Seduced By Narrative: Me and the Donner Family
By Jeffrey J. Higa
“That’s what a writer is. Writers are people that get interested in things.”
Novelist David Carkeet, in conversation (1996)
The Donner family almost caused me to flunk third grade. Let me clarify. The Donner Party that attempted the Oregon Trail in the winter of 1846, when harsh weather, poor planning, and bad decisions devolved into cannibalism, had such a hold over my intellectual development and imagination when I was eight years old that I could think of little else during those halcyon days. We didn’t have the words for it back then but these days, I think most people would call me a Donner stan. I even wrote Donner fan fiction. Cannibalistic fan fiction. Their story was so deeply rutted into the tender, formative period of my developing mind, that even now, some 45 years later, my first thought when someone asks me, “What’s your favorite book,” my mind offers the book jacket of Ordeal by Hunger: The True Story of the Donner Party, before, in a nod to propriety and social inclusion, I reach for an anodyne writer I read in graduate school.
For this, I blame the Scholastic Book Club. Not the Scholastic Book Club of my Gen-Z child that contains content warnings on some books and choking hazard warnings on pictures of crappy-happy toys. Not the abomination that is the 2024 flyer with no columnar order matrix to check off but a branded URL redirect to place an order. No, I’m talking about the Scholastic Book Club of my Gen-X youth and its culture of mania and zeal, when the arrival of the flyers heralded a multi-day cultural event. I still remember the excitement of seeing Mrs. Schwaub removing the newsprint student flyers (aka, buyer flyers) from the center of her larger glossy, offset-printed, tabloid-sized teacher pamphlet (aka sales manager guide). It didn’t matter that we got these every month. Sure, it was a new opportunity to procure some choice reads, but more importantly, it was our call to arms to enter a competitive sales melee with the other classrooms. For you see, we were doing more than just buying books and trendy posters with a 3-month half-life, we were also directly responsible for the quality of our in-class library and the very outfitting of our educational environs.
Our teachers didn’t have to impress upon us the importance of reading, we all knew that. What we possibly didn’t understand, and could only really grasp through the quiet, vulnerable admissions by our teachers at the front of the class, was the failure of our district taxpayers to provide enough funds for us, the very children in this classroom, for an up-to-date classroom library with books we might actually want to read, instead of the 1950’s hand-me-downs we got from retiring teachers. We were enlightened about the continued inability of our feckless superintendent to secure sufficient raises for our beloved teacher, so that she might, in her desperate state, purchase, on her own dime, those essentials we sorely needed to prepare us for fourth grade. Essentials such as the pair of blue plastic Dr. Seuss bookends that we all agreed was just the thing that would set off the Dr. Seuss section of our in-class library with panache, and could not be purchased, but was only awarded to the class that ordered the most Dr. Seuss books this month.
An essential part of the indoctrination was Preview Day, when an entity, whose identity was always shielded from us, would set up a cart in an unobtrusive part of the hallway for classes to visit on a rotating schedule. We couldn’t have been more than 10 or 15 minutes out of the classroom, but that small change in routine was always a treasured event. Laden on the cart were artfully arranged books, small toys, and posters, all available for our physical inspection. The most popular item was always the Guinness Book of World Records, the only compendium, pre-internet, of the wondrous and exotic things that regular people had achieved. It was a dream book for the boys in third grade, for we all aspired to become a “World Record Holder,” if only we could think of something to make our mark. We knew we wouldn’t be able to generate more digits to own the world record for the most fingers on one hand, but maybe we could jump on a pogo stick more than 15,000 times or dribble the basketball for more than 55 hours or not cut our fingernails for 25 years. Many of us bought the GBWR every year before we ended up with a stack of them in our bedrooms with the late realization that the records did not change that much year-to-year.
Although I did occasionally buy the odd poster of say, squirrels clad in boxing trunks and gloves with the pithy phrase “No Guts, No Glory” underneath, my reading interests tended toward biographies of sport stars, military heroes, and stories of true adventure. Pretty stereotypical reading preferences for a young boy. However, I valued these stories not for its macho bravado or masculine aspiration, but because these stories would often transport me out of my prosaic suburban environment and plunge me into worlds of struggle, danger, and eventual triumph.
Who was the editor at Scholastic in the 1970’s who thought it was a good idea to include a series of books on “true stories of survival” for the elementary market? Whoever that was, knew that it would be like catnip to me, and every month I ordered the next installment and read it on the floor of my living room, lounging on my back like a smitten kitten, holding up the book while I reveled in the tale of high adventure.
