Been Thinkin’ About…American frontiers

The caravel's sails billowed and orchestral music swelled. I was glued to the TV that early summer of 1992, watching a PBS documentary on Columbus and the New World. Shot on location in the Caribbean as well as Spain, the documentary included panoramic scenes of warm Floridian skies, the dark and inviting seas of my childhood, and creepy mangrove swamps. My 13-year-old life revolved around getting to Florida as often as possible and from my Midwest basement and sitting, sandwiched between the old wood stove and the cheap bookcases full of National Geographic magazines, I could not get enough of the show. History yes, but also an age of adventure, of strange new frontiers.

The humid breeze was strong one summer, not long ago, as I stood, smelling the old muddy Missouri River and contemplating history and the Ozarks from the cobblestone of St. Charles, Missouri. St. Charles is one my favorite towns, and not just for the red beans and rice or the waffle cones. Downtown St. Charles, if you have not been, feels a place out of time. Some six blocks of Main Street USA seem to chart American history, old, to vintage, to retro. Northern blocks are decidedly art deco. Middle blocks undeniably Second Empire. But the south blocks are my favorite. Early post-colonial period, built around the time of the city's founding, which is 1809, I like to sit and listen to the water flow down past the mill. It was from here that the frontier once spread to the Ozarks and all other points west. The great Missouri River carries a life of her own and the ghosts are all here beneath the big cottonwood trees.

The gunshots rang out from the old town square but hardly anyone flinched. Here, an old stage coach, there a Civil War cannon. The town square of Silver Dollar City, smelling of fresh blacktop and caramel corn, has held imagination sway for generations. I grew up here, it seems, riding the rides, sitting on the porch at the cabin and listening to the Homestead Pickers, and waiting for the shootout at noon. I was young then, young and green and a tourist — of all things! — and dreaming of a day when my life and the Ozarks could truly intersect. A strange new frontier of my own dreaming as I watched a blue summer sky pass through the white oak canopy and considered getting a blackberry funnel cake. The sound of the old train whistle still fills me with love, sentimental and bittersweet. A future past, lost long ago.

The night sky is different from the top of a high Ozarks ridge. Despite the hardwood forests, there is, here, a strange hint of the great Southwest, of glades and tarantulas and prickly pear and venomous death gliding, slate scales across gravel and flat rock, near silent, hungry and expectant in the summer night's radiant heat. Appalachia and the Ozarks are sister mountains in so many ways but here, one looks west and feels the call. The frontier and its latent dangers are still a ways away, but yet so much closer. And the great western plains' dusts color the sunsets in orange blush. Above, celestial temples wink into light, hinting at greater frontiers to come.

Just when we think we've reached all the heights, scaled the mountains, conquered and civilized the known world, the world surprises us, humbles us. Sometimes the greatest lands to be conquered are those within, going where few men these days are willing to venture, to introspect and investigate the great inner landscape of the soul. Recent past generations have been reluctant, preferring true north to come from a talking head, an established authority, a favorite brand. Instead, true north must come from within, that spinning compass of the soul, a strange compass which must be strangely nourished and nurtured, often in ways an industrialized and modern society cannot do. Artifice only satisfies so far.

America is a great nation and our great experiment of republic continues to unfold. We live in historic times again with a clarion call to choose, to know, to understand. Some look at our history with resentment and disdain. Some look to the future with petty resentment, even nihilism. Many grudgingly accept perceived fate, slogging through each day, numbing themselves with food or booze or weed or a heady combination thereof. I believe the greatest gift God gave us is free will, and I remind myself regularly that someone else's choices are their own. Such allows me to live a (mostly) happy life.

But as we celebrate Flag Day, Father's Day and the Summer Solstice, I am reminded — even as my Basset sleeps on my lap — that frontiers really never end. The sea billows roll. The mountain ridges are still tall and sharp and ragged rough. The mystery of the great celestial temples overhead remains, whispers of song still in the sky. The adventure is just beginning, should we choose to look, to really see, and to answer the call of the American frontier.