I started the day where the Des Moines River empties into the Mississippi from the west and I ended the day (basically) where the Chippewa River does the same thing from the east.  Along the way I do not know how many other rivers first from one side then the other fed the great river.  And this is the story of the Mississippi River — it is not one river, it is the sum of all the rivers in the drainage.  The Des Moines or the Chippewa may not mean much to you, but think about the Ohio, the Missouri, the Arkansas — these are rivers with entire histories across the east and west of our country and they disappear into the Mississippi.  From Keokuk north to Red Wing Minnesota I rarely ventured far from the banks of the Mississippi.  To the east, all day, were Illinois and Wisconsin and periodically, civilization got thicker around a bridge making a way across.  My bartender in Keokuk, where there is a bridge to Hamilton, Ill., said when I asked if she was from Keokuk, “Oh no, I’m a Hamilton girl.”  She’s worked at the same family owned, local Keokuk Iowa restaurant for almost 30 years (I ate at this place in 1988 when it was in the basement of the Iowan Hotel and she said she was volunteering as a busser then).  She knows customers by name, calls their orders out to them before they open their mouths, looks, talks and acts like an Iowan.  But she’s a “Hamilton girl.”  If ever you needed an indication of the strength of the Mississippi River, there you have it.

It would be hard to imagine a better way to go north or south in the middle of the country than the Great River Road.  I’ve been primarily on the western side, so I can’t speak for Illinois and Wisconsin, but Iowa and Minnesota are sublime.  To me,for a good drive, there is kind of a magic mix among scenery, points of interest/towns, and open road.  For the most part, the Great River Road ticks all the boxes very well.  I spent 1987/88 traveling all 99 counties of Iowa, but I’d forgotten the northeast corner, which, for my money, is perfect.  Hardwood forest, rolling hills and high bluffs, open ground, interesting towns along the way.  I do wish the weather were better today.  From dawn until 4:32 pm I never saw the sun.  Most of the day it was raining.  Until about 11:30, the fog was so thick I had no idea if I was next to the river or in it. I did catch a break around 11:30 when I got to the Effigy Mounds National Monument, just north of Marquette, Iowa and the rain stopped for period.

Located just inside the far western edge of the region generally associated with effigy mound culture, the national monument includes a north and south unit, miles and miles of hiking trails, and 206 known prehistoric mounds, 31 of which are animal effigy mounds.  Historically, we know humans have been in this part of northeast Iowa for over 10,000 years; 2,500 years ago conical mounds appeared and were chiefly burial mounds; around 1,700 years ago, linear mounds appeared, but there was no evidence they were burial mounds, and some were connected to conical mounds forming what are known as compound mounds; the real art started about 1,400 years ago in the Late Woodland Period when the people in the Upper Mississippi began building animal effigy mounds.  Most are bears, or birds.  They are typically 2-4 feet high, 40 feet wide, and 80 feet long.  But sizes, as they say, vary.  What’s interesting to me, is that there is no ceremonial or ritualistic reason for them.  There is indication in some that fires were set in the region of the animal’s heart or head, but no conclusive evidence that these mounds are anything other than what I would call yard art. Culturally, there is a link between the bear and the earth and the bird and the sky, so if you were an earth family, you probably built a bear mound mound and a sky family, a bird mound.  To be honest, today, you can’t tell one from the other, or either from a small hill; but, back in the day, if you were looking at them from above, they were clearly birds and bears.  Now how people 1,400 years ago got an aerial view of their handiwork, I don’t know, and, since from the ground level even then they didn’t really look like much, the mystery deepens.  Nevertheless, when you climb the 2 mile trail to the top of the high bluffs over the river, through hardwood forests of Hickory, Oak, Cherry, Maple and Cottonwood and find, on the spine of the ridge amidst oddly clear green spaces, dirt bears, your skin kind of prickles.  It’s a spiritual place for sure.  Then, after 650 years or so, they stopped.  No more effigy mounds.  I suppose tastes changed, or the Joneses down the way made a pyramid mound and then everyone just had to have one or some such thing.

North of the Effigy Mound National Monument you are hard into the Upper Mississippi River, which is different primarily by constraint.  On both shores, high bluffs hem the the old man in and efforts at man-made constraint — in the form of locks and dams — create pools and “lakes” that make it difficult to tell what is river and what is just lots of water. Above some of the dam and lock complexes, the Corps of Engineers has used the material dredged up from the channel to create man-made islands which they seed with native grasses.  The result of this is that in the pool areas above the dam, a waterfowl paradise is born. The islands provide nesting and shelter area, and the slack water of the pool is excellent for feeding.  Swans, geese, ducks and all manner of fowl have, thanks to the corps, their Eden.  The effect of all of it — bluffs on each shore, the river banging first one side and then the other, the islands and pools and braided lakes on the slow side of the river — is really remarkable scenery.  

Tomorrow the river turns west towards its source in northwestern Minnesota and I will as well. After a visit to the headwaters of the great river, I will finish the day, late I expect, where I last left the edge — in Grand Forks, North Dakota.  From there the Fall installation of Edge Trek 2017 will really begin.  North and east to the Canadian border with Minnesota, through the boundary waters region and on to Lake Superior.  I don’t know how far I will get on Saturday, or care really. As I’ve learned already, the adventure is in the going, and I’m just getting started.

