The White

The White

Indiana, February 1846. The cold gray clothed everyone with despair, and the lingering snow was brown and befouled. That winter changed the way I viewed the world. I would search for white—unspoiled, unvarnished, limitless. Tabula rasa. 

Everyone heard stories about California. Where fish jump out of streams into frying pans, fields bloom with flowers of every color, golden grain and green grass sway in warm breezes. Sparkling, crystal blue water with the sweetest taste lingers on the tongue. 

Goin’ to California was our family motto, and California became my white, my tabula rasa, where all things could happen. Three beautiful, magical words that made everything all right, and for a while, those words remained safe within a dream, a lark, nothing more.

“Can we really go to California, Dad?” asked Johnny.

“I’m afraid not, son,” I answered. “It’s a long way away.”

But my wife Sadie had grown old and frail from childbirth, the loss of two babies, and the damp, unforgiving winters. It had been a poor harvest, and our supplies dwindled. Endless murky skies foretold the future—fear, famine, and failure—and those words kept me up at night. And tipped the scale. 

I went to the organizational meeting. Forty-three families and two Native guides were Goin’ to California, joining others in Springfield Illinois in April, giving us two months to prepare.

Slow down, big decisions take time, said my inner voice.

But not this time, another voice shouted back.

At first she laughed, a laugh of desperation and fatigue. And no confidence in me, I thought, but I held my temper. I’d hit her once when we were first married, and I’d vowed never to do it again.

She awakened me in the night. When the fire burned out and sleet rained on the roof. “James,” she said, “I’ll go and never look back.” 

It was a plan, a way out, an escape. So close we could touch it. We’d made our choice. The only one.

We sold our land and packed what we could carry on a Prairie Schooner. My grandmother’s chest, her father’s drop leaf table fashioned from the trees on their land, my fiddle, our little dog Cricket. 

We left on April 16, and for the first weeks, we covered fifteen miles a day on wide, worn trails, slowing for the occasional breakdown and river crossings. We became friends with the McGuire family who traveled alongside us. Husband and wife, three children, and Mr. McGuire, Sr., or Mac, as he was called. Mac had explored the Rocky Mountains, hunted bison, and knew the land and its perils.

Rafael and Johnny laughed and talked with the McGuire children as they walked beside our wagons, and Mrs. McGuire and Sadie planned our new lives.

We’d made the right choice.

Mrs. Winthrop, a woman in her fifties who’d mostly kept to herself and fretted over her family, was the first. She complained of fever and dysentery, and we all stayed away and isolated their wagon when we set up camp. She didn’t make it, though, and one month into the journey, her sons dug her grave and planted our first cross along the trail.

Women and children were hit the hardest. They suffered severe thirst, and their families asked us to share the water we’d saved and carefully parceled out, and that’s when Sadie defied me, telling me I had to give it to them, that we must help each other, or we would all die. For the second time in my life, I hit her. My children watched, but I figured it was time for them to learn how to handle a woman.

East of the Rockies, a lone rider caught up with us. He told us about an alternate route through the desert. Shorter and safer, he said. Get there in half the time, before the others. Plenty of trading posts along the way.

I took one of his maps.

When we crossed the Rocky Mountains, I beheld the white, as breathtaking as I’d imagined, but Mac took me aside. “That much white isn’t good, it’s intoxicating. Be careful.” I wanted to hit him, too, but Mac was a big guy, and I held my temper.

By the end of August, plagued by injuries and repairs, disagreements and fights, and worsening terrain, we were making only four or five miles a day. One morning, we awakened to find that our Native guides had deserted us, and I thought about the shortcut. 

Get there before the others.

I told Sadie my decision; we’d turn off the trail and follow the new map. I informed the McGuires and invited the others to come with us. 

Mrs. McGuire hugged Sadie, and Mac looked grim. “Son,” he said, “this is the wrong choice. I’ve known a few who tried going it alone, but not many survived. And those who did, well they witnessed some mighty strange things, heard things, saw things. Satan appearing before them, people leaping from mountaintops. And there were worse things. Unspeakable things.

“Crueler than the snow and the cold,” he went on, “is the white. The Natives say evil lies underneath.”

He stood beside me as I packed the last of the supplies. “If you cross the Sierra Nevada too late, you’ll be trapped in walls of snow till spring. There’ll be no one to help you.”

I laughed it off. Old fool, I said to myself as he walked away.

We pulled out at daybreak—our family, four oxen, two mules, and a cow—and watched the wagon train get smaller and smaller until it was an inkblot in the distance. Rafael and Johnny bawled, and Sadie put her arms around them and wouldn’t look me in the eyes. 

“Nothing matters but getting to California,” I said. “You’ll see. This is the right choice.”

We passed through the snow-capped Wasatch and entered the desert when the white became sand. The sun scorched our eyes, and our tongues swelled with thirst. The cactuses yielded no water, but we planned to refill our barrels on the other side of the desert, and I reckoned if we were careful, we’d have enough to last until we reached California.

Movement through the dense sand slowed to a crawl. Our food supplies dwindled, and since we couldn’t afford to lose the beasts of burden, there was nothing to do but sacrifice our pet. I told my sons it was a desert animal, that Cricket had run off in the night.

Soon after we entered the desert, their mother came down with the fever, and I soothed her the best I could with wet cloths and tried to get her to take water. Sadie, whose blond hair was matted with sweat, who raved and thought she was back on the farm in Indiana, who died in my arms. I’d have traded my life for hers, but I knew she’d have wanted me to take care of our children the best I could, and I told more lies. What good was there in getting so close and dying of starvation?

That night I heard a voice. “You’re better off,” it said. “Sadie was always questioning you, doubting you, causing you to rethink every damn choice you ever made. She was dead weight, like Cricket.” 

Strange happenings, like Mac said, I thought. The full moon outlined the mountains, so near I could almost touch the white. It was November, later than we’d planned, but California was close, on the other side.

When the clouds moved across the moon, a rattler spooked the oxen and two of them ran off, and we were left with no recourse but to unload everything but the essentials and trust the remaining beasts to pull the wagon. The boys were ghosts, their eyes sunken and their skin sallow.

“Don’t worry, we’ll come back for all our things once we get to California,” I told them. “We’re almost there.”

All that was left was to cross through the Sierra Nevada into California. Rafael who cried out for his ma, and Johnny, wiping away tears and watching me with big eyes, and I. We three would make it to the dream, tabula rasa. Fish, flowers, fertile soil. Water with the sweetest taste that lingers on the tongue.

The moon illuminated something else, the lone rider, dressed all in black, beckoning to us. Come with me, James. Everything you’ve ever wanted, all your dreams. Over that rise.

I grasped the boys by the hands and dragged them through the dense sand. To the white.