Exuberance: The Passion for Life (39 page)

William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote an account of the dispute leading up to the
Mayflower’s
departure. It was not, he said, a decision made in the “
giddy humor by which men are sometimes transported to their great hurt and danger” but, rather, one entered into under the pressure of dire circumstance. Any voyage to the “
vast and unpeopled countries of America,” argued those who opposed it, would be subject to many dangers: there would be “
casualties of the sea … miseries of the land, [and they would be liable to] famine and nakedness and the want, in a manner, of all things.” The change of air, diet, and drinking water would infect their bodies with “
sore sicknesses and grievous diseases,” and there would be “savage people” who would “delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be; flaying some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the members and joints of others by piecemeal and broiling on the coals, eat the collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live.” As Bradford succinctly put it, “
The very hearing of these things could not but move the bowels of men to grate.”

But those set on going to America answered back. “
All great and honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courages,” they argued. “
It was granted the dangers were great, but not desperate. The difficulties were many, but not invincible.” The new world would be dangerous and many would die, but that, in itself, was no reason to stay put, stagnant, with little to hope for from the future. Their ends were “
good and honourable,” they reasoned, “their calling lawful and urgent.” It was not beyond fairness to expect the
blessing of God in their continued pilgrimage and, though they should lose their lives, “
yet might they have comfort in the same and their endeavours would be honourable.”

Most did lose their lives. More than half of the passengers who arrived at Cape Cod aboard the
Mayflower
died within the year. They lacked food, safe water, and shelter; yet somehow they persevered. They farmed, fished, cleared forests, and laid down a government. They built schools, established trade and commerce, and created a university whose intellectual influence has been second to none. They and those who came after them prospered. Settlements flourished, new colonies came into being. Optimism, laced with desperation, had paid off.

It is in the nature of a questing species to move on, however, and it was not long before their descendants left New England to explore new lands for themselves. Some were restless and others poor, but they, with many of their countrymen, were caught up in the swell of the nation’s westward expansion. The nation was afoot. Those who were the most enthusiastic and enterprising, who possessed a stupendous energy and the will necessary to take on the mountains and cross the prairies, would prove to have an incalculable advantage over the more faint of heart. All of the force an exuberant temperament could bring to bear—vitality, optimism, an expansive mind to imagine what the wilderness might one day be; expansive moods to offset despair, rebounding energies—would be called upon by those who moved west to pit their resources against those of nature. Exuberance came into its own—needed and selected for—as a vital feature in the American character.

“
This land was an enigma,” writes Willa Cather in
O Pioneers!
“It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.” The Nebraska land “
wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.” The prairie
belonged to the pioneer who could know it, could believe in it, and could trump its mournfulness with heart and resourcefulness. “
A pioneer should have imagination,” says Cather, “should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” Pioneers should be optimistic; they should have one foot, and much of their heart, in the future.

Cather’s heroine, Alexandra, has this imaginative affinity with the future; she has been hard tutored in the limits set by nature but keeps joy in what she can bring to the land through hard work and intelligence, and by putting into the new land traces of life from an earlier world. To the wild larkspur and cotton and wheat, she brings pumpkins and rhubarb, gooseberries, zinnias, and marigolds. She plants apple, mulberry, and apricot trees, as well as orange hedges; and she sets beehives in the orchards. She sees opportunity where others see unbroken lands or nothing at all; her boldness and belief make possible that which seemingly was not. In short, she brings to the possibilities of the land her own exuberance of ideas, beliefs, and hope. She, like Vachel Lindsay’s expansive, wandering Johnny Appleseed, carries life to the frontier and into the future:

The most significant thing about the American frontier, proposed the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was that it lay “
at the hither edge of free land.” As long as there was land ahead, there was cause for optimism. There was also need for it. The early pioneers, said Turner, were an essentially hopeful people: “
As they wrested their clearing from the woods … as they expanded that clearing and saw the beginnings of commonwealths, where only little communities had been, and as they saw these commonwealths touch hands with each other along the great course of the Mississippi River, they became enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy. They had faith in themselves and their destiny. And that optimistic faith was responsible both for their confidence in their ability to rule and for the passion for expression. They looked to the future.”

From the harsh and unpredictable conditions of life on the frontier came certain traits that would, according to Turner, mark the American pioneer: a “
coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness,” a “practical, inventive turn of mind,” a “
restless, nervous energy … and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.” Unexplored land required active imagination, energy, and a belief that insurmountable problems were surmountable. America, said Edward Harriman, the owner of the Union Pacific Railroad, had been developed by pioneers “
flush with enthusiasm, imagination and speculative bent”; its success, he contended, was owed to individuals who had seen into the future and “adapted their work to the possibilities.”

