Just like old times....
Mormon youth learn about God, selves, others on extreme trek
Two “families” and their carts move slowly along the trail south of Arizona City, about 3 hours into the first day of the LDS re-enactment trek. Mormon youth learn about God, selves, others on extreme trekARIZONA CITY - With the sun starting to cast long shadows, bodies on the ground could not see them.
It was the same ground that 150 pairs of feet had walked during the day. It was the ground that was alternatively hard-packed soil and shifting sand.
It was ground that if a person looked back, he could see the thin, lined impressions dug into it from the 400-pound handcarts that these bodies had pulled and pushed for eight miles and seven hours.
The young men and women, all between the ages of 14 and 18, all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were on this ground, resting. They were taking part in a re-enactment of the 1,300-mile journey that 10 handcart companies took across the middle of the United States 150 years ago.
Unlike many of their historical counterparts in those loosely organized companies, the modern trekkers weren't dead, just dead tired.
Connections
About a mile in, off the last paved road, at the extreme south of Arizona City, eggs, biscuits, pancakes and sausages were in oversupply early in the morning of Dec. 27.
A large group was gathered, knowing only a little about the next four days.
For at least the last year, hundreds of people had focused on the planning and logistics of moving about 275 people and their supplies across 20 miles of desert. Their task also included making the trip a historical moment, limiting almost everything to what was available to poor migrants in the 1850s.
Alan Bingham is the trail boss for what's known as Arise and Shine Forth, Casa Grande Arizona Stake Handcart Trek 2006. He's there with the participants on a chilly morning to create both difficulties and challenges, and create an atmosphere where everyone helps everyone else get through them.
As the group grew bigger, still missing were the kids from the Maricopa Ward. They were late and tongues started wagging that being late to get going was what had doomed Willie and Martin, two of the original handcart companies. Each suffered great casualties because they started out across the country in late August, with less preparedness than the other companies that had already moved out.
Mike Dick, a trail captain, says while the other companies had about a 5 percent mortality rate, the Willie and Martin companies had a quarter of their group die off.
Last Wednesday, the trailhead, the teenagers ate first, prayed second and were split into families, one family for one cart. Each family had about 9 to 11 people that included a ma and pa. Their role, like any decent parents, was to encourage, cheer and occasionally exhort their children in their efforts.
These re-enactments haven't always been just for the high school aged. Dick says that about 15 years ago the young men and women LDS groups of the church became much more involved.
Children prepared
There's about 6,000 members of the LDS Church in what's known as the Casa Grande Stake. This includes wards in Coolidge, Sacaton, Florence, Casa Grande, Arizona City and Maricopa. In recent years, all the children of the church have come to know that they will be asked and tasked with this trek.
"This was an opportunity to have some fun. I'm happy to do it," says 16-year-old Caleb Hansen of the Coolidge Ward.
Like most, he found out in August that the trek would be held just two days after Christmas. The last trek held by the Casa Grande Stake in 2002 was also its first. This time there's about a third more people.
"I had two brothers and a sister went out on the last one," Hansen says. "I know we go the farthest on the first day and it's the hardest."
Hansen talks during the 20 minutes he is taken off his handcart and declared "dead." This happens at the same time one of his family members is being treated for an imaginary snake bite.
None of the trekkers know how far they will go on the first day or overall. They know they are there to feel and relive some of the sacrifices of the Mormon handcart pioneers.
The families are formed from people who don't know each other so they can quickly learn about teamwork and getting along in adverse circumstances. As Bingham explains just before the families are named, this can be the hardest part.
"Everyone knows we have good people here," he says. "But just as in any family, you'll find they don't always mesh."
Each family puts the seven parts of their cart together, two wheels, a floor with attached axle and four sides to the bed. A tarp is cast over the top of everyone's bedding, water and clothing. Each person's belongings are rifled through to make sure such "contraband" items as toothpaste, deodorant, make-up, toilet paper, cellphones, iPods and food aren't in the mix.
"On the last day there's going to be a big push," says Rick Gibson, one of the stake leaders. "They'll move fast. They'll want hot showers."
Getting started
A glorious, layered sunrise greeted all as they headed into the base camp. An early layer of heavy clouds faded away to a feathered layer that looked like pillows. In his opening prayer, one of the main organizers, Sam Moore, said the expedition was a chance to be brought together "in the beauty of the land we live in."
"You will learn about your Lord, which is important," Gibson says. "But also you will learn about yourselves. As you push the carts I want you to remember what it was like for those before. ... They pushed and pushed and pushed their way through everything. If it rained, if there was mud."
