One of the times I’ve laughed the hardest was on this trip, where I had taken several first-timers with me.
The map showed this trail as a “shortcut” to where I was wanting to be for the night, but it instead turned into an unglodly-long zig zag down a mountain.
Into the second hour, with the bottom of the mountain still not in sight, I overheard my buddy mutter to himself, in complete exasperation, “What sort of total masochist designed this trail??”
I think the reason it was so funny is because all of us were suffering and in complete agony, having the same sorts of thoughts. He just spoke what we were all already feeling.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
