There’s something strange about progress.
We trade some of our humanity for convenience.
Every generation invents something to make the world smaller—railroads, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, the internet, social media. And every time we make distance easier to cross, physically or virtually, we lose a little of what distance once meant.
There was a time when leaving home meant genuinely leaving home.
Maybe that’s why I tell the people I care about that I love them every time I hang up the phone or one of us walks out the door. I’ve lived long enough to know that sometimes somebody leaves and simply never comes back. If “I love you” is the last thing somebody ever hears from me, I’m okay with that.
In the Old West, you could leave for work and be gone days, weeks or months—not 10 hours. News traveled slowly. Help might be days away.
You were on your own with your wit, your backbone, your horse, some rope, Sam Colt, Oliver Winchester, and whatever you packed in your saddlebags and bedroll.
A man could ride over a ridge and simply vanish, with no one knowing whether he’d ever come back.
That kind of distance could be terrifying.
But it could also be the very essence of freedom.
No phone, tablet or laptop tethering you to your people and your world. To get anything done, you had to leave your world and enter somebody else’s—or the world at large—which could be dangerous.
That’s part of what fascinates me about the American West. Not the mythology that everyone was a gunslinger, but the sheer space of it—the knowledge that beyond the next ridge might be a town, a stranger, trouble, opportunity—or absolutely nothing.
We’ve conquered most of the distance between us and made the world a smaller place.
Sometimes I wonder what we traded for it.
What has convenience cost us?
Maybe that’s one reason I keep finding my way back to 1893 and the world of 𝑨𝒕𝒐𝒏𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝑩𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒅.
— 𝑱𝒆𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒐𝒏 𝑩𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒍𝒆𝒕𝒕
