This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 25, 2010 - Instead of blogging this week, I'm going to recycle this speech, which I gave at the Leadership Reception of the Confluence on Monday night. The speech is abbreviated somewhat, but you'll find plenty of gratitude expressed for one of our region's greatest resources.
Here goes:
A big chunk of my personal mission, which is shared by the St. Louis Beacon for which I work, is to help to erase the St. Louis inferiority complex. I'm not a Pollyanna and I am most certainly not a Babbitt; in fact, I'm a just-the-facts-ma'am hard-core journalist. However, after observing this region for almost 50 years now, I know pretty well what is wrong and how difficult fixing our shared problems is proving to be.
But I know too what is right; and I recognize we are so rich -- rich not only in money but also in cultural resources and entertainment attractions and educational institutions. We also are endowed with riches of incalculable value in our inventory of natural resources, and thanks to the efforts of the Confluence, knowledge of them, and appreciation of them grows apace. The Confluence, as its website proclaims, is an aggregate, an assemblage of conservation, heritage and recreational resources.
I grew up in Little Rock, Ark., with a fellow named Pratt Remmel Jr. He remains one of my best friends and among a wide circle of friends he is one of the very most noble. He is an ardent conservationist, and soon after he and I graduated from college in the late 1960s, he established the Arkansas Ecology Center, which, among other things, led the fight to save the meandering Cache River from being converted from a rich wetlands in East Arkansas into meander-free ditch.
Pratt observed to me once that he and I and all the children of Little Rock were so fortunate, blessed in fact, to grow up in a place where every boy and every girl could walk to, or ride a bike to, a forest or a swamp without much trouble.
My personal refuge was the Fourche bayou and creek in south Little Rock. It was a magical, mysterious place for me, rich in wildlife and squishy mud, and gum trees and water snakes and king snakes and five-lined skinks and anoles, fat squirmy tadpoles that transformed themselves into frogs, and crawdads and salamanders and all sorts of insects. It was a laboratory for natural examination and a source of exotic fuel for a boy's active imagination.
The bayou and Fourche Creek had the extra historic endowment of having been the site of what was politely called the Engagement at the Bayou Fourche in 1863, when Gen. John W. Davidson whipped the Rebel Cavalry under the command of Brigadier Gen. John S. Marmaduke.
The bayou hangs in my memory like clean sheets drying on a clothesline, not only the particulars of it, which are hazy or impressionistic and always in motion, but also the primitive, solemn, awesome, fundamental essence of it, an essence that was so profoundly influential in the cultural development of a person who continues to finds special contentment in being alone in the woods, literally and figuratively.
Close to 10 years ago, I went with urban planner John Hoal on a trip to Chouteau Island. The intent was to introduce me to that landscape and to interest me in writing about it. It was so early in its history of the Confluence that John had to unlock a cable that stretched across the road to gain access.
We ditched his car and began hiking the length of this island, the largest of the three islands that comprise the Chouteau Island Complex. It was wintertime, and the cottonwoods on the Illinois shore were festooned with magnificent bald eagles. In retrospect, my hike with John that winter's day was a crescendo, rising slowly from the locked cable and increasing in dramatic content as we went along, rising as we saw and learned more and more.
Going up higher, we encountered a deer's carcass clearly providing nourishment for some predator or another, and continuing as the rhythms of the landscape changed. Finally, as we reached land's end, we were presented a visual climax that struck me like lightning, lightning charged with revelation.
At the southern tip of the island, I saw the silvery ribbon of the Gateway Arch. From it, the cityscape presented itself in sun lighted glory, spread before us, shining like a metaphorical holy city, like Byzantium, in "its own magnificence," as Yeats wrote, or the prayed-for New Jerusalem of William Blake, established in England's green and pleasant land.
Soon this vista, this source of inspiration and revelation, would be enjoyed if not embraced by thousands of hikers and adventurers, thanks to the supporters of the Confluence.
For me, the Confluence has proved to be much more than a place for recreation. I've often written about sites you can pinpoint on the Confluence map -- the Chain of Rocks bridge, the elevated trestle in north St. Louis, the Illinois mounds, and I wrote too about a trailblazing use of cell phones as a contemporary means of summoning commentary on local sites of natural and historic importance.
Increasingly I have become more and more interested in digging deep in the prehistoric and historic past of the region; and last year, when preparing my application for membership in the Explorer's Club, I used this interest in the archaeology of St. Louis as the backbone of my application. Explorations, I believe, can be conducted in places as far away as the Savage Mountain (K2) or as close as the vast interior topography of one's own mind. In between the distant and the intimate, there is the potential for enormous learning in the streets and forests of one's own home place. The Confluence, as the Fourche bayou was in my childhood, is my laboratory today. Few days go by that I don't think of some aspect of it.
It bears remembering that these 200 contiguous square miles of preserved riverine landscape represent a miracle of sorts, a titanic rescue effort, the embracing of a natural paradise by an metropolitan landscape, with forests and swamps we all can walk to, or ride a bike to, without much trouble at all.
There are magnificent bridges spanning the waters, the Eads Bridge chief among them in architectural significance. Walt Whitman wrote, "I have haunted the river every night lately, where I could get a look at the bridge by moonlight. It is indeed a structure of perfection and beauty unsurpassable, and I never tire of it."
Other bridges within the Confluence boundaries, perhaps not so poetic, serve to carry us back and forth between states, helping to smooth over regional boundaries. Just Saturday I rode my bike to north St. Louis to look at the beginnings of the new bridge across the river, and close by, I showed my companion a piece of the old railroad trestle, part of which has been restored and dedicated to bicycle and pedestrian traffic. That stretch of trestle is a structure so rare in the inventory of adaptive reuses that only Paris, New York and we can claim these high line structures as community resources.
Nearby, on the Riverfront trail, there is a place that hallows the courage of the free woman of color, Mary Meacham, who helped enslaved men and women escape to Illinois and to freedom.
The Confluence is steward and curator and promoter of these and many other inestimable resources, and thanks goes to the organization of its dedicated staff and board. While institutional organization is important and necessary, a more poetic, more spiritual, entirely visceral and intuitive commitment to the goodness of the Earth and the protection of its resources is prerequisite, but once put in motion, this conjoined commitment has the power to gather together disparate elements of natural life and human enterprise and human industry and to cause them to flow together -- just as the word "confluence" suggests.
My hope is the Confluence will grow and flow and flourish uninterrupted for all the men and women and children of the region, and for those who come to call upon us, and for the good of our region and its people, and the populations of our country and the globe.
And to all who have made this happen and those who continue to maintain and expand the treasure, I say thank you, and may your tribe increase. Happy Thanksgiving.