Rinker Buck > Quotes

“I do not believe in organized religion, herbal remedies, yoga, Reiki, kabbalah, deep massage, slow food, or chicken soup for the soul. The nostrums of Deepak Chopra and Barbara De Angelis cannot rescue people like me. I believe in crazyass passion.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“All I am saying is that sometimes you're doing quite a lot by not doing anything. You're not quitting. You just keep going. That's the pioneer spirit.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“History almost everywhere is tragic and ironic, but in America the contrasts are more stark because we set such high ideals.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Crazyass passion is the staple of life and persistence its nourishing force. Without them, you cannot cross the trail.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“The cops of America are poster-boys of low self-esteem. Their uniforms, silly hats, and sparkling patent leather girdles freighted down with shiny handcuffs, walkie-talkies, and spray canisters of Mace apparently do not make them feel secure enough, so they always add the hostile interrogation to make sure that the accosted citizens know who is in charge.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“I was having a great time, enjoying the best summer of my life, fucked up. Fucked up is good.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“All the heroes had crew cuts, platinum-blond wives and drove Corvettes. The media was devoted to this cult of innocence.”
― Rinker Buck, Flight of Passage: A Memoir

“Americans were those folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything. Allegedly”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“In modern life we move from one insulated igloo to another...serially abstracting ourselves from nature and its impacts.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“The pioneers and their new Indian partners amply displayed the American penchant for technological prowess, developing shore-to-shore windlasses and flatboat ferries to cross the rivers, innovations as vital to the country’s progress as the steam engine and the telegraph. America’s default toward massive waste and environmental havoc was also, and hilariously, perfected along the trail. Scammed by the merchants of Independence and St. Joe into overloading their wagons, the pioneers jettisoned thousands of tons of excess gear, food, and even pianos along the ruts, turning vast riverfront regions of the West into America’s first and largest Superfund sites. On issue after issue—disease, religious strife, the fierce competition for water—the trail served as an incubator for conflicts that would continue to reverberate through American culture until our own day.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“I was comfortable about my own western quest. The wrong outcome, or no outcome at all, is often the only result of a journey. Walkabouts and odysseys have always been common, and we needn’t search too hard for tangible returns. Journey for journey’s sake is enough. For weeks or months of a climb or a trek, we are forced to be in the moment.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Riding across Nebraska in a covered wagon was a monthlong immersion therapy in kindness, a reminder of the essential decency of my country.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Cody was a classic résumé-bloater, a braggart impresario who prospered by exploiting the gullibility of the American people, most of whom are so poorly read, so bamboozled by religion and the sensationalist, mogul-worshipping press, and so desperate for heroes, that they’ll believe almost anything that a grand bullshitter like Cody shovels out.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“The Americans today who like to whine all the time because they say that taxes are too high and that government costs too much should leave their television sets behind for a while and go out and see the country they live in.”
― Rinker Buck

“Seeing America slowly was, in a way, like eating slow food-I wasn't covering much ground in a single day, but I was digesting a lot more.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“I wish they paid overtime for guilt trips...I'd be rich by now.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Among males, conflict resolution requires a rapid return to the basics, preferably sports or automotive mechanics.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“And why did I think that the notorious and often fatal obstacles that the pioneers faced—mountain passes strewn with lava rock, hellacious winds and dust storms, rattlesnakes, and descents so steep that the wagons could only be lowered by ropes—would miraculously vanish from the trail for me?”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“In unfamiliar terrain, a plastic bag impaled on barbed wire is snapping in the breeze. Mules are skittish about that because they haven’t seen it before, and it reminds them of a predator. So the “muleteer” beats them there too. Eventually, when the mules tire of getting beaten, or are just fed up dealing with a less intelligent species, they use the tremendous power of their hind legs to kick out the tug chains and run away. For this, mules are known as “ornery.” In English we use the common phrase “stubborn as a mule,” a classic example of man ascribing stupidity to the beast instead of to himself.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Persistence is a drug that delivers strength, but it also dulls our sense of reality. My last thought before falling asleep was that we are all a lot more capable of conquering obstacles and fears than we think.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Historians have long been squeamish about acknowledging that General Washington, like many of the American founders, was a voracious land speculator. Few academics and high school history teachers want to risk their careers by suggesting to their students that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Americans were folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything.”
― Rinker Buck

“The grandparents are raising the children because the biological parents have skipped off—for whatever reason, not always meth. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have often meant that both parents in a military family get deployed at once, and they leave their children with their grandparents. Layoffs of single working mothers lead a lot of families to decide to become multigenerational again. A wave of bipolar disorders and addiction to video games and gambling has also taken a toll on families.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Fucked up is the universal condition of man. We were crossing to Oregon behind a cranky team of mules—the very definition, the apotheosis, the pinnacle, of fucked up. I woke in the morning to harness mules, fucked up, obsessed all day on making more miles, fucked up, and collapsed onto my squalid wagon matteess every night, fucked up. I was having a great time, enjoying the best summer of my life, fucked up. Fucked up is good.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“My adolescent feasting on books was a protective search for privacy and self that worked for me at the time, and later became habitual and delivered other benefits. I”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Kern was the classic oldest son of a strong, iron-willed father, secretly afraid that he couldn’t live up to the model, and thus quite skittish and sensitive to criticism. Even his appearance suggested vulnerability. He had feathery auburn hair with red highlights, broad cheeks and trusting brown eyes that opened wide with disappointment when he was hurt. He mostly excelled at things that required a lot of solitude and a minimum of social contact, math and science, and his best friend was a science nerd and ham-radio freak who lived in the village nearby, Louie DeChiaro.”
― Rinker Buck, Flight of Passage: A Memoir

“Drill, baby, drill.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“pellucid sensation. I felt completely free. Nothing”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Schoolteachers and historians depict the pioneers as exemplars of that supposed American trait, "rugged individualism". But rugged individualism was wrapped in an envelope of group enterprise.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“two hundred miles away.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey