Missouri Journal

Has Our Past Become a Foreign Country

Posted at August 18, 2006 07:39

By Arthur Mehrhoff

How to Make Our Past and Our Places Meaningful Without Manipulation

“You have to know where you are before you know who you are”

—Wendell Barry

At MissouriLife’s Weekend at the Lake this past October, I met a remarkable woman, Honey, from storm-ravaged Mississippi who was staying with some friends here in Missouri while recovering from her ordeal. She described her desperate attempt to “save some memories” of her late husband while Hurricane Katrina dismembered her beautiful household and threatened her life. In the face of imminent disaster, she had to quickly decide which pieces of her past to salvage from the wreckage caused by the storm. Her story made me keenly aware of the fact that we might all face Honey’s dilemma: What are the essential things we need to save when confronted by a whirlwind?

Both of my parents passed away due to long-term illnesses while I was still young, so writing for me became a way of going home again.

Growing up in the faded glory of T.S. Eliot’s old Saint Louis, where “the yellow smoke rubbed its muzzle against the window panes,” places became my imaginary ocean. While my father was alive, embarking on a voyage in our big-boat Plymouth (gas was thirty cents, not three dollars) was a major family event. My sister Nancy and I peered out the back window to watch the changing colors of the illuminated fountain in Forest Park. We admired the venerable bird cage at the Saint Louis Zoo from the 1904 World’s Fair (giggling at uncle Lyman’s story about the bird that pooped on his hat), marveled at the Central West End’s turn-of-the-century gates and mansions, or, if I was really lucky, attended an exciting baseball game at ancient Sportsman’s Park on Grand Avenue near my grandparents’ houses, hoping that Stan the Man would bang a homer off the North Side YMCA building. These placesbecame the reminder strings around my finger.

It was not just the city, however, that fascinated me. I hazily recall boarding a diesel train at Union Station, destination unknown: mighty Bagnell Dam and the postcard-worthy Lake of the Ozarks; the Hannibal of Mark Twain; mysterious Meramec Caverns, St. Joseph and the Pony Express; W.C. Handy and the St. Louis blues; Count Basie and Kansas City jazz; the magnificent Capitol in Jefferson City; the mighty, majestic rivers coursing through our state. To me this state seemed to mean, as in Willa Cather’s lovely phrase, “the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.”

The biggest adventure of all was traveling to Columbia each autumn to attend football games with my father. But the games, although we usually won, are not what I remember. I noted the changing landscape along the route, the spectacular fall colors along with the growing number of vacant and abandoned farm buildings,the city reaching farther and farther into the countryside each year. I marveled at the Gothic towers of the Memorial Union at the University of Missouri, my first glimpse at a college campus, and the overwhelming power of the names of war casualties etched into stone.

Nostalgia is history without the pain. I once tripped and slid down the white stone “M” at the north end of Memorial Stadium. It was a rather quick and painful descent that is also part of my past. My father’s death in 1963 ended the adventures. My mother’s death three years later closed the logbook. In one sense, Missouri Journal is my attempt to save some memories.

However, my personal journal must connect with you to be truly meaningful. I think most of you also cherish similar feelings toward those special places that distinguish Missouri life. Such places make our culture memorable and meaningful; their destruction diminishes us as a people, just like Alzheimer’s disease diminishes an individual.

And therein lies the problem. The past, writes cultural geographer David Lowenthal, has become a foreign country. We find ourselves surrounded by monuments, memorials, and places whose origins and symbolism mystify us even while the hurricane force of globalization knocks us around. We need these place-markers, both to anchor us in the storm and to safely navigate a successful course for the future.

There is a wonderful cartoon called “The Self-Made Man” that looks like a Picasso drawing, with everything in the wrong place. We need the past to create the future; to get things in the right places. Heritage tourism and ecotourism have become major growth sectors in the global economy as people search for authentic places in a sea of sameness. Economists and futurists both note this growing trend toward an “experience economy;” companies and communities now must make meaning as well as products. The key question becomes how to make these places and experiences meaningful rather than manipulated.

Missouri Journal will consider some of these critical issues for our communities and offer some navigational aids of its own, in future columns. As St. Louis-born T.S. Eliot marvelously wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploration will be to arrive where we started, and to know that place for the first time.”

The sight of the Gothic towers of the Memorial Union helps me remember and connects me once again to the past, which helps me navigate through an uncertain future.

There is an old tradition of tipping your cap as you pass through the archway of the Memorial Union. I hope you will join me in looking at old, familiar places once again for the first time. Let’s all tip our caps.

April 2006

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