Quotes from Rinker Buck

Uncertainty was a sacrament and the quest for miles meant that we'd never know where or how we'd end the day.

Over the years I had devised an elaborate syllabus of coping techniques for spending time with Nick.

Platte River Road Narratives

pellucid sensation. I felt completely free. Nothing

The exodus across the plains in the fifteen years before the Civil War, when more than 400,000 pioneers made the trek between the frontier at the Missouri River and the Pacific coast, is still regarded by scholars as the largest single land migration in history.

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

Cody was a classic résumé-bloater, a braggart impresario who prospered by exploiting the gullibility of the American people, most of whom are so poorly read, so bamboozled by religion and the sensationalist, mogul-worshipping press, and so desperate for heroes, that they'll believe almost anything that a grand bullshitter like Cody shovels out.

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.

Okay, son. All I am saying is that sometimes you're doing quite a lot by not doing anything. You're not quitting. You just keep going. That's the pioneer spirit.

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.

The very idea of wagon travel across the plains might have been indefinitely delayed had it not been for Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, a dreamy but persistent evangelist from the Finger Lakes of New York, who in 1836 became the first white woman to cross the Rockies. Narcissa Whitman is largely forgotten today, but her impact on American history was enormous, and for a time she was one of the most famous women in antebellum America.

Among males, conflict resolution requires a rapid return to the basics, preferably sports or automotive mechanics.

Over time "Pikers" became accepted as a term that referred to people who were slow of speech, plodding, and not ambitious in business.

The original Pikers from Kentucky and Missouri, in the words of pioneer diarist William Audley Maxwell, were considered "of a 'backwoods' class,

Perfectionism was my enemy now.

Your family consists of the people you are bound by convention to love but learn to ignore.

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.

I had never realized before just how tiring and dehydrating long exposure to the wind can be, but this made me feel closer to nature.

One of Nick's better qualities is that his short attention span does not permit him to hold a grudge for more than five minutes.

Meeker Markers" at important trail junctions.

Drill, baby, drill.

Americans were those folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything.

Persistence is a drug that delivers strength, but it also dulls our sense of reality. My last thought before falling asleep was that we are all a lot more capable of conquering obstacles and fears than we think.

This became our creed, almost a religious faith. Nobody knows and we would have to figure everything out ourselves