As well as giving up items of modern convenience, each family is given a live chicken and a "baby," made of cloth and weights. The chickens will be killed for food in two days; the 10-pound babies have to be carried at all times by someone.
As everyone waits for Maricopa, snatches of conversation carry over the stiffening, gusting wind: "OK, what are we pulling our wagons with?" "We have to carry our stuff? Oh no!" A boy walking past the portable bathrooms - the last they'd see for the next four days - says they have an unexpected odor. "I swear, that smells like cherry."
Before heading out, the groups come up with their own trail names. It's not just for kicks. They take on new family identities as another way of bonding, and, in more ways than one, they leave their old selves behind.
"If you follow the Ten Commandments, the Lord will be with you and help you," Moore says. "I know that Jesus was the Christ ... I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God."
Even though the trek is only a fraction of the distance, the effort of pulling the carts is real, the physical intensity and the foot blisters, and the muscle aches and pains are real. And the experience becomes a part of each trekker's real life. No, not dead, but dead tired.
"If the lesson is, I should be grateful for what I have, I've learned it," says Sierra Skousen of Maricopa Ward 1, about four hours into the journey. Her tongue is still finding the dry, hard grit between her teeth. "Can we go home now?"
Sierra is talking just after the handcart convoy has forced its way down a slope steep enough where people holding the cart behind had to slow the descent into the sandy wash. That is immediately followed by a tendon-straining, lunging run to get over a hump that looks imposing enough to keep them down. It doesn't.
The girl next to Skousen says she thought it was going to be tougher. "I didn't know it was going to be gradual like this," says Rachelle Scott of the Coolidge Ward. "I thought it was going to be hard all the time."
The longest, straightest stretch follows underneath and beside the power line road, a moment of inauthenticy remarked on at the time. Hands that look like they had juggled coal grip in front and behind the carts. Every other part of the trip is in and out or along dry river beds. They push and propel themselves over the steep, sharp, rock walls of the washes. Greasewood and other bushes get caught in the spokes of the large metal wheels and every now and then one of the trekkers gets one - thwack - in the face.
Very few slip as they keep moving onward.
No underlying fear
One aspect is very different. Unlike how the pioneers felt, during this trek there was never the underlying uncertainty and fear that something could kill or injure. The group is uniformly healthy - all were screened for fitness. The families are safe and if true emergency erupts, help is minutes away.
"Each day when the sun came up the pioneers didn't know whether they'd go 13 miles or 30 miles," Dick says. "They didn't know what faced them. By not telling them how far they've got to go, we're trying to preserve that feeling."
The "road kill," as the trekkers are jokingly referred to as they lie along the trail, are an eerie reminder of the many who died in two of the original handcart companies that tried to travel 1,300 miles to a better place.
Like them, they got quieter as the day wore on. They fell quickly and barely moved where they lay. Unlike their ancestors, they got up and continued, with Dennis Harvey's harmonica playing a lively square dance tune to pop a little pep in their steps.
"They're still cheerful," a nurse alongside the trail says as cart after cart plods by. It's about an hour into the journey and the 20 carts are winding their way through a pre-destined trail.
The movement of the carts at this point seems like the stumbling of a broken centipede. A cart moves forward and then stops as its pullers realize they are running into the back of the cart ahead. This stop-start motion smooths out as they all progress, though the distance between tip and tail carts grows longer.
Chickens in small crates rock rapidly underneath the carts, closer to the grind, the noise and the dust. A few carts tied had chicken crates tied on top, but that meant people pushing the carts had to look into the face of the chickens they would have to kill.
"I don't want to kill it," says 17-year-old Lauren Merrill of the Coolidge Ward. "We want to kill the baby, keep the chicken. The baby's heavy, we don't have to carry the chicken."
After Lauren sees a look of horror pass over "Ma's" face, she clarifies. "The baby isn't real here, the chicken is."
Wayne Tomkinson says some of the trekkers and the ma's and pa's have traced their ancestry back to those who were handcart pioneers. That includes him.
"Some things, like plastic, you start to think, what would they have given for a sheet of plastic, a tarp," Tomkinson says. "We're trekkers, but even with what we're doing, we're modern trekkers."
Beth Peterson and her husband DuWayne came on the trail near the end of the first day to tell stories of these real-life people.
"It really connects what they're doing now to their past and to their heritage," Beth says.
But, with the trek stopped for the first rest longer than five minutes, Beth and DuWayne walk among the teenagers, and they are met with closed eyes and bodies prone on the cooling desert sand. Beth says they don't have the heart to disturb them, and are only able to tell a few of the stories at this time.
After the ma's and pa's have a meeting while everyone else rests, the sun is behind the peak now in front of them. They will head over the low pass before the day ends. Bingham's plan is to go on into the darkened evening and stop for the night at about 10 p.m.
