LARPing, if you are unaware, stands for Live Action Role Playing. It’s kind of like Dungeons and Dragons, only acted out in real life. LARPers will dress up in medieval-looking armor, carry foam or plastic swords, and battle against other LARPers in simulated individual or group combat. I have never LARPed myself, but I know a few people who have, and I can understand why people would enjoy doing it. Life is boring, mundane, and most of us are totally average in most things. LARPers, though, get to experience life a fantasy world as someone with extraordinary courage, strength, and wisdom, if only for a little while.
Pioneer trekkers also wear abnormal garb. We dress in nineteenth century clothing, or at least as close as we can get to it — the men in slacks, white shirts, suspenders, and wide brimmed hats, the women in full-length dresses and bonnets. We also act out a situation that we don’t normally experience in modern life. We pull handcarts loaded with camping gear around for a few days. But even though the experience of a pioneer trek is temporary, the effect that it can have on its participants can be much more long-lasting than those of LARPing.
In the mid-1800s, Mormons trekked across the Great Plains of North America in order to escape persecution in the East and find refuge in the West. Almost all of them made the thousand-mile journey on foot. Many had ox-pulled wagons to carry their supplies. A few companies of these pioneers, though, pulled all of their belongings in handcarts.
Most of these people had employment, homes, and families that they were leaving forever when they set out for the West. They were making huge sacrifices that are almost incomprehensible for us today. We have airplanes, telephones, and the internet to connect us to people and places all over the world, but when they they had no expectation that they would see the people or places that they were leaving ever again. They willingly made those sacrifices because of the strength of their faith. They believed that they were participating in a great work. They were building Zion.
Walking in the footsteps of those pioneers is meant to inspire reflection on those sacrifices, and inspire humility as a consequence. We live in a relatively pampered age. Food is abundant, medicine is effective, transportation is fast and easy, and we are no longer asked to uproot our lives in order to live our religion. Still, many struggle to live our religion anyway.
I wondered during my recent trek, as I pulled that handcart up dusty hills, if I would be willing to walk across a continent for my faith. And that was when I realized that these pioneer treks are designed to make us ask that question. They are meant to inspire that kind of self-examination.
Of course, there can be no absolute answer to that question. I don’t know what I would have done with my life had I been born in the nineteenth century. But it occurs to me that if I’m willing to abstain from drinking alcohol, and from engaging in premarital sex, if I am willing to give one-tenth of my income to my church, if I am willing to work for hours every week without pay for a calling, if I am willing to attend church every week, and if I am willing to traipse around a Massachusetts State Forest wearing pioneer clothes and pulling a handcart, chances are that I would be willing to leave my old life behind and take on a new one if it were asked of me. If I make the sacrifices that are asked of me now, chances are that I would have made the sacrifices that would have been asked of me then.
And that, I think, is one of the ways in which a pioneer trek differs from LARPing. It is not meant to make us feel brave and strong and wise only for a brief time. It is meant to make us feel strong in faith for the rest of our lives.
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