Week 5

Minke whale, Ross Sea, Antarctica

The frontier has been a fundamental part of America and a frontier without a mythology is unimaginable. I don’t know that the blame for the mythology of the American frontier can entirely be laid at Frederick Jackson Turner’s feet. As Popper notes, there were more than a dozen biographies of Daniel Boone written before the 1880s. All cultures have had myths and heroes. The difference is that our heroes weren’t gods. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill. As an unnamed person said in The Significance of the Frontier in American History “when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow.” Even the fictional characters were just men.
Even some sixty years after the Census had determined that the frontier was gone, men like Chuck Yeager and John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were still exploring a frontier. On June 21^st, 2004, the first private manned spaceflight occurred. This should have been one of those brass band and fireworks events in our history. It merited perhaps five minutes of time on CNN. Now, the frontier is the ‘urban fringe’ and we treat the mythology like that god-awful lamp an elderly aunt has given us. We are embarrassed to own it but we can’t get rid of it. We don’t have an identifiable frontier and we can’t take risks. Sure, there are extreme sports and adrenaline junkies but there is a difference between strapping a snowboard to your feet and jumping from an airplane and strapping snowshoes to your feet and exploring the length of the Rockies or hauling hundreds of pounds of glass photographic negative plates thousands of miles to photograph Yosemite. As a society, we’ve abandoned the back roads for the security and comfort of the freeway. And that’s too bad.

Bless you Sir Edmund Hillary. I hope there’s a special place for trailblazers.