They came upon the Guernsey Ruts without warning. They were not visible from a distance the way the great landmarks had been visible, not something that appeared on the horizon and grew for two days before arriving. They were simply there when the trail arrived at them, the sandstone ridge rising from the North Platte’s south bank in a way that the boggy ground nearer the river made unavoidable, and the wagons fell into single file the way they always fell into single file when the terrain required it, and then the wheels found the ruts and the company understood what they were in. (Excerpt from The Road Not Taken)
What Cord’s company found when they entered the sandstone crossing were channels: vertical-walled channels cut into the solid rock by the accumulated passage of thousands of wagons over nine years of emigration. The ruts were two feet deep in the shallower sections, three feet in the deeper ones, the walls of them rising on either side of the wagon wheels in a way that eliminated any question of steering. The rock itself determined the line and the wagon followed it whether the driver chose that line or not.
Maya felt it the moment Buck dropped into the channel. She felt a change in the quality of the pull, the team’s motion suddenly more constrained, the slight lateral suggestion of the rock walls communicating through the axle and the tongue and the lines to her hands with the geological authority of something that was not going to be argued with. She let the team find the ruts and settle into them and walked beside Buck with her hand off his neck for once, because the ruts were doing the directing and Buck knew it and she knew it and there was nothing to manage except the pace, which she kept steady, which was all the pace required.
The sound was different. This was the first thing Maya noticed. The iron-shod wheels running in the rock channels produced a resonant grinding that was nothing like the sound of wheels on dirt or gravel or the alkaline dust of the Wyoming approach. It was a sound that was partly mechanical and partly geological and entirely unlike anything the trail had offered before. The rock conducted the vibration in a way that the ground never did, the whole wagon hummed with it slightly, the canvas vibrated at a frequency that the wooden bows transmitted from the box up through the frame.
The sandstone ridge at Guernsey was not a choice. It was not that the trail had found the best available line through difficult terrain, but that the terrain had eliminated all lines except one, the boggy ground between the ridge and the river making a detour impossible and the ridge itself making a direct crossing the only option. Every wagon since the Bidwell-Bartleson Party in 1841 had crossed at exactly this point, had put its wheels into exactly this stone, and the stone had received every one of them and had been changed by every one of them in the incremental, cumulative way of soft rock under sustained use: a fraction of an inch per wagon, perhaps, a fraction of a fraction, but the fractions had added up over nine years and as many as fifty thousand wagons per year to channels that were already, in July of 1850, among the most dramatic physical evidence of the emigration anywhere on the trail.
And the emigration was not finished. The ruts were being cut deeper every day of every season that wagons crossed them, the 1850 wheels adding their increment to the 1849 wheels and the 1848 wheels and every year before, the stone recording the passage the way stone recorded everything, permanently, without preference, without any more awareness of what it was doing than the river had of running.
