August 13th, 2009

 

I have to do a quick blog because I am about to lose power.

My leg is doing well and I am excited about that. It was 99 degrees today and was a big drain to try and get to my destination.

I am including an email that I sent to a friend of mine because I feel that it is something that everyone should know that is following this trek….After having made great progress in the hospital, I have begun to pull the handcart again and I walked 18 of the 20 miles yesterday and then I pulled 16 miles today and feel as good as I did before I went into this tailspin. So if I am the only one that has walked the same footsteps, eaten as they did and suffered as they did, I truly believe that there is Divine Intervention during a lot of this trek so I can be the last living witness to what so many gave their lives for. All we have are the journals, stories and text books of those who suffered for us, and it’s not only Mormons, it was 600k people who traveled those trails in search of their dream, be it gold dust or religious freedom. Their lives are literally etched into the dust and rock that I walk. This trek is about America…it’s not about me or not really just about my grandmother, it’s about those whose “Faith was Greater Than their Pain” to find their dream. One of the most profound sentences that I think that I have ever read in the

hundreds of pioneer journals that I have absorbed over the years was a man newly baptized into the Mormon faith in the 1850′s. After having given up his home and everything that life’s comforts had to offer him in search of his newly found religion that took him half way around the world, he said that his proudest moment was when he stepped off from his clipper ship and a man at the bottom of the gangway called me an “American”! He felt that he was now part of the greatest nation on earth and they included him as one on the citizenry. What an amazing moment in his life…something that I feel too many that occupy our shores have lost…feeling proud to be considered an American.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to ramble but I have had over a couple of months to my thoughts and to be able to feel the impressions of those footsteps that I walk in on a daily basis and I’m afraid that those that gave so much on our behalf would be utterly disappointed at what has become of this nation, but at the same time I can give testimony as to the spirit of the people who live in small town America, they, like me, aren’t quite sure how we lost that spirit that built America but it is my resolve to change what I have the power to change, and that power may be to change only myself.

TOMORROW I’M IN WYOMING!!!