Blessed, Honored Pioneer

Brightly Colored Burdens, Brian Kershisnik

In the summer, especially in July, we think about pioneers. We can't help it.

Whenever I think about pioneers
I think of brave women and men.
I like to remember that children came too;
I would like to have been a child then.

For starters, this sentiment was, for me at least, patently false. I wasn't normally one to question, or indeed, even to notice the lyrics of the songs we sang Wednesday afternoons when the bus dropped us all off at the church for Primary, but these sort of jumped out at me. (Interestingly, if you weren't headed into the church for Primary meeting the bus still dropped you at the church and you walked the rest of the way home. Same for the activity bus that brought you home from the school in Fillmore if you had to stay late. You walked from a central drop. Alone. In the Dark. I'll tell you more about that another time. Back to Songs About Pioneers.)
I did NOT want to be a child then, or at any rate, there. I did NOT want to cross the Great American Desert (named by the namers of names before they got very far west and found out about the actual great American deserts. Baker, anyone? Barstow?) on foot or in a wagon or on a fast horse or a light spring buggy or any other way. I wanted ocean and trees and cliffs and mist and stone walls haunted by aristocratic shades with romantic tales attached, not stoic ghosts moving ever westward with such grim determination they had never noticed (or so it appeared to the child I was) that we were here. This was it, The Place, we had gone no further and had been here as if for years really quite some time now. The pioneers we sang of every July in preparation for their day on the 24th seemed to me like sailors in ghost ships, clinging eternally to their prairie schooners, ceaselessly roving westward, losing an endless supply of loved ones along the way, sharing out flour by teacupfuls from sacks mysteriously replenished, raising by their faith the essential draft animals which were doing their solid best to expire, fiddling, singing and dancing their ghostly heads off around their buffalo-chip campfires. (Good thing our civilization didn't destroy the buffalo any sooner, how on earth would anyone have ever gotten themselves and their families across those plains to colonize and conquer the west without the buffalo? We'd still be stacked up on the eastern seaboard, standing in line for passage in sailing ships headed 'round the Horn, stymied in enacting our Manifest Destiny till the invention of air travel.) The pioneers of my childhood were contradictory that way, always, always still in their crossing though I knew they ages ago got here; I lived, after all, in a town they made out of nothing. All the Mormon relatives that stretched between them and me were somewhere in the cemetery, to be ordered and stacked by those with the interest to do so. What was now the granary on our lot was first a house with one inch of milled lumber, a layer of tar paper and several of pretty wallpaper between the pioneers who lived inside it and the Utah Territory that lived outside it. The upstairs loft where the entire family slept (always said as if there had been thirty of them, at least) was my playhouse. They made, used and left the blacksmith's shop still standing twenty feet beyond the granary. I knew they had gotten here. But all the stories of them I ever heard as a child were snapshots en route and our Primary songs embalmed them in forward motion on a great wheel, Sisyphean, running on a barrel in water, an exhibit for all time of The Crossing, frozen in their faith, a grim and impossible comparative measure for ours.
I'll show you.

Day after day the wagons are rolling,
Onward and westward we ever must roam.
Roll along, roll along, covered wagons, take us safely to our new home.
Night after night we sit round the campfire
Singing the songs that remind us of home.
Roll along, roll along, covered wagons, take us safely to our new home.
Someday we'll reach the land of our dreaming,
Settle and build on some land of our own.
Roll along, roll along, covered wagons, take us safely to our new home.

See what I mean? When do they arrive? Not in any Primary song I ever sang. There's that ominous ever must roam for good measure. Nobody's got an ETA, sister, so settle down and pass the ashcakes. And just for further glorious confusion, where in this song is home? The songs that reminded the child-me of home were the songs about the pioneers leaving home to come to...home.
This is the catchy descant from To Be A Pioneer

We are marching, ever marching,
We are marching, ever marching,
Marching onward, ever onward.

Doomed to walk for eternity... The actual verses remind us that, of course, one needn't do the normal things we associate with pioneers, walk a thousand miles OR MORE, or leave your family dear, to gain pioneer status, but believe you me, any Kanosh Primary child worth its salt (a very large lick of which sold for not very much at my dad's General Mercantile) knew the difference between pioneering and BEING a pioneer. What camp of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers does your grandma belong to? Your people come in wagons? Handcarts? On the shameful train? Don't be trying to tell us stuff.

Pioneer children sang as they walked
and walked
and walked
and walked.

Like that? Good. Repeat it. In addition to walking walking walking they got to wash in streams, work and play, camp, read and pray, but the song leaves them as it found them,

Week after week they sang as they walked
and walked
and walked
and walked
and walked.

That last walked, the last note, has a fermata so a wise chorister can draw it out to the gasping point, leaving the walking children suspended on our fading breath, for as long as necessary to drive home the point.

Little pioneer children, gathering berries for food;
See the pioneer children hunting chips for wood.

