Paul Turner: Who has the grit to take on the wild frontier?

Like other residents of the West, some of us here in the Spokane area will eventually ask ourselves a big question.

How would I have fared back in the covered wagon days?

It’s natural to wonder. We like to think we would have been hardy pioneers, the kind of settlers who possessed grit and substance. But how can we be sure?

Let’s face it. Some of us are whiners, even with the staggering array of seat warmers, pulsing showers and other 2018 creature comforts at our disposal.

But because the West was long America’s second-chance refuge and can still seem relatively new, we ask ourselves.

Would we have been brave enough to come out here? Would we have been tough enough?

Would we have survived without our prescription lenses, blood pressure medicine and central air with heated floors?

Sometimes self-doubt creeps in and we have to admit we’re just not certain we would have had what it takes. But perhaps that’s because, when considering this, we tend to focus on life-or-death challenges of the 1800s and discount our 21st century skill sets.

Sure, it took immeasurable fortitude to endure droughts, quicksand, grizzly bears and encounters with hostile indigenous peoples trying to protect their real estate. But have you ever stopped to consider that maybe the pioneers who came west might be intimidated by the difficulties we unblinkingly confront on a daily basis?

Just think about it. Maybe one of your distant relatives excelled at finding water and tracking game along the wagon-train route. That doesn’t necessarily mean he would have been up to the task of remembering all the different passwords for a computer, cable TV apps, garage door opener, et cetera.

Or perhaps a sturdy sodbuster in your family tree rightfully earned respect for her impressive ability to cradle a nursing baby in one arm while she steered a plow with the other. That’s all well and good. But it’s no guarantee she would have been able to microwave breakfast, find her husband’s misplaced iPad, drop the kids off at school and then get to work in time for the psychodrama of the weekly departmental planning meeting.

OK, that might seem like comparing apples and oranges. But who is to say dispatching a rattlesnake in your boot is a western skill and navigating the rocky shoals of your annual performance evaluation isn’t?

Now we all know the West of today is a far cry from the frontier era. We now have baby wipes and yogurt in squeezable tubes. But just imagine the pioneers confronting the life we know and probably take for granted.

Wouldn’t they regard as an unspeakable horror the idea of traveling at high speed on Interstate 90 and seeing that the driver of the car in the next lane is looking at her phone instead of the road?

Would they shrink from the very idea of multitasking or trying to find the TV remote for the 40th consecutive night?

Would they assume something demonic was afoot if they heard some woman in her house asking an invisible person named Alexa for tips about going on a juice cleanse?

How would they react to their laptop crashing?

What would they think about the everyday indignities of air travel or the sobering notion of family members wanting to watch early-round games of the West Coast Conference basketball tournament?

The list goes on, though it needn’t. Those westward-heading men and women in the 1800s already proved themselves.

I suppose it is possible current residents of Ohio or New Hampshire could ask themselves how they stack up to the transplanted Europeans who laid claim to that land. But really, it seems more like a western thing. At least for a few people.

Putting aside for a moment the degrading treatment of native populations, there is an obvious reason we measure our link to the settlers who came west.

We admire them.

They looked around and beheld the opportunities before them back in Illinois or Kentucky. And they reached a decision.

Their prospects weren’t good enough back there. They could do better. So they headed out here.

Could we have done the same?

You have to wonder.