So it must have been early in my third grade school year, on a fateful Preview Day when I reached for the next story of true survival that called to me from the cart. The only thing I am sure of, is that in this particular tome of struggle and human grit, there was a slim chapter on “Survival on the Oregon Trail.” There in the chapter heading was a simple line drawing of a covered wagon pulled by horses, with men and young boys walking astride, and the opening line, “It was a winter that America would never forget.”
Although my obsession with the Family Donner started from that slim chapter in that Scholastic Book Club potboiler, it found its firm footing when I started checking out Donner Party survivor accounts from the public library. At first, the neighborhood librarians seemed pleased that I was challenging myself by checking out chapter books that seemed beyond my reading level. In addition, they were older books at that, which had not been checked out in years. But what they didn’t know was that the books were mainly based on survivor interviews or written diaries found on the victims, people who on the whole, had about as much “learnin” as I had. Their language was not an impediment.
I read two whole book length accounts of the Donner Party disaster and had requested a third before the librarians cut me off. Maybe that’s unthinkable now, a librarian denying a patron’s request for a book. But Arizona was a pretty conservative place at that time, and it was clear, at least to us kids, that the library belonged to the librarians. For example, when the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated came out, we could check it out, but the librarians had already censored most of the pictures with judicious scissoring.
Despite my setback, it turned out that I did not need more first-hand accounts of the disaster to fuel my imagination. The Donner party story had already imprinted permanent furrows onto my brain and the idea of cannibalism had become my muse.
In a fortuitous happenstance, my grandmother had recently retired from 40 years of working as a nurse at a large regional hospital. During her career, she had worked as an LPN in many different areas, including surgery and obstetrics, so I started to probe her with questions about the human body. I knew enough to avoid crass questions like, “So, when I stab a pork butt with a knife, does a human butt look the same?” but instead phrased my questions in a more circumspect manner such as, “How do muscles get bigger?” She was always eager to answer my questions, to nurture what she assumed was my developing interest in medicine, and sometimes, if I got lucky, she would use a visual aid.
Like many women of the Greatest Generation, grandma kept everything. And I mean everything. When she died, among the things we found while cleaning up was the desiccated remains of the stump of my umbilical cord, preserved in tissue paper and stored in a yellowed envelope like a holy relic. She also kept all her notes as a student nurse and her early days as a surgical assistant. That’s how I learned she had a fine hand for illustration. In particular, I remember a highly detailed drawing of a cross-section of the human head, exposing the brain and other viscera with each blood vessel and large nerve called out and labeled. It was not unlike something I would see decades later as a prop document on the desk of Hannibal Lecter.
She kept the notes in bound notebooks housed in a dresser she used for storage along with an assortment of items from her long career: a stethoscope, a sphygmomanometer inscribed in Japanese, a pair of sterling silver obstetric forceps from Germany, a nursing cap with service medal, and a pair of white shoes with thick white soles. I remember flipping through the notebooks a couple of times on my own when no one was home, but the clinical nature of immaculate illustrations eventually bored me, and I retreated to the fire of my own imaginings. I have not seen those notes since, despite searching for them in the closets of my parent’s old home. In addition, I seem to be the only one in my family who remembers these notebooks because when I mention it most family members, they react with bemusement. These days, I am left to wonder if her notes were one of the few things she did throw out in her lifetime, as a precaution during the “my grandson might be abnormal” phase.
For the family, if they were worried about my affair with the Donner family, they didn’t show it. My mother said that at first it, they were hoping that it was yet another thing that I fixated on and would prattle on incessantly, like my short-lived fascinations with quicksand or Wacky Packages trading cards. “Those days, we could ignore you, easy,” she said. “Because you just talked at us all the time about whatever you were thinking about. We never had to respond.” But they should have known better.
They had had a warning about how easily I was swayed by narrative, the year before in second grade. That year, our young teacher, Miss Perkins, must have been an adherent of a new pedagogy. All our previous teachers had segmented our days into strict subject matter–for example, math–followed by worksheets on that topic as they walked around while we worked before moving to the next subject. Miss Perkins, however, would spend the morning teaching us about a topic–the ocean–and would tie the different academic subjects into that discussion. After lunch recess, we would return to class and work on the packet of worksheets that addressed the ocean from different academic disciplines. The truly revolutionary thing to us is that she freed us to work on the packet on our own. She didn’t walk around the room and didn’t check on our progress. She did, however, have several rules: If we didn’t finish the packet during class time, then completing it would become homework. If we did complete it during class period, we were to clip the completed packet to a tree-shaped rack near her desk. The branches of the tree rack contained clothespins, one for each student, labeled with our name. After clipping our completed work to the tree, we could then borrow a book from the classroom library to read at our desk until the end of the school day.
