The Popular Ruts Don’t Tell the Whole Tale

We spent part of yesterday in Guernsey Wyoming, at the Oregon Trail Wagon Rut site. We’ve been there before – twice in fact. I have photos of my now 22 year old daughter, when she was about 10, trekking up through the deepest of the ruts.

Previously, we took the trail with the stairs, and went right to those deep ruts. This time, we took the paved trail from the other end. We passed a long stretch of shallower ruts before we even got to the deep ones. Coming at things from a different angle was very enlightening – we saw some new things we had not seen on our previous visits. We also noticed something we had not noticed before – there were more than one set of ruts in some places.

Inspired by that insight, we began looking for places where more than one route had been taken across the rocks. We found them all over! Wheel marks went in all directions in some areas. We hiked down to where the ruts began on one end, and looked for evidence where the wind had blown dirt into the tracks. It was apparent that there were many routes across, some more deeply marked than others. And the deeply marked ones were not always the “best” way, or even the easiest. They were just the most visible.

Those secondary ruts crisscrossed the deeper ones – merging with them, then diverging again. They didn’t completely leave the trail, they just found a different way over some of the roughest parts. And it was a REALLY rough trail. Steep, rocky, uneven, and probably scary to drive an ox team and wagon over. You can tell that those who traveled it first had to carve it out – hacking down parts of the rock, and filling other parts with dirt or wood. So to diverge from the trail to find an alternate course meant a lot of work for those who did it first.

How often life is like this. We see the obvious, because it is pointed out to us. We think that the obvious is the story, or that it must be the best way.  It is only by looking outside the normal expectations and by looking beyond the common that we discover that there are often many ways to do things, and that the best way for us may not be the way everyone else assumes is best.

This analogy extends far beyond that simple correlation. It takes in other factors – the design of the individual wagon, the animals that it was pulled by, the load it carried, the number of people with it, the number of people on the trail and how much congestion there was within a single pathway, the goals and objectives of the travelers, etc. But I don’t really need to expand on that, use your imagination and you’ll find some concepts to ponder.

We had a fun time – but for me, the great thing I took from the day was the discovery of all those other ruts. All of them traveled enough to make marks, but since the marks were not quite as deep and impressive now, largely ignored and unremembered. But for thousands, those secondary ruts where the path of success, the way they made their own piece of history, and the defining element in their life, if only for a day. It made me think about the beaten path, and how much I have achieved by leaving it and carving my own ruts on a little different route.

And I wonder if the marks I leave will still be visible in 100 years, or if they’ll be worn and covered by the effects of time and natural forces.