The Long Trail West
Perhaps one of my first introductions to the loneliness of stuff left behind was from the computer game Oregon Trail. In the long ago days of fifth and sixth grade, I would walk into the only air conditioned room I ever had reason to visit, rub my arms against the goosebumps and try not to lean backwards in the plastic lawn chairs, waiting for the computers to turn on and the game to start. In the computer lab. Notice my fashionable mismatched socks and my "white" Keds. Oregon Trail was a window for learning. About computers, yes, but also about diseases I didn't know how to pronounce, geography that I somehow assumed mostly to be fictional, and the oddity of leaving home for an unknown future. (Never mind the irony that I was living the same story, the child of international missionaries.) But back to Oregon Trail. My memory is too vague to remember whether the crude pixelated images showed items abandoned on the side of the road, but in the years since, I ha