“When my brother and I built and flew the first man-carrying flying machine, we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention that would make further wars practically impossible.”
—Orville Wright, 1917
from the Museum of Westward Expansion
at the Gateway Arch, St. Louis

The “For Sale” signs replicate like viruses on the car windows of the young U.S. Marines. It’s the surest, saddest sign. It means these boys are being shipped out. And they won’t need cars where they’re going. And they might not come back.

Like many Southerners, I come from a military town. So when the “For Sale” signs proliferate, I know that the military is mobilizing.

Those “For Sale” signs haunt me tonight as I stand underneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Mulling the finitude of existence comes easily when you look skyward at this inverted catenary curve deposited on the banks of the Mississippi River. It’s dusk, a notch below freezing, and eerily quiet on the river. Nothing stirs. In the American Midwest, nobody’s home.

Once, right before a Final Four college basketball game in St. Louis, a coach went down and spit into the river because he’d heard it was good luck. Silly superstition, of course, but a good story. His team won later that night.

The curvaceous monument that defines St. Louis soars 630 feet above the river’s edge and is officially named the Thomas Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. It commemorates the opening of the U.S. frontier, which, at the time, pretty much ended on the lawns of St. Louis.

Jefferson loved anything new and exotic so he commissioned Lewis and Clark to go forth, find it, and bring it back. Lewis and Clark were two fellows with the happy knack for getting along swimmingly well with just about anybody from a different culture. Grandiose naivete has its charms when deployed in the right spirit.

If you stare directly up while walking underneath the arch, it’s an optical illusion. It ebbs and flows like a river’s current. A monument and a river, side by side. One of steel, the other of water. One stands, the other flows. As symbols they differ but as neighbors they get along just fine.

From here, Lewis and Clark’s expedition headed westward looking for a shortcut that didn’t exist. Instead they found new races, peoples, cultures, flora, fauna, and mountains so big and ominous that even their hardy souls were intimidated. Still they trudged on, overcoming all odds and suffering only one casualty throughout the perilous journey.

Bathed in footlights, the Arch looms and luminesces. This modern megalith is a pillar of engineering and optimism. It’s a world-first engineering feat. In order to build it, they first had to figure out how. Incidentally, although it was estimated that 13 workers would lose their lives during the construction of the monument, there were no fatalities.

Across the river the twinkling lights of a riverboat casino beckon, just like in Mark Twain’s era. In the 1800s there were so many riverboats that they docked three deep for miles along the river front. “Be good and you’ll be lonesome,” said Twain. Floating casinos ensured that neither excessive goodness nor lonesomeness was ever a problem. Twain also said that he never met a stranger because he’d already met every kind of person on the river.

“Every person is a foreign culture,” says famed negotiator Herbert Cohen, i.e., every person sees, acts, and thinks differently from you. This is important to learn. Twain got it. Lewis and Clark got it. Their expedition succeeded by figuring out how to live, work, and play peaceably with peoples whose views and values differed radically from theirs.

Today, however, the “For Sale” signs multiply in number and spread across the South as a vastly different sort of expedition begins.

This sad math stirs me to action. Breaking the stillness, I do the wisest thing possible given the circumstances. I amble over to the Mississippi River, lean out, and spit.

Just for luck.

Duff Watkins ’77 wrote this reflection in February 2003, shortly before the war in Iraq began. A government major at Centre, he now lives in Australia. His e-mail address is research@speednet.com.au.

Two hundred years ago this October, Meriwether Lewis met William Clark in Clarksville, Ind., just across the river from Louisville. From Clarksville, the two recruited and trained much of their “Corps of Discovery” for the journey to map the West. For more about the official Lewis and Clark bicentennial, see www.lewisandclark200.org.