Gateway

We strolled from our hotel to the St. Louis Arch and the Thomas Jefferson Western Expansion Memorial. This monument is an amazing sight, almost unbelievable, like someone photo shopped an impossible image onto the sky in the background of St. Louis.

This is the historic point of departure for dreamers leaving for a new life in the open, untamed west. To me it couldn't be more intimidating or exciting than boarding a space ship to colonize a new planet. Then again the people loading their prairie schooners with enough goods to survive the trip and start a new life, along with their families, couldn't possibly have imagined the distance nor terrain and obstacles awaiting them. Even from the top of the arch the formidable Rocky Mountains are invisible, the distance between here and there unimaginable.


Yet still they left; still they came west.

At Ellis Island we learned how the politics of old Europe drove people away on a similar journey, a dream and prayer to be anywhere but where they were, oppressed in unimaginable ways. The seeds of modern distrust of government must have come over the ocean from peoples whose governments were murderous. What then drove people from the new America away into the west? Hope of riches? Dreams of having even more control over their own prospects? Restlessness? God?

Now, in a few days, as we continue westward, we will be home in a place forged by those who came dreaming before us. When we left, a rainbow filled the Eastern sky, inviting us on our adventure. As we return, a steel bow beckons as our doorway to possibility and promise in the West.


Through the gateway we pass; we are coming back, not to something new, but renewed ourselves by tracing our history as Western Americans. What calls us is -- home.