When they all wake up the next morning it is under a steady haze of rain.
©Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Inc. 2007
It was the same ground that 150 pairs of feet had walked during the day. It was the ground that was alternatively hard-packed soil and shifting sand.
It was ground that if a person looked back, he could see the thin, lined impressions dug into it from the 400-pound handcarts that these bodies had pulled and pushed for eight miles and seven hours.
The young men and women, all between the ages of 14 and 18, all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were on this ground, resting. They were taking part in a re-enactment of the 1,300-mile journey that 10 handcart companies took across the middle of the United States 150 years ago.
Unlike many of their historical counterparts in those loosely organized companies, the modern trekkers weren't dead, just dead tired.
Connections
About a mile in, off the last paved road, at the extreme south of Arizona City, eggs, biscuits, pancakes and sausages were in oversupply early in the morning of Dec. 27.
A large group was gathered, knowing only a little about the next four days.
For at least the last year, hundreds of people had focused on the planning and logistics of moving about 275 people and their supplies across 20 miles of desert. Their task also included making the trip a historical moment, limiting almost everything to what was available to poor migrants in the 1850s.
Alan Bingham is the trail boss for what's known as Arise and Shine Forth, Casa Grande Arizona Stake Handcart Trek 2006. He's there with the participants on a chilly morning to create both difficulties and challenges, and create an atmosphere where everyone helps everyone else get through them.
As the group grew bigger, still missing were the kids from the Maricopa Ward. They were late and tongues started wagging that being late to get going was what had doomed Willie and Martin, two of the original handcart companies. Each suffered great casualties because they started out across the country in late August, with less preparedness than the other companies that had already moved out.
Mike Dick, a trail captain, says while the other companies had about a 5 percent mortality rate, the Willie and Martin companies had a quarter of their group die off.
Last Wednesday, the trailhead, the teenagers ate first, prayed second and were split into families, one family for one cart. Each family had about 9 to 11 people that included a ma and pa. Their role, like any decent parents, was to encourage, cheer and occasionally exhort their children in their efforts.
These re-enactments haven't always been just for the high school aged. Dick says that about 15 years ago the young men and women LDS groups of the church became much more involved.
Children prepared
There's about 6,000 members of the LDS Church in what's known as the Casa Grande Stake. This includes wards in Coolidge, Sacaton, Florence, Casa Grande, Arizona City and Maricopa. In recent years, all the children of the church have come to know that they will be asked and tasked with this trek.
"This was an opportunity to have some fun. I'm happy to do it," says 16-year-old Caleb Hansen of the Coolidge Ward.
Like most, he found out in August that the trek would be held just two days after Christmas. The last trek held by the Casa Grande Stake in 2002 was also its first. This time there's about a third more people.
"I had two brothers and a sister went out on the last one," Hansen says. "I know we go the farthest on the first day and it's the hardest."
Hansen talks during the 20 minutes he is taken off his handcart and declared "dead." This happens at the same time one of his family members is being treated for an imaginary snake bite.
None of the trekkers know how far they will go on the first day or overall. They know they are there to feel and relive some of the sacrifices of the Mormon handcart pioneers.
The families are formed from people who don't know each other so they can quickly learn about teamwork and getting along in adverse circumstances. As Bingham explains just before the families are named, this can be the hardest part.
"Everyone knows we have good people here," he says. "But just as in any family, you'll find they don't always mesh."
Each family puts the seven parts of their cart together, two wheels, a floor with attached axle and four sides to the bed. A tarp is cast over the top of everyone's bedding, water and clothing. Each person's belongings are rifled through to make sure such "contraband" items as toothpaste, deodorant, make-up, toilet paper, cellphones, iPods and food aren't in the mix.
"On the last day there's going to be a big push," says Rick Gibson, one of the stake leaders. "They'll move fast. They'll want hot showers."
Getting started
A glorious, layered sunrise greeted all as they headed into the base camp. An early layer of heavy clouds faded away to a feathered layer that looked like pillows. In his opening prayer, one of the main organizers, Sam Moore, said the expedition was a chance to be brought together "in the beauty of the land we live in."
"You will learn about your Lord, which is important," Gibson says. "But also you will learn about yourselves. As you push the carts I want you to remember what it was like for those before. ... They pushed and pushed and pushed their way through everything. If it rained, if there was mud."
As well as giving up items of modern convenience, each family is given a live chicken and a "baby," made of cloth and weights. The chickens will be killed for food in two days; the 10-pound babies have to be carried at all times by someone.
