Oregon Trail

Mat Benson sat across from me in 4^th grade, where on the roof of my mouth, I would daily trace, with my tongue, the cursive letters of his name displayed on his placard, laminated to the top of his wooden desk with cold metal legs. Not because I had a crush on him, or because he had an alliterative name, of course. But because I was so bored.

On rainy days we had the option to stay inside during recess, and being somewhat of an indoor kid, always thrilled me as I would run to the computer lab, log on to an apple computer, use almost the entire recess to watch the game boot up and then play about 3 minutes of the Oregon Trail game. Probably the best and most vivid memories of my elementary school.

Mrs. Simon, my teacher, had a severe bob hair cut and always wore white, silken, and slightly opaque blouses tucked into her high fastening slacks. Her bras were mazes of lace and straps and elastic and fabric, and stared at her boobs for at least a few hours a day. I certainly didn’t know what that thing was or why she needed it, but I had a feeling that I might need to know where to get one someday and I wanted to have it memorized. She had a nervous habit of shaking her foot to the point where I was concerned it was going to come off. She also had a face so caked in foundation and powder that once, while writing vocabulary words on the overhead, she really got her foot going and instead of her shoe flying off, a small piece of her face actually fell on to the overhead slide. There are many words I still can’t spell because of that incident.

Mrs. Simon announced with some enthusiasm, which was rare for her, that we were going to have a hands on and interactive unit on survival and the Oregon Trail. I was so eager about this, I spent that whole night laying in bed thinking of who from my class I would want in my wagon and who I hoped got typhoid fever.

We saw many videos on the subject of survival; the one that stuck out for me was where a man told us how, if you get lost in the woods after swimming with your family, stay where you are, take off your clothes to get dry, cover yourself in tree sap and roll around in dirt so you don’t get a sunburn and so you aren’t naked and that if you had a small piece of surgical tubing, some plastic wrap and a day or two, you could actually purify your own pee so you could drink it and stay alive. I would like to know what that video is called and could one request it on Netflix?

Our culminating activity for this unit was to go an a survival trip where we put our new found skills suck as building shelters to the test. None of the people I wanted in my wagon were selected to be on my survival team and I spent the entire bus ride out to the forest hoping Mrs. Simon forgot her sack lunch and that she would be hungry all day long!

We started out with our entire class and group by group, we were dropped off into these foresty little nooks where we would be retrieved by Mrs. Simon in a few hours. I doubt there are many public schools now-a-days where parents would allow their children to be dropped off in the woods, sans adult supervision, with 5 other 10 year olds. But I’m not a parent so what do I know?

Mat Benson, the boy who sat across from me at school was on my survival team. We had 2 hours to produce our shelter for our final grade. We had learned about almost every kind of shelter. Wig-wam, Tee Pee, various huts, so when Mat Benson piped up that our team should make an igloo a few of our team members seemed perturbed. Aside from the fact that it was June, and an 80 degree day, all I could think of was not that erecting an igloo would prove impossible, but how we were going to get to a place that had snow, get it all back here and make the igloo in time. Luckily there were 3 other kids on the team that were not smarter, but more practical than us and dictated that we would be making a Lean To.

I’m pretty sure none of these kids liked me, but Mrs. Simon told us we were allowed to bring large scissors, so when I whipped out a pair of hedge trimmers from my Portland Trailblazers’ duffle bag I had liberated from my parents gardening shed, my popularity climbed.

I was assigned the task of cutting branches. Just cut branches off a low, young conifer, plain and simple. Mat Benson then took the branches I cut over to the clearing where our other team mates assembled them into our Lean To. I felt confused because on the Oregon Trail game, the players just slept in their wagons and never built any shelters, but I wasn’t going to argue because this was pretty fun. So, on we went until I had just about stripped this poor tree of all its branches for our Lean To no one would ever have to attempt to survive in. Mat Benson reached for the last, rather girthy branch just as I had prepared to chomp through it with my trimmers. Sadly for him, the timing just didn’t work out in his favor because by the time I noticed that was the top of his right middle finger popping off and becoming air born, it was clearly to late. The piece of that finger landed close to our Lean To, nail side down and Mat and I stared at it for a few very long seconds. The other teammates were looking at it too and were trying to discern if it was a berry? Was it a piece of a carrot? A discarded bite of hot dog? Because it certainly couldn’t be a finger top? Mat Benson then exclaimed a few colorful words and ran up the path to find help. In all the videos we’d watched I hadn’t learned how to survive the trouble I was going to get into for bringing the stolen hedge trimmers. I gingerly placed them back into my duffle bag, sat down on it and watched as my team mates lie on the forest floor, rocking and crying in front of a half assembled Lean To and part of a finger. Was I still going to get to ride the bus home, I wondered?

No bus for me. I was driven back to school by a parent chaperone and placed in the school nurse’s office. I had never been in there when I wasn’t sick before, which made me feel instantly sick so I lay down. I started to feel bad, really bad about Mat Benson and wondered what kind of a boy he was. I had never talked to him much and thought maybe I wouldn’t have been so bored in Mrs. Simon’s class if I would have passed notes with him or typed in 8008 in my calculator to make him laugh.

I sat up on the nurse’s cot and sat the phone in my lap. I dialed my Mom’s number, not sure if anyone had informed her yet and she picked up on the third ring.

“Hi Mom,” pause. Pause more. “Did Mrs. Simon call you? Really? No? Well, I might be in trouble, can you come get me? No, nothing like that. I guess I just sort of cut,” triple pause, “Mat Benson’s finger off on our field trip. Yeah, I think I need to come home.”

I sat alone for twenty more minutes in the room, pulling back the wrapper from the paper thermometers and took my temperature over and over until I heard the screech of our Aerostar van pull up to the school office. It was the early nineties and I could actually hear my Mom’s perm get out of the car and slam the door.

I was glad there were only 3 days left 4^th grade.