For the pioneer who could work backbreakingly hard, improvise
nimbly under pressure, and imagine a sustaining harvest before the land had yet been seeded or even cleared, the West promised open opportunity. If the pioneer would strip himself of assumptions and habits better suited to the drawing rooms of the Atlantic seaboard, the West would deliver him into new space and freedom. It would reward expansive ideas with expanding horizons, value enthusiasm over restraint, and encourage entrepreneurial will over mindless hewing to established ways. Such freedom of spirit and movement was pealed out by Whitman in his “Song of the Open Road”:

His was the exuberance held by those bound for the West.

Neither freedom nor the West was easily won, of course. The struggle for the land cost greatly in both lives and sanity, a reality darkly and beautifully told in O. E. Rölvaag’s classic saga of the Dakota prairie,
Giants in the Earth
. It is a tragedy, a story of the fullness and failures of human temperament played out against the killing moods of nature. The Norwegian immigrants Per Hansa and his wife, Beret, move west from Minnesota to settle in the Dakota Territory, bringing with them different dreams, energies, and imaginative capacities. Beret is fragile, filled with biblical foreboding, and unseverably tethered to what she has left behind. Her initial reaction to the prairies is bleak and it remains so:
“Here something
was about to go wrong.…
How will human beings be able to endure this place? she thought. Why, there isn’t even a thing that one can
hide behind
!”

Per Hansa, on the other hand, is physically vigorous and exuberant, and he lives in and for the future. His response to the land is one of passion: “
This vast stretch of beautiful land was to be his—yes,
his.…
His heart began to expand with a mighty exaltation. An emotion he had never felt before filled him and made him walk erect.… ‘Good God!,’ he panted. ‘This kingdom is going to be
mine!’
” Beret sees only a punishing land and a graceless, godless existence; she cannot imagine being a meaningful participant in its development. “
This formless prairie had no heart that beat,” she despairs, “no waves that sang, no soul that could be touched … or cared.… How
could
existence go on, she thought, desperately.”

Life, however threatening, however impossibly hard, is different for her husband. “
Where Per Hansa was, there dwelt high summer,” it was said. He imagines his land not as it is but as it will become; his resilience matches the prairie’s:

Per Hansa has “
such a zest for everything” that he scarcely sleeps; in the blaze of his first prairie summer, he “
plow[s] and harrow[s], delves and [digs]”; he builds a house, weaves fishing nets, and plants saplings and potatoes. “
He was never at rest, except when fatigue had overcome him and sleep had taken him away from toil and care. But this was seldom, however; he found his tasks too interesting to be a burden; nothing tired him, out here.… Per Hansa could not be still for a moment. A divine restlessness ran in his blood; he strode forward with outstretched arms toward the wonders of the future, already partly realized. He seemed to have the elfin, playful spirit of a boy; at times he was irresistible; he had to caress everything that he came near.… But he never could be still.… Endless it was, and wonderful!”

To Beret, however, the facts of the prairie are “
unchangeable—it was useless to juggle with them, or delude oneself; nothing but an eternal, unbroken wilderness encompassed them round about, extending boundlessly in every direction.” The desolation of the land, she feels certain, “
called forth all that was evil in human nature.” The bleakness of the prairie and the assault of nature—its ferocious summer storms and unrelenting winter blizzards, locusts that ravage their crops, prairie fires, famine—as well as Indian attacks, take their toll on her and the other settlers. Beret goes mad: she “
heeded not the light of the day, whether it might be grey or golden. [She] stared at the earthen floor of the hut and saw only night round about her.… [S]he faced only darkness. She tried hard, but she could not let in the sun.” Her entire appearance, writes Rölvaag, “
seemed to reflect a never-ending struggle with unreality.”

Per Hansa, on the other hand, meets the prairie with hope and a keen appreciation of its terms for survival. He grows “
even louder in his optimism.… There were moments, even, when he felt confident that he would live to see the day when most of the land of the prairie would be taken up; in such moods, there was something fascinating about him; bright emanations of creative force seemed to issue out.… [W]henever he spoke a tone of deep joy rang in his words.” But for Beret the future is only grim: “
they would all become wild beasts if they remained here much longer. Everything human in them would gradually be blotted out.… They saw nothing, learned nothing.… Couldn’t he understand that if the Lord God had intended these infinities to be peopled, He would not have left them desolate down through the ages?”