New Frontiers

The drive to my doctor’s office isn’t long. It starts getting prettier heading west on I-70. I drove over the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge and the beautiful Missouri river at St. Charles. I’m supposed to teach a unit on the Lewis and Clark expedition this semester, if I get that far given these insomniac nights. I wondered what Meriwether Lewis would think if he was here today. I imagined him standing on the banks of the river with Seaman by his side, watching these huge hunks of metal flying by at furious speeds on an impossibly complicated piece of architecture. Lewis was from a slow world. It took the expedition two years to find the Pacific ocean and make it back to St. Charles for a hero’s welcome.

Some people in the U.K. and even some Americans have told me that this country has no history, but on this late September day before the leaves have started turning, I feel my heart overflow with a rich sense of history and amazement at the sacrifices made by others before us who gave us the life we know today.

I feel good on the drive. I feel like my meds are working. I listen to Better than Ezra and Jack’s Mannequin and think it’s time I found some new music. I sing loudly. These nights are another matter. I sleep fitfully. I wake up feeling dizzy and twitchy. At night my mind kicks into overdrive, making small problems into insurmountable obstacles. How long to get well? How expensive? Will I ever really shake this thing? What will I do if this doctor quits or retires on me?

Lewis and Clark and all the members of the expedition were driven to distraction by gnats, mosquitoes and the dreaded tick. I feel their pain. I’m on my own journey in a new medical frontier of emerging ecological illnesses that our technology is yet unable to detect and that our medicines struggle to treat.

Lewis could probably sketch the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge to scale. The explorers of that time recorded and categorized everything. It was their way of exerting some control over a dangerous and unpredictable environment. It’s now 3:23AM. Meriwether Lewis mapped half a continent by his own hand. I write only to exert some control over a dangerous and unpredictable interior; my own body and mind.