Today I thought about the Donner party in the shower

I'm about to prepare my Sta-wet pallet and I'll start coloring this tonight. 

Mostly because of tick tick tick at this point. I've got less than a week to finish. 

But it also feels like a comfortable time to do it. 

Ideally I'd like to have a little more time to finish the grayscale painting. Do the details and all that. But like I said yesterday, a lot of that stuff I can do with the color as well.

Happy January 11th Everybody

I dreamed about California.

I was traveling around by car.

There were these huge ice chunks melting off mountains and falling into Donner lake. It was creating these huge waves.

I pulled my car over to watch the spectacle.

Some people surfed the waves and a crowd stood on the shore and cheered and marveled. Then one gigantic chunk broke off the mountain and I could tell the wave would flood everything and wipe everyone away. I tried to start my car and it wouldn’t start. I got out and tried to run but the hill was too steep to move quickly.

Today I thought about the Donner party in the shower. For my non Californian friends and international friends who may not know, the Donner party was a group of people traveling to California in covered wagons in the 1840’s with hopes to start new and better lives in the fertile soil and golden sunshine.

The Donner party ran into multiple huge setbacks along the trail. By the time they got to the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains it was November (I think.) You weren’t supposed to try and get through the pass that late in the year.

But it looked clear and they knew they were close. And they were low on supplies.

They started through the pass. They didn’t know the risk they were taking. And they would never forgive themselves for taking it.

It started snowing. And it just didn’t stop. Some of them, exhausted from the elevation and from the hard work sat down to take a rest. They woke up covered in snow. They tried to find a way back but realized they were stuck.

They put together some shelters around the lake that is now named Donner Lake. 

They were snowbound for months, from November until March or April (I think) during a particularly brutal winter. They ran out of food. And some of them resorted to cannibalism to stay alive, in Jack Torrence’s words.

They’re most famous for the cannibalism part. But that was in a lot of ways the least brutal thing about the affair. Everyone just watched as everyone around them went crazy and slowly died from starvation and cold.

They hoped they wouldn’t be next. Or in some cases that it was them instead of their children.

They had already given up most worldly possessions and loved ones to go on this journey and more loved ones were lost along the way before this.

They lost the rest that winter and it was all replaced by brutal traumatic memories that must have haunted the survivors for the rest of their days.

One of the only things to make it to California was Patty Reed’s doll. Which she kept in her dress the whole time.

Here's a postcard I have with a photo of that doll on it.

Have fun

Goodnight Sweeties.