The first road west of the Mississippi left Arkansas Post and followed Indian trails, animal trails, rivers, creeks and the line of least resistance. The danger of cutting cross-country during the 18th and 19th centuries is best paraphrased by a modern park ranger: "My problems start when the smarter bears and the dumber visitors intersect."

  As for pathfinding, when Daniel Boone was asked if he ever got lost, he said, "No, but there were three days when I was bewildered." If Boone had a few days of bewilderment, think about the Joe and Jenny Smith family leaving their hardscrabble farm in Ohio to look for the promised land of the Ouachita Mountains. This was said: "I told you, Joe, it was the first creek, upstream, past the big rock that looks like a rabbit." Joe: "Looked like your mother to me."

  Meanwhile little Billy, Jack, Bobby, Sue, Francis and Augusta Smith are walking, hopping, running and skipping beside the wagon. These kinds of antics were good for about 10 minutes first off in the morning. The rest of the day was spent whining about the heat, the cold, the wet, the bugs, their bellies and their feet, and dodging the wagon wheels. Some weren't quick enough for the wheels.

  Jenny Smith's job was to make and break camp while tending the cows, the sick, and the hurt and cooking in sheets of rain, choking dust, and plagues of mosquitoes. Joe Smith's job was hunting and being careful not to shoot himself or a loved one. Mostly, the animals remained at a polite distance.

  Wild Indians were, of course, the worst threat. At anytime they could walk into the Smith's camp, sit down and order up a healthy portion of the family's dwindling provisions. Then they'd sit around picking their teeth, telling locker-room jokes about white people in a language that sounded a lot like gagging.

  The Smiths never wrote home about the bathroom situation. This was a prudish era. These folks -- living on berries and beans and slightly green meat -- kept that kind of news to themselves, when they could.

  Babies came from nowhere. One day Jenny is fording a cold creek knee-deep, and the next day she notes in her diary that a new member of the family arrived last night. Two days later she's hunkered down in a 30-knot Blue Norther grilling seven squirrels, well, nearly eight if you count the loony one that jumped on the muzzle.

  Those were the good old days. You know, growing older is a lot like that eighth barbequed squirrel. What was once normal now seems a little hairy and awfully strange.