“Going on would have been simple, for
travel is an escape, and as long as our wagons moved our decisions could be
postponed. When one moves, one is locked in the treadmill of travel, and all
decisions must await a destination. By choosing to stop we had brought our
refuge tumbling about us, and our problems could no longer be avoided.
“The promised land is always a distant
land, aglow with golden fire. It is a land one never attains, for once attained
one faces fulfillment and the knowledge that whatever a land may promise, it
may also demand a payment of courage and strength.
“To destroy is easy, to build is
hard. To scoff is also very easy, but to go on in the face of scoffing and to
do what is right is the way of a man.”
A later period novel from Louis L ’Amour. I’ll be honest
some of his novels can strike me as sloppy or not much better than formulary,
but he will occasionally have a novel that feels so from the heart, it has a rib-sticking
quality to it. This volume is one of those rib-sticking works.
This novel comes from a deeply informed place and on
one-hand is straight-forward simplicity in story-telling with no-frills while
on the other there are moral or practical asides that give one pause for contemplation.
His knowledge of the terrain rings true, he drops little bits about survival in
the mountains that gibes with reality, but, again, his moral asides resonate. They
tread a balance between erudite and folksy pragmatic—most importantly these
asides strike me as heartfelt.
A superlative L ‘Amour novel.
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