Donner Pass

I danced her story once, Tamsen Donner’s. It was part of a series called Portraits of Women. Two of us, students at Connecticut College, were cast in the part. We donned long prairie dresses that covered our necks and wrists, and swirled wide from our ankles when we spun. I have a photograph of the piece: I am flying, horizontal to the ground, gazing outward, or onward, across an imagined prairie, suspended on my friend’s hip.

So they must have carried each other along, those who tried to cross this pass. I came from the west, in a car, speeding along I-80 in search of a campsite for the night. I came in summer, but still my breath condensed in the air. They came in wagons from the east, the Donner Party, in autumn, when the pass was bound in early snow.

She was born in 1801, Tamsen, and set off, at the age of 44 with her second husband, three daughters, and eighty other travelers for San Francisco bay.

Traveling east on the interstate, my thoughts were on a place to spend the night, the falling light, and my turn toward home. A blinking LED road sign announced that the Donner Pass rest area was closed. I passed a sign outlining the Donner ski areas, Donner Pass road and Donner Memorial State Park and was startled into the present.

And she was with me, Tamsen, in her long prairie dress. Shivering out her last night with her fatally wounded husband, while her three daughters, rescued, awaited her arrival in Sacramento. Few in the party survived and tales of cannibalism bring the terror, and cold, and will to survive into focus.

I find a campground well off the freeway and pitch my tent in the glare of my headlights. The yipping of Coyotes wakes me in the night and I smile, curl deeper into my sleeping bag and sleep again. In the morning, wearing a wool hat and down vest, I ease out of the campground and back to the interstate. I shift into low gear and head down the mountain leaving Tamsen, and California, behind.