Do you know how many berries lie between me in my Kanosh chapel and the Gateway to the American West? This was why they needed the bottomless flour sacks, like in a fairytale. The very best part about this song was that the chorister had to explain chips to us. It wasn't that we thought it was interesting or a big deal, it was that she thought it was.
I think they are a dismal, dispirited bunch, those little songs. Slow, plodding, melancholy. Child-sized dirges for our departed ancestors. The only one with any spirit at all was The Handcart Song.

When pioneers moved to the west,
With courage strong they met the test,
They pushed their handcarts all day long
And as they pushed they sang this song:
For some must push and some must pull
As we go marching up the hill;
So merrily on our way we go
Until we reach the Valley-o.

There you go. These are my people. (Hey, Sam.) Strong, merry, tested, but moving on to somewhere they called the Valley-o. Who could resist? Plus, this has a rollicking good tune and made me feel excited for them. Like they were working through something hard but that it had a way through and it had an end and God didn't want them to suffer for the sake of it, He wanted them to make it and He knew they would and that they were going to be very happy-o when they got there. Got there. These people got there.

In the summer we think about pioneers.
We put in sod right before we flew to New York City. I told the painter we can do it but it will take all of us and anyone who will help and it will take all we've got, absolutely all of it, but then it will be over and we can sleep on the plane. I figured it would take us three days. We had two and a half. It was hard and hot and horrible and friends came to help us. On the worst day, the middle day, the dirt-moving day, one friend showed up and stayed with us all day. It made us work more cheerfully. Cheerful, because we had to be. She and I leaned on our shovels in the blistering afternoon sun (I don't know if she got a happenin' tan from this endeavor; I did not) and talked about our pioneer ancestors. Only the women because we don't understand men in the first place and we wouldn't have been them, anyway. Our talk was of hardship and unending physical labor. Our summation was that we could not have Done It. Could not. The next day tons of people showed up throughout the day and into the dark of the night they still came to help the painter while our youngest child had a birthday/end-of-school bash on the part of the lawn we didn't fix and I began packing. A sod bee, a grass raising. With those people I also talked about pioneers putting in fruit trees and plowing for grain, digging irrigation ditches. And we made it. In the morning there was green, green grass where before there had only always been dirt and we got on a plane and flew away while our automatic sprinkler system saw to our gorgeous non-productive planting. And we flew home to grass. Done and done.

July 24th is Pioneer Day. We celebrated it in Wales. Noah will celebrate it in Macau. It's my mom's birthday. She can use it to never have a fuss made about her birthday because what can we do? The Kanosh Town 24th celebration is consuming and enormous and what can we do? We can always feel a tiny bit, just a very little, guilty because we forgot to get something for that day, forgot the greeting because we were in charge of the Nursery float for the parade and all the two year olds had to be in costume in the back of the crepe paper decorated truck by 8:30 for the parade to begin at 9 and we had to keep them alive till it was all over. Perfect Pioneer Day. Just a pinch of guilt to season the dutch oven beef.

I went to the Kanosh house for three days to clean and fix. The painter stays there mostly alone so there isn't as much of that cleaning and fixing. I sat for a time in what I intended to make a flower garden. It never prospered, never took, but I sold myself into bondage and slavery spinning dreams of a day, someday, with lush dense flowers, clear beds, tamed paths, circle-in-the-square. I worked my brains out; it is nearly gone now. It's been watered and the paths mowed, but it's as if without constant observation my flowers just shimmered away into the wind that always, always blows. My sister tells me she went to the house she sold a couple of years ago, where the new owners have watered and mowed faithfully though they are not really gardeners. She asked for starts from her old plants; sure, they said. But there was nothing, nothing to take. Beds full of grass; weeds where gravel paths had been. Just that much time, looking away for a few seasons, and it was all gone. Why, we asked each other. Why did we work so hard? For what? For everything to just blow away when our backs were turned? Does nothing survive?

We thought about pioneers. We talked about England and how we had tried to build it in Kanosh. Singing the songs that remind us of home. Scandinavia. The British Isles. This other Eden. Our people came to Utah from God's gardens. Green and mists and cliffs and stone walls. Is this dusty Kanosh yard all that there will be when I'm gone? Stickers and foxtails? I was suddenly irrationally joyous I had written a few words and a few people had read them. Shakespeare was right, not marble, not monuments, words. These stay. This is also why I always sang Primary songs about the Crossing, those were the words most of the pioneers wrote down, a momentous life event, not the day-to-day once they reached the Valley-o.