The earth has been “making” the Mississippi River for several billion years.  Something called the North American Craton has been sliding and crashing about since New Jersey and Marrakesh were connected and, among other things, it eventually caused the Appalachian and later the Rocky Mountains to be separated only by a vast inland sea.  Through the various ice ages when sheets of ice a mile thick spread as far south as today’s Chicago, the water had no where to go as the earth between the ranges lifted, except down the Mississippi.  When the waters of the Arctic and the vast lakes of Canada finally broke through the ice, they cut a gorge through the upper Mississippi that would define countless civilizations, start and end wars, and ultimately become the busiest waterway on the planet.  Portions of the Mississippi River are older than the Atlantic Ocean.  Any water south of the Great Lakes, west of the Appalachians and east of the Rockies, finds its way to the Mississippi and from thence to the Gulf of Mexico.  41 percent of the continental US drains via the Mississippi.  There are bones and teeth of Mastadons, Mammoths, Giant Sloths, sharks, rays and all manner of prehistoric flora and fauna buried in its mud.  I can’t possibly detail all that is the Mississippi, but fortunately, someone has.  And he’s done it in prose as lyrical as the sounds of the river itself.  Regardless of whatever else you may chose to do, I suggest you get a copy of “Old Man River” by Paul Schneider and read it.  I’ve stolen liberally from it and will read it over again once this trip is through.  It is a masterwork of history, archeology, culture and language.  It is the story of the Big Muddy, The Old Man, The Mississippi.

Today was really the first day of the adventure.  I followed the Mississippi from Dyersburg, TN to Keokuk, IA via the Old River Road.  I got lost.  I found a new way.  I strained to see the river through the trees and I walked the banks at the confluence of it and the Ohio — which deposits more water into the Mississippi than any other two tributaries combined.  I saw industry and agriculture, failure and plenty, and I saw some of the cultural history of some the oldest civilizations our continent knows.

I will know more of the mound builders tomorrow when I get to Northeast Iowa, but as a preview, prehistoric yard art was a big deal.  For no reason other than art — that anyone can figure out.  My son will be glad to hear that.  But that’s tomorrow.  Today was a day of wandering, not unlike the river itself, through hardwood bottoms and bluffs, a day to see the power of rich alluvial soils.  To realize that the same river that can and has killed tens of thousands with its floods, can feed hundreds of millions with its plenty.  My history is so short — the river is in songs from musicals and novels by Twain — but to see it on the ground is to recognize its permanence far beyond any refrain.  It is literally absorbing the effluent from millions of years of geologic change and rinsing it all to the sea.  As an analog for work, or sins, or impermanence it works well, but as a geologic constant it excels.

Tomorrow I hope to see the effigy mounds of the early Mississippian cultures and get better acquainted with the Upper Mississippi from Northern Iowa into Minnesota.  Eventually, I will reach the northern edge where I left off, but for now, I have my hands full of the Big Muddy.  Sometimes, when you are headed to the edge, you cross a few lines.  I’m going to keep going and I will get there when I get there.

Today is the day of leaving.  It’s an odd thing to leave home without a real idea of how long you will be gone or exactly, precisely, where you will be while you are gone. I notice this each trip, but I don’t think I ever really spent much time on it before.  Most of the time any of us goes anywhere, we have an exact idea — flight times, hotel reservations, outings, dinners, the works.  When I leave, I know which direction I am going and I know the place I last stopped and I know when I have to be back home.  That’s it.  I believe it makes me more reflective on this first day.  Whereas the night before, heck the weeks before, I’m all excited and thinking about the trip, on the day of leaving I tend to spend most of the day thinking about home. About how lucky I”be been to be able to go off on a wild hair like this.  About how hard I worked to get that lucky.  About how ridiculous it is to have a wife who loves me so much she is excited for me to go off on a wild hair like this.  It’s completely nuts.  But it also completely glorious. I don’t know how much time I have here and neither does anyone, but we can all make the most of what we have while we can.  So, let’s go.  Let’s leave.

I’ve talked before about the getting to and the going from.  I have to get back to where I last left the edge before I can go from there around the edge some more.  I hate boring drives, so I try to make the getting to as interesting, or at least marginally so, as the going from.  For this leg, I need to get to Grand Forks, ND and go from there around the northern edge of Minnesota, the Upper Penninsula of Michigan, down the eastern edge of the “thumb” of Michigan and around the southern shore of Lake Erie to Niagara Falls. So, how to get from home to Grand Forks in some manner that holds one’s attention?  My choice was the trail of tears to basically the Mississippi River, and then up the Mississippi via the Old River Road to its source near Bemdji, MN, and across the border to Grand Forks.  Today was the Trail of Tears.

