Follow Your Trail

by Tony Niccoli

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How far would you go to build a new life?

I’ve found myself pondering this lately as Heather and I prepare for some changes and new adventures. And also, as I look back on the last ten years and how far we have come. The magazine you are reading right now is a perfect example. I can vividly remember Heather first telling me that it was her dream to start her own magazine. At the time, we were both living in California for work, and looking to make some major changes to our careers and lives. Heather was the managing editor for a collection of 5 magazines in Orange County, and she enjoyed the work but wanted something more. We would sit and talk about how she thought a magazine could be better tailored to the community and be more interactive with its advertisers to create something special – and still free – for local residents. Something that wasn’t just advertorials and fluff. But at that time, Heather had no experience with the design or sales side of magazine creation. She had written for Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living and numerous other publications, she had worked on editorial calendars, planned stories, and worked with advertisers, but never actually been the one to create all the style and layout or sell them the ad space itself. And after a few days of talking about it, and realizing that it was something completely within her power to reach for, I remember when she just jumped right in! We got her a trial subscription to some creative software and she opened Photoshop and InDesign for the very first time. The year was 2013 and she didn’t even know where to start, or how the path ahead of her would evolve, just that she needed to get going now if she ever wanted to reach the destination. Heather gave up her job in California when we moved here, and forced herself to take that amazingly brave initial step. The first issue of Home&Harvest came out in November 2014 and it has been consistently growing ever since. I’ve had the pleasure to watch her continually expand on her design skills and dream up more and more creativity with each issue. Standing at this moment in time and looking back, it’s incomprehensible to imagine a time when she didn’t even know how to start a file in Photoshop or mock out a page in InDesign. I’m always proud of her when I think about the jump she made. And a big part of that was just being willing to leave her comfort zone and push her boundaries. It’s at those moments in life when we really grow. It takes something a little scary – -forcing ourselves to accept discomfort and possible failure – to really allow us to see how far we can go. Reflecting on that and trying to imagine the path that led to today is what got me thinking about this article. A few years back, Heather and I were on our way home from visiting family in Boise, and we decided to take a different route than the one we already knew. As we were driving through Oregon, we both let out a little yell at the same time. Oregon Trail! A sign there let us know that a historic landmark was coming up, and we always love to stop for those road-side history lessons! Here, we discovered, was an actual chance to see the real Oregon Trail. As you know, we are both of the generation that spent countless hours in school’s library “dying of dysentery” in the original Oregon Trail computer game. And I have a special love of history passed to me from both of my parents, so I thought I had a pretty good idea of what we were about to see. We decided to save the historical sign posts for after, and just get straight out to see the trail. So there we were parked just a mile or two off the main highway, and walking out a short path to see what remains of part of the actual, original Oregon Trail. I kept my eyes to the ground, waiting to see two long ruts working their way across the open country side, bearing testament to all the wagons that had passed. But we never found them. In fact, the only thing that had crossed the path was a wide U-shaped gully of packed dirt. No wheel tracks. Nothing. As we walked back, I stopped to read the first sign in amazement. It wasn’t at all what I had expected. Thousands of wagons had left imprints, but the even greater number of oxen had done something more. Instead of rutted wagon wheel lines, the trail was that little U-shaped depression. We walked back out to it and stared in wonder, I reached down and touched the dirt. All of these families, leaving the east behind, abandoning their comfort zone, and pushing west for a better life. It was really inspiring to think of that. I’ve never encountered anything even closely resembling that amount of hardship and grit. For them, it started slowly, with a few missionaries traveling out west, following the trails that had been laid out by trappers before them. A few years later it was dozens of travelers. Then over a hundred. And in 1843, the flood gates opened on western expansion as over a thousand people made the journey for the first time. They loaded up 120 wagons, brought thousands of heads of livestock, and rallied in Missouri to start their migration out the promised fertile lands of Oregon and the great west. Their travels lasted five to six months, beginning as soon as the weather broke in the spring, and desperate to get across the mountain passes before the snows set in that fall. They traveled every single day without any breaks, hoping to make 20 miles or more with each effort. Their iconic wagons were up to six feet wide and twelve feet long. But most families only had the smaller, lighter prairie schooners, and not the giant Conestogas that are so famous today. They were built to be sturdy, repairable in the wilderness, and still light enough for a team of oxen to pull when loaded down with all the supplies that a family would need for both the six months of travel, and to start a new home in a distant land. They knew their arrival would be just before the depths of winter set in, and had to prepare for that as well.

