In the summer of 1990, my sister and I died. A lot.
Some evenings we drowned. Others we succumbed to measles or exhaustion. We froze to death. We died of starvation. We were bitten by snakes. We contracted cholera and typhoid. A few times, we broke a leg or an arm. Back then, that was a death sentence.
Most often we died of dysentery.
We watched as our names were scrawled onto tombstones that would soon be lost to time. We thought it hilarious that the monuments read “Here Lies Butt,” laughing all the while and ready to start over just to—in all probability—die again.
Alexis and I are part of what has been called the Oregon Trail Generation. That is, the little sliver of a microgeneration between Generation X and the millennials that some researchers bookend by the years 1977 and 1983. As I define it, we were the last generation to grow up without constant access to technology, the last to treat tech as an add-on to everyday life rather than a function of it. To wit: I didn’t own a cell phone until I left for college. I didn’t have my own computer until my junior year of college, instead relying on computer labs for writing papers. I didn’t realize until I was weeks from graduation that I even had a university-assigned email address, full of unread messages from the previous four-and-then-some years.
The Oregon Trail Generation was named for a computer game designed to teach kids history.
The game was first developed in the early 1970s by a trio of young Midwestern history teachers named Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger. It was produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and first published in 1975. By the late ’80s, Oregon Trail was ubiquitous in school computer labs around the country. Like most other kids in that decade, my sister and I grew up playing it as we waited for the late bus or got the coveted “play on the computer” directive from our teachers.
Early in that summer of 1990, my mother came home and asked Lex and me to unload something from the back of her minivan. Our mom made her living—and in many ways, her life—teaching special education in New Jersey’s public school system. Earlier that year, our school had purchased a brand-new Apple II computer. It was slate gray and the vanguard of technology.
For some reason, the school’s administration had offered my mother a chance to take the Apple II home for the summer. A lifelong writer, she thought she might use its powerful word processing program to work on her stories, which she had traditionally written longhand. And she wrote on it often. But at the end of most of those long, hot, summer days on the Jersey Shore, when my mother made her way to the kitchen, my sister and I would click on the Apple; transport ourselves to 1948 Independence, Missouri; load our wagon with supplies; and begin the treacherous journey that almost always resulted in death.