boy we've come a long way

As some of you know, I've just finished reading the book (left) These is my Words by Nancy Turner for one of my book clubs. It's a historical fiction written by a local author (if Tucson is really considered local) about the struggles of a family settling the Arizona Territory way back in the days of the Wild Wild West. Of course, to keep readers like me interested, there is a love story. The overwhelming remarks of the book club were about the ruggedness of the west and insane amount of death highlighted in the story (to give you an idea, about 10 people die in the first 20 pages) and it struck me as crazy until.... this last weekend we were driving back to Phoenix from Las Vegas, through some of the very land written about in the book. Now I understand.

The 388-mile trek took us 7 hours (with 2 young kids, you take lots of breaks) and while the boys were comfy cozy and occupied with snacks and DVD players in the backseat, I had nothing but the barren landscape to keep me company (radio station? ha!). So I found my mind wandering back to the book. Just how it was back then and how it this desert probably hasn't changed all that much since the late 1800s when Sarah Agnes Prine and her family tredged across it. Okay, well the land may be the only thing that hasn't changed. For one, we certainly weren't traveling on horseback or in a stagecoach. I wasn't forced to wear heavy long dresses with petticoats (thank God, I'll keep my jeans). And the biggest threat to our livelihood was Hunter yelling in the back that his sippy cup had run out of apple juice rather than Indians with bows and arrows... in fact, the closest thing to Indians I could find was the Jeep Grand Cherokee we were driving in.

If nothing else, the drive made me very happy to have all the freedoms and abilities that I have now as an American woman. It also made me very thankful for my iPhone (but that's a different story).