This week, a show premiered on HBO Max — formerly known as HBO and then HBO Go and then HBO Now and then HBO Max and then just Max and now HBO Max again — titled “Back to the Frontier.”
The show’s page describes the premise as, “Three American families attempt to survive as 1880s homesteaders — without modern conveniences like technology, running water or electricity.”
And I’m feeling a little salty about this show’s existence, because where were the cameras when hundreds of other teens from my Provo, Utah, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stake and I attempted to survive without modern conveniences in the summer of 2003? Could I be rich and famous from reality TV stardom if an HBO Max/Go/Now crew had documented pioneer trek?
Trek, for those who may not know, is a tradition(?), occasional activity(?), curse(?), wherein large groups of church youth ages 14-18 are organized into “families” and a smattering of adult leaders are designated as “ma’s” and “pa’s.” Together, they dress in pioneer garb — including suspenders and bonnets — and travel to desolate locations to pull handcarts through windstorms and recreate the misery our faith’s early pioneers undoubtedly felt crossing the plains to Utah in the mid-1800s.
I participated in trek, under duress, during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school and it remains one of the strangest and most difficult things I’ve ever done. Not as strange and difficult as some other trek experiences I’ve heard, which include having to kill a live turkey for food and burying dolls on the side of the trail to represent the pioneers who did not make the journey. Luckily, we had plenty of food and zero Cabbage Patch doll burials. But it was still was not fun or easy. And I wish I had fame or fortune or both to show for it, like the “Back to the Frontier” families surely will.
According to the “Back to the Frontier” official trailer, the featured families will be handing over their devices, removing their makeup, and living in log cabins for an unspecified amount of time.
And that’s all good and brave, I guess, but I do believe these families are missing out on a key aspect of the trek experience, which is the bus ride from Provo, Utah, to Nowhere, Wyoming, that lasts roughly 90 hours.
For me and my fellow travelers, this bus ride featured a group of teen boys throwing Lunchable meat slices at the windows and watching them slowly slide down the glass, leaving a trail of bologna slime behind. For my seatmate, it featured waking up to a mouth full of M&Ms after he had fallen asleep and those same bologna-tossing boys had poured candies into his open mouth. And it all happened on a school bus. Not one of those fancy charter buses with carpeted floors and seats. A regular old yellow, numbered bus with vinyl seats that our skin would have stuck to if we hadn’t been covered from literal head to toe in pioneer garb in the July heat.
But that’s fine, you don’t need the bus ride to make compelling television, I guess. You do, however, absolutely need some good human drama. According to the “Back to the Frontier” trailer, that drama will come from families being forced to share a bed, use a latrine, and harvest crops for meals. Child’s play.
I want to see them live among hordes of teens whose only commonality is a shared congregation and being forced to spend three days in Wyoming pulling handcarts. In my experience, these circumstances led to at least one fistfight between teen boys over reasons I cannot remember but probably were very stupid, quite a few tears shed, some from dust in our eyes and others from emotional pain, and one forest fire near-miss at the hands of a boy who had brought matches in his pocket for some reason. All on the first day. Shakespeare WISHES he could write a plot so compelling.
Also, the families on “Back to the Frontier” appear to arrive on set in covered wagons, not pulling handcarts, and that kind of passenger princess behavior, again, isn’t really doing justice to the pioneer experience. Or at least the 2003 version of it.
You can’t call yourself a trekker until you’ve thrown on a pair of gardening gloves because that’s all you could find while packing and pulled a handcart along a dusty trail in violent winds. I did this, for three days, alongside the bologna-throwing kid who happened to have been assigned to the same “ma” and “pa” as I was. He actually turned out to be pretty nice. Which just goes to show, you can’t judge a book by its lunch meat.
In all sort-of-seriousness, I wish the “Back to the Frontier” families luck, because while I don’t believe they’ll have it as hard as me and my 2003 peers did, life without technology or flushing toilets is still tough. And they deserve to be rewarded handsomely for their efforts. Even if I wasn’t.
What I did get at my trek’s completion was more mosquito bites than I had previously believed the human body could tolerate. A sandwich and a Gatorade for the 117-hour bus ride home. An appreciation for the pioneers’ long walk across the plains. And the comfort of knowing that I will never again have to ride a bus to Wyoming or pull a handcart through dusty winds.
Unless, of course, HBO Max/Now/Go calls and promises fame and fortune. In which case I might do it again. But only if the bus is carpeted.