I guess the other kids could handle this kind of freedom and at first, I was like everyone else. I worked hard on my packets during school so I wouldn’t have homework interfering with my playtime after school. I don’t remember the day, but I must have finished early and like many times before, gone to the classroom library to choose a book. This time I picked up Stone Soup, the venerable illustrated version by Marcia Brown, and I fell under the story’s spell.
Or should I say curse? Because almost immediately, I could not get enough of the story. All I wanted to do was read the story over and over. Every day, as soon as we received our daily classwork packets, all I wanted to do was go to the back of the room, get Stone Soup, and read it at my desk.
To this day, I don’t know why that book compelled me to ditch all my second-grade academic aspirations and become a stone soup purist. I recently purchased a used copy of the exact version I remember from my childhood, complete with the correct dust jacket, the silver Caldecott medal sticker in the exact same corner of said dust jacket, and with library markings and circulation book pocket.
If you don’t know, the stone soup story is an old fairy tale about three soldiers who, coming back from an unspecified war, stumble into a town that refuses to feed or house them. With no resources, the soldiers convince the townspeople to lend them the crock, firewood, and water to make a soup from stones. After adding the stones, the soldiers suggest to the onlookers that perhaps a little salt and pepper might make the soup more tasty. One by one, the soldiers suggest more items–carrots, cabbage, potatoes, beef, etc.–until the whole village has ponied up for a hearty stew. A feast and party are had by all, the soldiers are offered beds for the night, and the next morning the soldiers depart having taught the village how to ward off starvation by making stone soup.
Generally, the story is predictable and unremarkable. Initially, the reader is drawn in by the oxymoronic title and follows a narrative arc that develops into dramatic irony early on, even for a second grader, that is sustained until the very end. I don’t know if it was the cunning of the soldiers or the naive stupidity of the villagers or even Marcia Brown’s drawing style that entranced me. Looking at the illustrations now, I see that all the characters have French names and the soldiers are wearing military dress from the Napoleonic era. In my adult mind, I like to think they are retreating soldiers from Napoleon’s calamitous foray into Russia and are returning home to a devastated motherland. But, of course, I knew nothing of European geo-political tussles in the second grade. The charm of Stone Soup on my undeveloped second grade mind remains a mystery.
However, it was clear that I had a fever, and the only prescription was more stone soup. Like an addict needing his fix, my hunger drove me to deceit. I learned that I could complete just the top worksheet of the packet, act like I had completed the whole thing, clip it to my clothespin on the tree, and then go find my proverbial cowbell in the library.
I read the book continuously over that year. It took months of investigation from Miss Perkins and my parents to figure out the cause of my class work stoppage. I shrugged my shoulders when questioned, volunteered no information, yet continued to make sure I had access to my book. When Miss Perkins banned me from the classroom library, I just had another kid filch the book for me and I kept it in my desk. When she banned me from reading anything at my desk, I dropped the book to my lap and read with my head down. When she discovered that Stone Soup was the issue, she removed it from the classroom, but I did not fret because I knew there was a beat-up paperback version of the book hiding amongst the shelves. It was only towards the end of the school year, when threats of “flunky” and “repeater” were showered on me, when Miss Perkins had separated me from the rest of the class and exiled me to a desk unnaturally adjacent to hers, and when she had finally scrubbed her library shelves clean of any copies of the book, did I relent and go back to doing my school work.
Who could have predicted that Stone Soup would become the gateway drug into my narrative obsessions? Not my family, because on the day a comprehensive search of my room was made, they unearthed my long overdue copy of For Fear We Shall Perish: The Story of the Donner Party Disaster. But more distressing to everyone was the discovery of the complex timeline I had worked up that traced key moments in the Donner story, like when the Donners make the fateful decision to leave the Boggs Company and follow the untested Hasting’s cutoff or when the Second Relief decides to leave the children at the lake camp a couple of days before the worst storm of the season snows them in and it later becomes known as “Starved Camp” for cannibalistic reasons.
My life changed then. My mother, a stay-at-homemaker, threw herself into understanding my malaise. This being the 1970’s, when the self-help vertical was the fastest growing category at B. Dalton Booksellers with treatises aplenty on yoga, meditation, and jogging, my mother started bringing home books exploring the minds of children and instruction manuals on child rearing. Later, I remember those books would take a slightly darker turn, as I suppose my mother was searching for a book that might answer the question, “Is your child a sociopath?” but this being the early days of the self-help movement, she had to settle for monographs on abnormal child psychology and the failure of a mother’s compassion.
