The Oregon Trail
(or Jennifer Has Died of Cholera)
In fifth grade, my quest to be cool continued on an obvious trajectory: I would make a name for myself by being the best at the educational video games that we could play on the Apple 2E at the back of the classroom.
I rocked Fraction Munchers and this game where you played as a fish and had to decide whether to eat or retreat from other fish, plankton, and the like. How I disdained the boys who didn’t take the fish-eating game seriously! They were always trying to eat fish twice their size or retreating from plankton, the idiots.
The game that showed off my true talents, though, was Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego. In it, you pursued criminals (they were art thieves or something) by following strangely worded clues about geographical locations and suspicious “tow-headed” characters. Sometimes it involved research to figure out what geographical location the clue was referring to, and research is where I shine.
I was great at Carmen San Diego, but every time I got to Senior Inspector level, leading me that much closer to catching the elusive Miss San Diego, one of my classmates would shut off the computer wrong, destroying my game. They did this, even though the instructions on how to properly shut off the computer was taped right there on the computer itself.
What’s wrong with them? I would ask myself. Why can’t they follow simple directions?
Little did I know then that I would be asking these questions all my life.
Another game I loved but wasn’t as good at* was Oregon Trail. This was a game that depended largely on your planning and leadership skills, which, as a youngest child, I lacked.** You had to set out on your journey west having brought the right supplies and you had to make the right decisions about forging rivers and doling out food and medicine. If you didn’t do it right, your entire party would die of dysentery or typhus or cholera — explosive diarrhea, basically.
I lost a lot of people and a lot of oxen. I just couldn’t keep those poor, virtual souls alive, and my Oregon Trail was littered with their graves.
*Usually it is not the case that I love things I am not good at.
**The last time I tried to plan something for me and my siblings to do, they ended up hanging out on the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz all day, and I called my mom in tears because they blew off my dinner reservations. I was 32 years old at the time. As the youngest, I at all times reserve the right to tattle on them.