As everyone waits for Maricopa, snatches of conversation carry over the stiffening, gusting wind: "OK, what are we pulling our wagons with?" "We have to carry our stuff? Oh no!" A boy walking past the portable bathrooms - the last they'd see for the next four days - says they have an unexpected odor. "I swear, that smells like cherry."
Before heading out, the groups come up with their own trail names. It's not just for kicks. They take on new family identities as another way of bonding, and, in more ways than one, they leave their old selves behind.
"If you follow the Ten Commandments, the Lord will be with you and help you," Moore says. "I know that Jesus was the Christ ... I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God."
Even though the trek is only a fraction of the distance, the effort of pulling the carts is real, the physical intensity and the foot blisters, and the muscle aches and pains are real. And the experience becomes a part of each trekker's real life. No, not dead, but dead tired.
"If the lesson is, I should be grateful for what I have, I've learned it," says Sierra Skousen of Maricopa Ward 1, about four hours into the journey. Her tongue is still finding the dry, hard grit between her teeth. "Can we go home now?"
Sierra is talking just after the handcart convoy has forced its way down a slope steep enough where people holding the cart behind had to slow the descent into the sandy wash. That is immediately followed by a tendon-straining, lunging run to get over a hump that looks imposing enough to keep them down. It doesn't.
The girl next to Skousen says she thought it was going to be tougher. "I didn't know it was going to be gradual like this," says Rachelle Scott of the Coolidge Ward. "I thought it was going to be hard all the time."
The longest, straightest stretch follows underneath and beside the power line road, a moment of inauthenticy remarked on at the time. Hands that look like they had juggled coal grip in front and behind the carts. Every other part of the trip is in and out or along dry river beds. They push and propel themselves over the steep, sharp, rock walls of the washes. Greasewood and other bushes get caught in the spokes of the large metal wheels and every now and then one of the trekkers gets one - thwack - in the face.
Very few slip as they keep moving onward.
No underlying fear
One aspect is very different. Unlike how the pioneers felt, during this trek there was never the underlying uncertainty and fear that something could kill or injure. The group is uniformly healthy - all were screened for fitness. The families are safe and if true emergency erupts, help is minutes away.
"Each day when the sun came up the pioneers didn't know whether they'd go 13 miles or 30 miles," Dick says. "They didn't know what faced them. By not telling them how far they've got to go, we're trying to preserve that feeling."
The "road kill," as the trekkers are jokingly referred to as they lie along the trail, are an eerie reminder of the many who died in two of the original handcart companies that tried to travel 1,300 miles to a better place.
Like them, they got quieter as the day wore on. They fell quickly and barely moved where they lay. Unlike their ancestors, they got up and continued, with Dennis Harvey's harmonica playing a lively square dance tune to pop a little pep in their steps.
"They're still cheerful," a nurse alongside the trail says as cart after cart plods by. It's about an hour into the journey and the 20 carts are winding their way through a pre-destined trail.
The movement of the carts at this point seems like the stumbling of a broken centipede. A cart moves forward and then stops as its pullers realize they are running into the back of the cart ahead. This stop-start motion smooths out as they all progress, though the distance between tip and tail carts grows longer.
Chickens in small crates rock rapidly underneath the carts, closer to the grind, the noise and the dust. A few carts tied had chicken crates tied on top, but that meant people pushing the carts had to look into the face of the chickens they would have to kill.
"I don't want to kill it," says 17-year-old Lauren Merrill of the Coolidge Ward. "We want to kill the baby, keep the chicken. The baby's heavy, we don't have to carry the chicken."
After Lauren sees a look of horror pass over "Ma's" face, she clarifies. "The baby isn't real here, the chicken is."
Wayne Tomkinson says some of the trekkers and the ma's and pa's have traced their ancestry back to those who were handcart pioneers. That includes him.
"Some things, like plastic, you start to think, what would they have given for a sheet of plastic, a tarp," Tomkinson says. "We're trekkers, but even with what we're doing, we're modern trekkers."
Beth Peterson and her husband DuWayne came on the trail near the end of the first day to tell stories of these real-life people.
"It really connects what they're doing now to their past and to their heritage," Beth says.
But, with the trek stopped for the first rest longer than five minutes, Beth and DuWayne walk among the teenagers, and they are met with closed eyes and bodies prone on the cooling desert sand. Beth says they don't have the heart to disturb them, and are only able to tell a few of the stories at this time.
After the ma's and pa's have a meeting while everyone else rests, the sun is behind the peak now in front of them. They will head over the low pass before the day ends. Bingham's plan is to go on into the darkened evening and stop for the night at about 10 p.m.
When they all wake up the next morning it is under a steady haze of rain.
©Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Inc. 2007
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