I could always tell when she had gotten a new book because I would be peppered with questions immediately after school. Sometimes she might be holding a clipboard and making notations with her pen after I answered, sometimes there might be a tape recorder documenting our interaction, and sometimes she might write directly into the book itself, listening to my answers and nodding while simultaneously flipping to the back of the book to check on something.
My mother’s lowest moment but paradoxically, my highest, came when she discovered my magnum opus: My imagined diary of George Donner, one of the few male Donner children to survive. I was immediately drawn to George because at the time of his rescue, he was also 8 years old and I could easily imagine all the cannibalistic learning and living he must have experienced at that age. My inordinate pride in the document stemmed not so much from what I had written, but with the great care I took in trying to capture the tone and cadence of the language of the period, what my English degree-educated self would now term, the authenticity of the voice. Sure, my education on the vernacular of the period came from Saturday morning cartoon sessions with the Warner Brothers’ Yosemite Sam. And I may have cribbed a few catchphrases and modeled the elocution on Foghorn Leghorn but I thought, on the whole, I had written an account of the Donner family disaster that could slide seamlessly alongside the other survivor’s diaries of the time. All eight pages of it.
My parents didn’t see it that way. Soon, I was visiting with a large variety of doctors and specialists. We engaged in family counseling, counseling with just myself, an encouraging developmental-behavioral pediatrician, a counselor who I labeled “Dr. Angry” because each session he tried to provoke me to become angry, and even a specialist in cognitive development who gave me a battery of different IQ tests. I was very interested in the results of the tests, because I could not glean if any of my answers were correct from the face of the examiners. In truth, I wanted to know if I was objectively some sort of genius and I didn’t know it. However, my parents told me that they were advised not to reveal to me my test scores and being Asian parents, they were very good at keeping secrets. To this day, I do not know what my IQ score is, although by this point, I’m sure I’m considerably less intelligent than I was back then. I eventually figured out that I couldn’t be a genius because a few years later, a kid in my class became a member of Mensa because of her high IQ score, and when I mentioned it to my parents, I just got a “huh” and they never made any efforts to enroll me in Mensa.
I like to think that I would have outgrown my Donner obsession eventually. Like the many diets I would initially believe and entrust in my life, I would have grown weary of it and allowed myself to be weaned from it. But the truth is I brought the Donner Party with me into fourth grade, carried them through all the red, white, and blue manufactured madness of the bicentennial, and probably would have continued into the fifth grade if it hadn’t been for a little space opera that was released in the summer of 1977. I went to a Saturday matinee with my mother and my sister, an anomaly itself because Saturday matinees were usually a dad duty, a time for my mother to have two or three hours for herself. Nevertheless, after Star Wars was over and we were walking back to the car, I asked my mother a question I already knew the answer to, “Can we see the movie again?”
I knew it to be a futile attempt. I was throwing myself once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with my dead pleading to my Asian mom who made us buy our snacks at the candy store in the mall and then hide them in her purse before going to the theater. I expected her response to be along the lines of, “What, you never open your eyes during the entire movie? You never see nothing? Don’t ask stupid questions.” Instead, she stopped and looked at me for a very long time. In the stillness of that unnaturally long pause, time seemed to stop and my sister and I side-eyed each other in confusion several times. But now as a parent myself, I am convinced that in that moment, the maternal intuition that gestates within a pregnant mother alongside her baby, allowed her to foresee all that would happen in the next couple years. She recognized that her answer at this fulcrum point would change the balance of all our futures.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, I would see that again.”
She never did but that summer she let me see Star Wars four times in the theater before school began. And that Christmas, the first one filled with Star Wars toys and knock-off lightsabers from bootleg companies, and LPs of John Williams’s score, the Donner Party was abandoned for good as I surrendered myself to a narrative that began a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Jeffrey J. Higa is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright from Hawai’i. He is the author of Calabash Stories (Pleiades Press, 2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His work can be found in Zyzzyva, Tahoma Literary Review, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, Salt Hill, Bamboo Ridge, The Hawai’i Review of Books, Poets & Writers, and others. His story “The Shadow Artist” received an honorable mention in the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize from the North American Review. His full-length play Futless won First Place in the Kumu Kahua Hawai’i Prize contest and his holiday story “Christmas Stories” has been serialized on Hawai’i Public Radio. In 2022, he was the recipient of the Kundiman fiction fellowship at the Sewanee Writers Conference. He is currently looking to publish his COVID project, ‘da pidgin Inferno, a (Hawai’i creole) version of Dante’s Inferno.
Artwork Source: “Blue Chart,” Steve Johnson. In the public domain.
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