Rinker Buck > Quotes

“Frequently, to be an American then was to be periodically unmoored, transient, so bereft of options that moving on was the only choice.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Drill, baby, drill.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“My adolescent feasting on books was a protective search for privacy and self that worked for me at the time, and later became habitual and delivered other benefits. I”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“I was often overwhelmed as a boy by feelings of anxiety, and by profound embarrassment about the kind of family that I came from, my fears made worse by my inability to share them with anyone else or even to comprehend what they meant.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Until I read about it nearly twenty years later, in a book about instrument flying, I didn’t realize that I suffered throughout our flight from something called copilot vertigo. The phenomenon is especially severe in tandem-seat designs like Cubs, where visibility over the pilot in front is limited.”
― Rinker Buck, Flight of Passage: A Memoir

“That's my dogma. Just borrow any old god-damn religion that happens to be around when you need it and enjoy the pleasure of being with welcoming people. Today, on windy Rocky Ridge beneath a hard blue Wyoming sky, I was a Mormon.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Uncertainty was a sacrament and the quest for miles meant that we’d never know where or how we’d end the day.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Platte River Road Narratives”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Not having specific goals for the day seemed to be the way to live. Just harness up in the morning and go. The rest would take care of itself. Three hundred miles of green roadways down and”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Over time “Pikers” became accepted as a term that referred to people who were slow of speech, plodding, and not ambitious in business.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Porter’s aerial palace, complete with twenty-six windows, a long exhaust pipe for steam sticking out the rear, and a giant American flag fluttering over the rudders, was designed to ride beneath an immense cigar-shaped dirigible. The engineering was lunacy, but Porter’s marketing was brilliant. He proposed dispensing entirely with the notorious jumping-off hassles along the Missouri River by launching his “aerial locomotive” from New York. The coast-to-coast trip, Porter’s calculations showed, could be made in just three days—five days if the prevailing headwinds were particularly bad that week. Porter aggressively advertised his “Air Line to California” in eastern newspapers and magazines. Amazingly, over two hundred suckers paid a subscription price of $50, which included three-course meals and wine, for the inaugural balloon hop to the gold fields. That winter, a large crowd gathered in a Long Island cornfield to watch Porter test a model of his airship. But the craft never left the ground because the steam engines were far too heavy for the balloon. The would-be Porter aeronauts, however, were the lucky ones—they never had to leave in the first place. The 125 paying passengers on the first Turner and Allen Pioneer Train were not so fortunate. The Turner and Allen expedition of 1849”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“I was also, once,more, a victim of my own stupidity”
― Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure

“Missouri, a critical frontier state, prospered for many reasons—good soil, river access, fast-growing hardwood forests—but mostly because of mules.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“The endurance required should have been too much for us, but across these Nebraska plains endurance just begat more endurance.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Fear was just a deceptive veil obscuring the unknown.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“A great burden had been lifted from me.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“consigning”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Now I knew a little bit more about how the pioneers felt as they embarked for the West. It was my jumping-off time and I was getting jacked around by the outfitters. •”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Someday, when historians perform their "why the Mayans declined" necropsy on American society, they will marvel at the way that, at a time of high anxiety about energy resources and costs, millions of elderly people took to the road in the clumsiest, most inefficient vehicles ever devised by man. The lunacy of America is all right there, in the RVs.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Americans were those folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“This was 1849, a year when the frenzy to reach California gold was so intense that all wisdom had percolated from the American brain. Speed in reaching northern California was everything, and Turner and Allen were actually pikers in that department. The craziest westering scheme of all was devised by a head case New Yorker named Rufus Porter, an inventor and balloon enthusiast who was the founder of Scientific American magazine. Like many Americans, Porter was swept up by the visionary possibilities of a mass crossing to plunder the gold fields of the Pacific West. Porter became convinced that giant balloons, powered by twin steam engines borrowed from a paddle-wheeler, could loft as many as two hundred Gold Rush miners to California at once.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“This became our creed, almost a religious faith. Nobody knows and we would have to figure everything out ourselves”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“During the trail years, reaching Independence Rock aroused a kind of collective, Paleolithic carving gene, a powerful urge among the pioneers to leave behind some evidence of their arrival. While the wagon trains rested for a day or two at the rock, the pioneers found it irresistible to scramble up the curved walls and chisel in the hard granite their names or initials, the year, and their hometowns. There is no way of knowing exactly how many pioneers left their initials or names behind on Independence Rock because erosion by wind and water over the past century has removed thousands of these inscriptions.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“our vaunted rugged individualism was financed by huge government largesse.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Over the years I had devised an elaborate syllabus of coping techniques for spending time with Nick.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“In 1857, to encourage continued settlement of the West, Congress passed the Pacific Wagon Road Act, which among other improvements to the trail called for the surveying of a shorter route to Idaho across the bottom of the Wind Rivers and the forested Bridger-Teton wilderness to the west. Frederick W. Lander, a hotheaded but experienced explorer and engineer, was assigned the job. He made Burnt Ranch the trailhead and main supply depot for the trail-building job, which became one of the largest government-financed projects of the nineteenth century. Lander hired hundreds of workers from the new Mormon settlement at Salt Lake and supplied the enterprise with large mule-team caravans that ferried provisions and equipment from U.S. Army depots in Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. “With crowds of laborers hauling wood, erecting buildings and tending stock,” writes historian Todd Guenther, “the area was a beehive of activity.” The engineers, logging crews, and workers quickly hacked out what became known as the Lander Cutoff, which saved more than sixty miles, almost a week’s travel, across the mountains. In places, the Lander Cutoff was a steep up-and-down ride, but the route offered cooler, high terrain and plentiful water, an advantage over the scorching desert of the main ruts to the south. Eventually an estimated 100,000 pioneers took this route, and the 230-mile Lander Cutoff was considered an engineering marvel of its time. This”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“I was impressed by how Americans have worshipped these dubious character types, as if we are desperate to escape our own banal, middle-class lives.”
― Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure

“Whenever you make an agreement with yourself, you have to stick to it.”
― Rinker Buck, Flight of Passage: A Memoir