Frontier of Life

Photo: Daniel Boone leading settlers through Cumberland Gap – George Caleb Bingham, 1851

Good friends, neighbors from a forty-year past, love to remind me of a comment I made after we had gotten buried under several feet of snow.

“Nature put it there, and nature can take it away,” I said before hunkering down to watch college bowl games long forgotten.

I laugh too about that moment in time. For me, it was a good one. A holiday break from school, nestled in a snug, warm house, and healthy as could be. But in fact, that moment was an anomaly, antithetical to my life ethos. I wasn’t a hunker-downer. Whether gamboling in the woods, engaging in snowball fights, or playing ball on dirt fields, from the days of my youth, other than when in school or absorbed in a book, life was “out there.”  Wherever there was. And it still is.

Out-there versus in-here is more than about a physical place; it’s a psychological and sociological construct. The notion transcends a person’s immediate situation and speaks to their larger life perspective as well as their view of others, from individuals and groups to the world. Out-there versus in-here gets at their attitude towards beliefs, lifestyles, and viewpoints different from and perhaps opposed to their own. It tells of how they live their life: maximumly in an expansive, risk-taking manner or minimally behind or within a protective shield.

Sadly, the in-here approach to life has gained a foothold in our political life and strife. It’s not only depressing and disconcerting, it’s contrary to a key element of the American spirit that is captured in a single word: Frontier.

In 1893, historian Fredrick Jackson Turner promulgated a new theory about America. His idea was the frontier being the driving force in shaping and building America. While he meant it in context of the literal frontier, the land brutally wrested away from the Indigenous peoples through decades of ethnic cleansing, Turner also hypothesized about the role the frontier played in shaping the American character.

Over time, as he developed a more macroscopic view of the American experience, Turner abandoned his theory. He came to see America for the stark reality it is. Rather than an unadulterated mass, the country was and remains a conglomeration of disparate sections. Each region, with its climate and land formations in conjunction with it being populated by disparate ethnic groups with unique customs, mores, and economies, was and is like a land unto itself. Collectively, they—we—formed and form what Jackson posited in 1922: a version of a United States of Europe.

 But Jackson’s original thesis refused to die, and it became ingrained in the American psyche and mythology over the ensuing century. Hollywood captured and promoted it through movies about the Old West, with heroic, hardy pioneers championed and protected by a rugged male individual. The theme song from the TV western Paladin extolled him as “a knight without armor in a savage land.” President John F. Kennedy called his visionary program for America the New Frontier, and one cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan, spoke about the “conquest of new frontiers” when president.

“In the future, as in the past, our freedom, independence and national well-being will be tied to new achievements, new discoveries and pushing back new frontiers.”

We can debate the validity of the role of the frontier or the degree it played in shaping we Americans, but there’s no denying the idea being infused into our mythology. Like all mythology however, it doesn’t matter if it’s factually true. What matters is that people believe in a myth’s larger meaning, whether it be the Resurrection, American Exceptionalism, or being a Chosen People. What’s also true about myths is that they become infused not only into a peoples’ collective belief system—culture—but also within followers’ and believers’ personal identity.

Another nondebatable point is the frontier, whether literal or psychological, cannot be—using Reagan’s language—conquered if people hunker down and refuse to be outward- and forward-looking, adaptive, and embracing. That’s because the frontier is out there.

I smilingly recall a comment a skier from the Kansas City area made during a lift ride.

“We have a saying that when people retire from there, they go to one of two places: Florida to die or Colorado to live.”

His statement caused me to chuckle despite the fact that we likely had another fan of the hated Kansas City Chiefs in our midst. The reason was twofold. One was that I heartily agreed. The other was that it spoke about his energy and spirit. The man didn’t carry an in-here attitude in his spirit. Rather, he was embracing life by looking forward to engaging with others and experiencing new ventures. And he knew the only place that could be done was not within the enclosure of his personal citadel, but out there, on the frontier of life.