry one after the open plains, the frigid nighttime deserts, and the soaring mountains. The excitement of that existence came down to bribes of liquor and mountains of paperwork, peppered with the occasional plague that cleared the office long enough for a proper vacation.
New Orleans, for all its electric moss and eclectic music, struck me as a creaking, pestilential, somehow haunted place, even before the coming of War. It rotted. It reeked. The river ran the wrong color and every inhabitant spoke the wrong language. As a Southern sympathizer, perhaps you did not expect this impression from me, Dear Reader, but how could I be fair to any city after being among the first White men to slip through the Continental Divide?
If New Orleans impressed anything upon me, it was the utmost need to find my way back West—fast.
The need to make good time made itself apparent as I passed through the town that seemed to me the Birthplace of Languishing, as I watched with something like terror the slowness with which the Mississippi met the sea and soaked up the swamps and marshland. More than unspoiled nature, New Orleans—a town hardly even American, I soon realized on that brief first visit—made me crave velocity.
As I made the final leg of my journey home to Ohio, I took stock of my position: I was young; I had proven my worth by persevering across the land; I had led families through 2,000 miles of wilderness. Furthermore, allow me to add what I was not: I was not a missionary; I was not a military man; I was not a mountain man. I was simply an American citizen who had led a band of fellow citizens Westward successfully.
If not quite Manifest Destiny's posterboy, I was most certainly Manifest Destiny's everyman. And so our morality play continues.
I could avoid it no longer: it was time for me to corral myself and write a book.
[The fiddler plays "Loop #5, Sisyphus" con gusto.]
The agony! The monotony! The loneliness! In nature, man is never alone, for he is in his God-given element: at his desk, man is subjected to howling emptiness that even Satan was spared by Our Lord God; it is something worse even than boredom: absurdity!