WEST

Rae pees on the stick and watches the blue line emerge as if marking the beginning of a race.

During the Oklahoma run, fifteen thousand people lined up in wagons and on horseback and raced forward at the gun across the dusty, unclaimed land.

Rae works in a supermarket. Her favourite task is replenishment. It feels good to fill those shelves. She lines the cans flush with the shelf precipice and thinks of pioneers traversing mountainous ravines. She lays the vegetables on beds of artificial grass and imagines the oxen feeding after a long day walking. The young men and women who shop in the store with their iPads and designer rucksacks aren’t the sort of people to walk across country, to suffer the storms and hard ground, to nurse the sick and the dying, to contemplate themselves in silence. They would probably say something like, The city is my wilderness.

The doctor works out the baby’s due date by counting forwards from the first day of Rae’s last period. She was pregnant for two weeks before she conceived. Pregnancy is a trail that began before she knew it did.  

The sickness knocks her out. She lies for days in a dark room. She flicks through the television channels. She can’t commit to anything. She watches fragments of advertisements, game shows, documentaries – Nazis, the environment, pioneers – anything. The historical re-enactments look fake. She switches the TV off. She switches the light on. She reads Anna’s history books and adventure guides.

Women pioneers didn’t intend their journals to be published. They just wrote what happened to them. The fact that these books are available to read is because someone later decided their experiences were important.

Always pack a water pump and filter, a good tent, warm clothing in case the weather turns, GPS if available, though this is not the old way.

Buffalo Bill Cody used real Native Americans in his shows to enact the very battles in which their families died.

During the American Civil War, it was common practice to pose corpses before taking their photograph to make them seem more dead.

Ghost towns are just sitting there, abandoned. No one is living in them anymore. No one is looking after them. When they were populated, they had a story, but once the residents left, the narrative vanished. You can’t tell what their story is just by looking at a picture. You must be there.

The Oregon Trail is being swallowed up by agriculture. Soon, there won’t be any trace of it left. If we lose that history, we won’t remember how we once raced across the country, shaping, and devouring it, how greedy we are.

Photographs show wagon swales cutting through prairieland as if the pioneers have only just passed through and are waiting over the brow of the hill.

At the hospital, when a nurse struggles to measure Rae’s heartbeat. Anna says, Perhaps you don’t have one.

A scan of Rae’s uterus shows an egg sac positioned correctly. A fluttering dot shows a heart. It is alive.

Rae sees the baby’s bones, as if the child has already been born, lived, died, and been buried, and she has missed it all.