Oregon Trail, Pt. 1: The Legend

From the time we arrived in Vancouver folks have been telling us about the various must-sees of the area. Many pointed us to Stanley Park, while others took us out to some of the surrounding islands. Yet there is one place every Canadian agreed we had to visit: Oregon.

For me, Oregon found a home in my psyche when I was ten-years-old by way of a black-and-white, 2D video game, "Oregon Trail." The game was a test of courage, a measure of one's boyhood, and a glorious waste of time. It was also one of 30 games in a rotation for the entire fifth grade to use during Computer Lab; that one hour each Tuesday and Thursday when our sticky, prepubescent fingers meddled with the bits and bytes of fortune. Or, as was most often the case, when our under developed hands cramped up from repeatedly keystroking "control + open-apple + escape" on large, plastic-covered Apple II keyboards.

The games rotated every lab. Most of them, though, could hardly be called "games": disks with one single program meant to teach a skill: math, spelling, math, addition, subtraction, math. That's what I remember, anyway. I was always being handed 8-inch floppies with names like "Numbers and Grids", or "The Path for Math, Vol. 8." It's a wonder my math skills are so poor.

So, 26 kids in my grade, and 30 floppy disks to get passed around. Our teacher, we soon realized, had a mind-bending rotation system that involved a blend of quantum mechanics, multiple alphabets, and alchemy. None of us were certain whose turn it was to play Oregon Trail, so the long walk from our classroom to the computer lab often involved hushed, although vigorous and somewhat questionable, bouts of bribery. This was between the boys, mostly; the girls didn't seem to care about Oregon Trail, and I truly believe it was this fact alone that was at the heart of the divorce between Michael McHart and Christy Berry some 15 years later.

One only knew it was his or her our turn on the Trail when Mrs. Shaw delivered the floppy disk. Enveloped carefully in a green protective sleeve, the edges worn from hundreds of unfoldings, the disk descended as if by its own accord onto the table. I'm not sure Mrs. Shaw even set it down: rather, it floated from her freckled fingers as if magnetically drawn to the disk drive.

Legend was, nobody had ever reached Oregon. Ever. Some said it was impossible. Others, that there was a glitch in the game, and the moment you reached the border, it would freeze up, and you would have to re-boot. But real reason nobody had finished Oregon Trail was simple: it was impossible to beat in one hour.

Until one Spring afternoon when I did.