The magic of winter is a gift of earth frozen, hearts warmed, season ’ s love, and the promise o of spring’ s song.

Merry Christmas from your friends at PNW!

Wagons were so loaded down with water barrels, flour, salt, sugar, bacon, dried goods, cloth, repair parts, farming equipment, and barrels of tar. With all the weight, and the need to push the oxen every day, most travelers walked the entire trail. They might get a few days rest in a wagon if seriously ill, but many strode the entire 2000 miles of rough wilderness on foot. It was the job of the guide for each wagon train to know the route by heart and time the daily travel for ideal stops. They set out around 6 am most mornings after a quick breakfast of cold leftovers from the night before. By noon they would need to find pasture and water to give the animals a break. Before nightfall they would need to find a safe place to camp – circling the wagons to corral their livestock and preparing to cook fires to make their day’s main meal. Tired feet got a few restful hours outside of broken-down boots and they went to bed knowing that tomorrow would be more of the same. It is incredible to me to think of how long they worked to make that life change! And once they would get a few weeks out, and realize just how long and difficult this trek was going to be, it was far too late so safely turn back. Even if they had something available to them in Missouri or back east, it wouldn’t have been safe to try to go back alone. The point of no return, and the need for forward progress and success would have set in very quickly for families on that trip and no amount of preparation or planning could have ever set them up for the realities of spending six months traveling over that difficult ground. I’ve had a few times in life that I found myself wondering if I was making the right choice. Where I’ve taken a moment to look back and consider if I was on the right path – afraid to be outside my comfort and forced to adapt to a change I had readily sought. Once was selling all my furniture, leaving a stable job, and packing everything I owned into a tiny two-door hatchback to move across the country for the chance at a better job. And just a few days before I left, my dad offered to come do the drive with me, so I had to unpack the passenger seat and downsize even more! But I’ll forever be grateful that I did it. Both the trip with my dad and amazing time to bond, and the risk of moving to a new area where I hardly knew anyone – for a new life that sounded great but still wasn’t guaranteed. I think it was somewhere around Kansas that I really started to wonder. Should I be going back? Would I make it out there? Are we there yet? For the real risk-takers, traveling along a similar route through Kansas, they weren’t even to the halfway point. That would have to wait for Independence Rock in the middle of modern Wyoming. It’s said that they named it Independence because a wagon train had a real shot at success if they could get there by the 4th of July. It meant that they were on schedule to cross the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada’s before the snow set in. It was a joyous day for them to know that they had a real chance of victory. About ten years after my big move out west, I was ready for a major change with my line of work. I had a challenging, stable, and lucrative job that had even allowed me to go remote and work from home when we decided to move to Moscow, but I wanted to do something new. I had always wanted to be a small business owner, and wanted to have a shop that would be a part of the downtown community. I had been having a great time designing flowers for fun with Heather, and she would tell me about what it was like to work in a flower shop in US and the time she got to run one in Germany. It just seemed like a perfect fit for me. But it remained a dream for a really long time. Home&Harvest | Nov+Dec 2021 Then one day, an afternoon where I was really getting burnt out, and starting to get down, Heather encouraged me to take a break and sit outside with her. We did something that we had first done before moving to Moscow, and starting the magazine. We wrote down all of our expenses and what we would live without if really had to. We had the list down to share a cell phone with no home line. No TV or streaming, downsize to one car but mostly ride our bike when the weather was nice, live off of a tiny food budget, skip birthday and Christmas gifts for each other, and never spend a single penny where we didn’t need to. We added it up. Then we paused to decide if going for it, failing, and having nothing but the memories, and a few years of rebuilding while we stuck to the decimated budget would be worth it. We made a list of everything we would be giving up. We made a list of everything we had a chance to achieve. It was way outside my comfort zone. It was going from scary to the point of feeling reckless to leave such a good job. But it was what I really wanted to go for. A days days later, we signed a lease for our current location, started the demolition, and made arrangements with my job to stay on for a few more months as we built the shop and they trained someone new. That was all it took – I forced myself to march a little farther every day, going to build coolers and cabinets in the evenings after work, and determined not to let a day go by without some progress. For those west-bound explorers, it’s said around 350,000 travelers took those early journeys along the Oregon Trail. And though almost one in ten would die along the way from cholera, drowning in river crossings, diphtheria, being crushed under wagon wheels, or the famous dysentery, their numbers grew every year. Congress passed the Oregon Land Donation Act in 1850, guaranteeing white male citizens 320 acres of land, with an additional 320 acres available to married women provided that they were residing on the property before December 1st of that year. It promoted the next great surge of travel to the west. Suddenly the risks of following the trail outweighed the risk of facing difficult economic conditions in the east for many families. The possible reward at the end of the journey was just too spectacular to pass up. By the end of the 1800’s, everything had changed. The west was quickly becoming settled, a transcontinental rail road had been completed in 1869, and settlers could spend a week on train instead of risking their lives for nearly half of a year. The trail fell out of use, but was never forgotten. We were lucky enough to get to see it in person when we chose to take a new route on our travels, and it really had an impact on me seeing it face to face. So here Heather and I are in our comfortable, modern lives, looking at some more major tasks and changes. When we first moved to Moscow, we were lucky enough to find a wonderful home. It was in a great neighborhood but the house needed tons of work – it had been on and off the market for five years and had been used as a rental. The power had been shut off so we toured it with the flashlights on our phones, and did our best to avoid the massive spider infestation, while ignoring the stench of dog pee. The fact that it was in abysmal shape when we found it worked out perfectly because it made it something we could actually afford! In our first year or two here we did some serious work and got it clean and livable. We restored most of the rooms back to the original 1960’s style, painted inside and out, and did a lot of landscaping. But as we got busier with the mag-

