The Pearl 2020

bottle, a bin of trail mix, a blanket, pillow, my hammock, a change of
clothes, and I’m out the door. I leave a note for my mom and dad, telling
them I’m on my way to Houston, encouraging them to call me when they
see this. Around 9 P.M., about an hour after I passed through Kansas City,
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly ringtone interrupts my pondering. I answer,
cutting off the iconic film score before it gets to the first “wha wha wha.”
“Hey Mom, how was dinner?” She ignores this and asks, “Houston,
Texas?”
“That’s the one.”
“Don’t you think you should have talked to us before you left?”
“I left you a note.”
“But that’s so far Caleb, are you sure you’ll be okay? Is your truck
going to make it? Are you going to stop and get food? I know you usually
don’t on your trips.”
“I’ll be fine Mom, I promise. I’ll call you in the morning
when I’m on my way back.”
She knows I am anxious not to talk and trusts me enough to ignore
her motherly instincts of making sure everything is okay, so she lets me
go after saying she loves me. I hang up the phone and turn it off, having
already memorized the route I need to take to get to my destination. I
don’t want any distractions while I’m alone.
~~~
Robert Merton would categorize Henry David Thoreau as one of the
people who do not accept society’s goals, nor the means of obtaining those
goals. Thoreau was a man who liked solitude, nature, and living simply and
by his own means in a time when people were becoming more reliant on
others. He did not care about making money; in fact, he sometimes talked
about how money ruined humanity by complicating things: people building
extravagant houses they can’t afford, relying on others to produce the food
they need to live, paying too much money for scholarly educations, caring
too much about the clothes they wear. Thoreau saw all this and yearned for
a simpler life. He also looked at what the U.S. was doing at the time and de-
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