I spent two solid days in my old house (though all my houses are old) in a deep melancholy. Deep even for me. Soft midnight blue velvet coffin lining. I thought a lot about death. I thought about impermanence and wasted effort. I thought in a panic about my children inheriting my messes as they now stood. On the third day, as I was vacuuming the ceiling I started talking to God (perhaps because I was looking up). I thought about the family that had built the house, a family I knew had struggled. Zella Allen, who died after being a widow for a long time. The builder, a man never really well, never really strong, a barber. When we tore out the plaster in the bathroom it was full of human hair. Curly, straight, lots of colors. Zella wove rugs. Nothing remained of their work in my yard. We found a bit of foundation on the property line, an out-building we would really have appreciated using. But the lot was nearly bare when we bought it. An old apple, a lilac and some roses. Those last. A young English walnut, a young black ash and a young locust. Those volunteer. A large Siberian elm. Those can't be killed. A terribly bumpy lawn, you could never lay on it or even sit without great care.
I wondered about hard lives and I asked God, is this house just haunted by a sad, overworked ghost? And He asked, would that be you?
After I got over that for a while I finally got tired of myself and asked Him, am I going to just be broken-hearted about this for the rest of my life? Do I have to think about this forever? And He asked, what can you learn?

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love.

I had talked to my sister about pioneers, about nothing being left of the gardens they made except where someone kept on keeping them alive. I thought about the apple trees, the lilacs and the roses. I thought about going with the painter's mother to Reliance, Wyoming, to show the girls the house where Grandma was born, about finding a town run-down and bereft, about the frozen horror of the memories of parties and football, of Beautiful Garden contests and prize vegetables. There are no gardens now in Reliance. Grandma could only find the house where she was born by counting buildings, first in her memory and then on the street. I thought about pride and I thought about squalor. Impermanence. I thought about myself fighting Siberian elms tooth and nail all the years I kept a garden in Kanosh, fighting them because they are boorish, trashy outlaws. But they cut the endless wind, they grow quickly, they don't drink much and they give shade. Had I fostered a few of them they would have given me shelter and respite--and I thought about my ancestors and some of the relatives at the reunions this summer.

Here's my heart, oh, take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

In July we sing to our pioneers. We cannot help ourselves.

What can I learn?
If I had it to do over I would have rolled out the bumps and filled the holes in the lawn at the Kanosh house the first year we lived there. My sister points out it is difficult to accomplish such a thing in Kanosh, the geography is against you. Where do you rent a roller? This is the point, I would do it differently.
I would plant apple trees and lilacs and roses.
I would let the trashy elms give me shade.
I would build high fences to keep out the wind.
I would finish every room in my house. Every room. There is not, right now, one finished room. I would finish every room.
We would dress the backlot and grow our own beef because cattle do well in Kanosh.
I would go visit England and build a Utah garden in Kanosh.
I would try much harder to keep in touch with the friends I had outside Millard County. This will surprise both of them.
I would, someday, write down everything that happened so people could remember that my son always sang as he walked through the gardens and my middle daughter spoke English like she learned it on Mars and the little one rubbed her face in the cats she always always carried. Write it down when I read a book or do a play or can peaches or sing with a friend. Words last, don't let them all be about not having gotten there yet.
I was raised on bits of stories, pieces of sentences I never thought to corroborate, fill in, flesh out. A woman in the first company to reach the Valley-o confiding to her journal she'd far rather go on as far again as she had come than stay in The Place they had found. Chicken coops, empty on every backlot, left after no one was selling eggs anymore, but people still telling me how the eggs were stored, shipped. Stories of fruit raised as cash crops, peaches you can hardly grow any more and watermelons stolen from fields at night. Watermelons? Who can grow watermelons? Brigham Young zipping through Kanosh, going somewhere warmer, promising no one would ever lack for food if they'd be good. Faithful. The Mormons who didn't pick up and go on to California, who stayed in the place they got to and submitted to being made into Saints. The Place, they were promised, would be good for that.

I see the emptiness of allowing myself to just keep journeying, distracted by hard work from being where I really am, no matter how faithful I may think it makes me look. I see the point is to get there, to at least be there as if for years. Day from day in my own Valley-o.
The painter says, we're older now. We've learned.
It's time to arrive.
My pioneers planted lilacs and roses alongside the apples and grain. Have you heard the stories about all the dances, the parties in the Valley-o? How they played as hard as they worked, right from the start? Every day, day after day, on the way and after they arrived.

It's a bonfire at my house. Someone will bring a guitar (he'd better). Plan to stay late. I'll put out quilts. The grass is green and smooth.
Lilacs everywhere, I found old roses still alive under the pyracantha, in the spring I'll plant apples.

We learned other pioneer songs in Primary too, from Sister George, in months other than July.

Come ye children of the Lord,
Let us sing with one accord.

When dark clouds of trouble hang o'er us,
And threaten our peace to destroy
There is Hope smiling brightly before us
And we know that Deliverance is nigh.

How blessed the day when the Lamb and the Lion
Shall lie down, together, without any ire.

...singing the songs that remind us of home.

Whenever I think about pioneers
I think of brave women and men.


Winter Dancing, Brian Kershisnik