By now, many people around Lincoln County are familiar with the story of two brothers, Rinker and Nick Buck, who, along with Nick's Irish Jack Russell terrier, Olive Oyl, traversed the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail in a covered wagon drawn by three mules, Becky, Jake and Bute. Rinker, a well-known author, pitched the story to Simon & Schuster, which accepted his proposal. The journey took place about four years ago. Rinker's book, “The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey” was published in 2015.

That trip was one in a series of adventures in Nick Buck's life. He lives in Newcastle and builds houses. He owns horses and is passionate about driving sleighs and wagons. He's lived and fished in Alaska, and was part of a fishing crew off the east coast. He's volunteered in Peru, and traveled to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to help clean up. He's been a local actor for about 40 years.

He hasn't read his brother's book yet, saying “It's one thing to read a book. It's another thing to read a book about yourself.”

Nick is the eighth of 11 children. Not much fazes him. “I let life come to me,” he said. He said that most of his siblings settled on one career. In “The Oregon Trail,” his brother, Rinker, said of Nick, “He's spent his life in the barnyards and the bilges.” Nick agrees with that assessment. “I've worked with my hands, building complex houses, or running complex machines, or dealing with complex personalities. When I was in my 20s, if something came up that looked like fun, I'd do it,” he said. His brother asked him to join him on his covered wagon trip at an opportune time. “I'd fallen off a roof and crushed my foot. He asked me to go in February, and we left in May,” he said.

The Oregon Trail doesn't just run along flat lands. Pioneers abandoned belongings and unloaded wagons to get up, over and down the trail, reloaded, and forged on. The Buck brothers faced challenges of their own. One dilemma involved a decision on whether to go up or around steep, rugged California Hill in northwest Nebraska. Going around would have taken more time. Nick told Rinker he could get up the hill. It's described in the book, but Nick told the story his way. “I'm driving the mules. There's a ditch on the left hand side of the road. We got about a third of the way up, and the wagon tilted into the ditch. I tried to figure out how much energy it would take to get the mules back on the road, or whether I should plow straight ahead. I'm yelling at the mules and Olive was growling and barking. She was saying to the mules, 'He means it this time!’ Three quarters of the way up, I felt the mules relax a little. What was going on in their minds was, 'We can't do this.' I'm thinking, 'You can't not do this because we're going to end up in a heap down at the bottom!'” They made it to the top.

When asked how he had the confidence to take the hill in the first place, he said, “It's physics. You have to know how steep it is. You calculate the energy potential of each mule. You calculate the size of your adrenaline gland. You can't be scared in a situation like that, you have to be determined,” he said.

He grew up around horses and wagons on his family's Pennsylvania farm. “My dad worked with the older kids around the horses and wagons, but by the time I came around, he wasn't doing it as much. If you wanted to do it, you went out into the barn and did it. I've been doing it all my life,” he said.

He hasn't planned a new adventure yet. He said adventure finds him. He was on his way to Florida at the time this story was published. He's been asked to serve as an advisor on the board of Skyline Farm, a historic carriage museum in North Yarmouth. “They were just gifted a blacksmith shop, a wheelwright shop, and a harness maker shop. They have about 100 carriages now,” he said.

The brothers traveled through several states during their trip. Wyoming, in particular, loomed large, and not only because all of New England fits inside of it. When asked what question he wished he’d been asked, Nick wrote a little essay about traveling through Wyoming.

“The wheels kick up the dust as you travel the two-track. The horizon never rests. The trace chains jangle and the mules’ sweat evaporates, leaving behind a salty deposit on their hairy coats. The sun and wind are constant reminders that, although it is Wyoming, it is just a spot on a planet in a galaxy in some far-away place. There is no background music. The mules’ hooves and the wheels creaking and the chains are the only sounds to accompany your every mile. Looking off into the distance is your companion, imagining what is over the next ridge and beyond that, the next. Will there be water when we get there? Home was far away at the beginning, but as the days turned to weeks, home was where we were. Solitude is a great travel companion if you let it come close.”