Route 66, Unfathomable Dust, and the Limits of Human Endurance

I often think when looking at my extensive collection of Advil, Tylenol (pm, night time, day time, cough and cold), Sudafed, Zantac, Prilosec, Alleve, Nyquil, etc., along with any prescription medications I've been given over the years, that I would never survive if I lived in an earlier time that predated these simple yet powerful panaceas.  In writing this, I realize I look like a hypochondriac, and to be honest, I probably am, but my point is that today, we have become so reliant on prescription drug culture and the immediacy of quick-fix over-the-counter pills.  I veritably could not imagine life without these simplicities, but during class today I was struck by the group presentation's inclusion of the luxury items that many westward migrants chose to forgo for economic reasons, and how these travelers illuminate a much more tested and extensive limit of human endurance.

During the dust bowl, midwesterners escaping to California, much like the Joad family in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, were trapped in overheating cars while lung-clogging dust swirled around them, threatening their ability to eat, drink, see, and breath.  Access to water was scarce, eating nutritiously was often hilariously impossible, sand infiltrated unprotected eyes, and crept into lungs leading to a number of breathing conditions.  And yet these Okies persevered and pushed forward despite these conditions that today we probably would liken to the lowest rungs of hell. While it has fortunately become highly unlikely that we will find ourselves in a situation as deplorable as the Joads and their fellow migrants on Route 66, my point here is that we've become so insulated by our modern and instantly-accessible comforts that we have no sense of our limits or capacity for strength.  Some of us are pushed to the brink in different, specific ways, but the Grapes of Wrath and the realities of these American refugees truly illustrates the outermost limits of humanity's capacity for survival, not just during one day, not just mentally, not just physically, but totally and for an indefinite amount of time.  Ultimately, after seeing today's presentation, not only am I more grateful for the luxuries I have access to that I formerly saw as trivial and basic, but I am more conscious of the fact that so often when I think I cannot endure, I really have only begun to test the mettle of that innate human capacity for survival and endurance that has been masked by time but not diminished by it.