-azine and flower shop, we had to put some of the more daunting tasks on hold.And then one day last year, we just decided that it had been too long and we needed to get moving. We didn’t really even know the process but we knew where to start. We walked right in and gutted the bathroom that needed the most love. With the walls ripped down to the studs in most areas, floor torn down to the plywood below the multiple layers we found, shower panels on their way to the dump, and the sink and fixtures heading to the Habitat Surplus Sale, we had a blank slate. But more importantly, we had a call to action and a need to take the next steps. It was scary, it was uncomfortable, it was unknown – but it forced us to jump into action! The project just suddenly fell in line and with every bit of free time we could muster we took another step. It was that demolition that forced us to keep marching forward. Like a wagon train leaving Missouri, we were off and needed to keep up the pace. It became a truly rewarding project – and we both love the outcome! In fact, as I’m writing this, Heather is upstairs painting the ceiling in the other bathroom. Two of the walls are ripped out to the studs, the new tub is waiting in the garage for an instillation later this evening, and we’ve already got the backerboards and tile ready for the walls and the floor. This one was a little less intimidating because we already know most of the trail’s twists and turns. Its just a matter of getting some daily progress and watching the goal get closer with each step. So as we look at the closing of another year, prepare for the next trip around the sun, and plan our next great adventures, it all seems much more realistic to just go ahead and dream as big as we can. The first step will of course be the scariest, and something will definitely “go wrong” or add sudden difficulties along the way. But we both know what it means to go as far as you need to in order to create the life you want. The vision you dream of. And that can be something major like learning the skills you will need for a new career, or something minor like learning how to install a bathtub. I feel lucky that we have begun to recognize that our lives, like years, have a winter season. If we want to be off the trail and settled before the cold sets in, we need to get moving now. And not let a single day pass once we start! If you aren’t standing in exactly the place in life you want to be all you have to do is make yourself a little uncomfortable for a while. Tear out that wall, start working on a new project every night, or just pack up and get ready to move. The trail is still out there waiting for you!

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