Recapturing
our frontier spirit
The warmest weather since before Halloween, accompanied by sunshine that doesn’t fade until after dinner, is giving all of us an overdue chance to reflect.
Our temporary summery embrace won’t last, of course. Groundhogs were right in predicting at least six more weeks of winter. But for the next few days, all of us will have a welcome opportunity to think about summer and our favorite places to enjoy.
Lots of locations come to mind, from Willow Walk Nature Trail at Marion Reservoir’s Cottonwood Point to just about any location off K-150 — the further off, the better.
As a native who grew up in the same house in which I live today, I have a favorite — the east bank of Luta Creek at Dogfish Dam, on the north end of the woods that divide Marion into hill and valley.
After the river was straightened a century ago, a lot of land along it became city-owned. Most of what’s now privately owned had gone back for taxes years ago, making almost the entire length an undeveloped extension of Central Park.
Adults rarely ventured there. Kids, on the other hand, lived there — much as kids today have indentured their attention to electronic devices.
The woods were a place of forts and paths known only to grade schoolers, deer, and rabbits. All around were artifacts of a huge prehistoric settlement of indigenous people who similarly had explored the region even though the kids of yesterday did not learn of their existence until after they had grown up.
To a kid exploring the creek’s biosphere, finding Indian arrowheads and utensils were an everyday pleasure. They littered the ground like whirlybird seedlings from maple trees. Only decades later have such discoveries become less frequent.
For those who dared, there was an ultimate challenge — walking across the narrow top of the dam to Dogfish Island, a pocket of farmland east of Marion’s water plant, isolated by the river’s new channel to the east and old channel to the west.
But even for those without the courage — or foolishness — to cross, there were trails to follow, tunnels and caves to build or explore, and fields of reeds to slash into anything from walking sticks to make-believe swords to mal-tuned flutes and horns.
If you’ve read Stephen King’s “The Body” or seen its movie version, “Stand By Me,” you know the type of paradise it was and the level of pre-teen philosophizing engaged in by those who visited.
These days, reaching my absolute favorite spot without trespassing requires a more circuitous route than 71-year-old legs would like to attempt. But memories of this unspoiled frontier — vast beyond belief to a child — remain as striking as do the attitudes that exploring it engendered.
The woods were our extracurricular activities, our summer recreation league, and our library programs. They taught us to be masters of our own entertainment and education and to be resilient in our exploration, using whatever was available as trailblazing tools.
It was a day in which air conditioning was absent or confined to a few rooms, when there were exactly three channels of TV, and when the only place where you could look things up were bulky encyclopedias in libraries.
Still, we survived and even thrived. My band of virtual brothers along the banks of the Luta all went on to achieve great personal and professional success. The frontier attitude of relying on ourselves and our ingenuity instead of products and services provided by others was a key to our success.
Nowadays, we as a community often struggle with how to deal, both in government and private businesses, with increasingly complex problems that seem to defy the simplistic solutions of our youth.
But do they? As we reflect on our own favorite places in our beloved hometown and how we may have enjoyed them, very often the strongest and most pleasant memories are of simpler times that might not be beyond our reach even in a much more modern world.
Honoring the places of our heart by marking them and encouraging others to enjoy them might restore to us some of the frontier spirit that this once-frontier town formerly thrived on.
If you could send your fellow residents to one place in the county where a few moments of reflection might provide at least some guidance in how to approach seemingly intractable problems, where would it be?
More important, how long has it been since you visited there — either in person or in your memories? Recapturing our youthful resilience may be among the keys to our community’s future.
— ERIC MEYER