There isn’t one Trail of Tears.  There are several.  They represent the pathways some 16,000 or so American Indians — Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Seminole and Chickasaw — travelled from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma.  Oddly enough, my Great Grandfather would one day open a general Store in Oklahoma that served the coal miners and what was left of the Cherokee Indians who were trapped there.  My Grandmother told stories about serving those people in the store and of their quiet dignity as they found ways to trade for their needs and somehow survive in a manner they’d never been taught among people they did not know.  ONe a story of generations on the rise, the other, a story of the inevitably downward spiral of a people who were wards of the state.  The tribes on the trail of tears didn’t go because they wanted to.  They went at the less than cordial insistence of Andrew Jackson, primarily because there was gold in North Georgia and the Indians were in the way.  As many as 5,000 Indians died on the way.  I followed what was known as the Drane Route and the Deas-Whitley Route from. Fort Payne, Al to Tuscumbia Landing on the Alabama/Mississippi border.  Today, that’s basically US Route 72.  I’m sure the landscape was dramatically different back in the day, but there is no escaping the change from the rolling tail of the Appalachian Range to the flat lands of the Delta.  A subsistence people must have wondered as they walked — in  addition to to where in the world they were going — how they would apply their skills in their new land.  How would they hunt, gather and commune in a country so different than their homeland.  How they would establish the same pride and leadership without their freedom.  How they would mourn those who died along the way, strangers in a strange land.  Today it’s just a road from one place to another, but for them it was a death march to an unknown place and an unknown future.  For me it is the beginning of a journey, for them it was the end of everything.  

I enjoyed the drive — despite the awareness of its history.  The soybeeans are yellow in the fall sunlight and, further west and north, the cotton fields reflected bright white in the setting sun.  Traffic was light and the road was smooth and good.  I was glad to be aware of those who had come before and glad to be able to appreciate their struggle in the context of their own time and in the context of the terrible choices made on behalf of a growing nation.  I didn’t have to agree with those choices now anymore that I had to participate in them when they were made.  But I did need to know about them.  To reflect on them.  To wonder how to manage change in a confusing time.  And it helped to take it all in.

It’s possible that one way I ease the leaving is to make my first stop at the home in which I grew up.  I did this last Spring, and I did it again today.  I ended the day of leaving at my childhood home.  Familiar, comfortable, and imminently safe.  A good spot to leave my real home and proceed to the unknown.  There will be challenges, choices, learnings and failings over the next weeks, but I will, like many before me, head off without expectations, hoping to find things of value.  Tomorrow I will strike the Great Mississippi River and turn north to follow in the wake of Zebulon Pike in search of the source.  I will use the Great River Road on both the east and west banks of the River as I head north, to the source and, ultimately to the edge, again.  I have now left, and I’m ready to begin.

A journey is in order. An opportunity to strip away the noise and commotion of real and imagined problems, actual and created grievances, and return to the simple realities of a life on the road. You will recall that last we were together on the edge, was at Grand Forks, ND, a short distance form the Canadian border and essentially the easternmost end of the flat, straight 49th parallel agreed to as a delineation between there and here back in the Treaty of 1818 which, in typical bureaucratic pace, settled matters resulting from the War of 1812 which actually ended in 1815. I won’t officially leave the 49th until International Falls, MN, but essentially, the days of straight drives are over.
Getting to the starting point is always a source of some internal debate — hurry along to get started, or, find a way to make the journey to as interesting as the journey from. For this leg, I will choose the latter and get to Grand Forks by ascending the Mississippi River via the Old River Road from somewhere near Dyersburg, TN all the way to the source of the River at Bemidji, MN and from there northwest across the ND border to Grand Forks. Hopefully the bulk of this ride will be on the western side of the River, but at the very least, it will adhere to the River itself whichever bank. I haven’t really seen the Mississippi River on my trek around the edge since it was floating barge traffic above my head on the way to Venice, LA at the start of this entire ridiculous adventure. I look forward to returning for an extended visit along the shores of this redemptive ribbon of drainage.

From Grand Forks, I will head east along the northern edge through International Falls, Voyageurs NP and the Boundary Waters of Minnesota before running slap into Lake Superior — the big lake they call Gitche Gumee. I will follow its western and southern shoreline through a patch of Wisconsin and out onto the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, cross between Lakes Michigan and Huron to follow the eastern shore of the “thumb” of Michigan all the way to Detroit, and then make a decision. I’ll either follow along the southern shore of Lake Erie to Buffalo, NY before turning for home, or, I’ll head back from Detroit and pick up there in the spring.
In addition to marking another segment of the edge off the list, I’ll get a chance to visit childhood noises like International Falls — which was always the spot the weatherman said was the coldest (weird memory fragment that) — and personally investigate the area that claimed the Edmund Fitzgerald, in the hopes of vanquishing that ever-present Gordon Lightfoot ear worm. Hey, it’s the little things. As always, I hope if you are so inclined you will check in each night to see what drivel I’ve spilled on the page and maybe offer a few comments. I’ll spend the next few weeks preparing the truck and organizing things, but should be on the road within the next 30 days or so.  Go to http://www.ropeandchain.com and you can register your email to get a notification whenever the posts go up.  Click on Edge Trek at the top left to see the so called rationale for this whole journey and review previous posts.
I’m ready to get out there.

I’ve been in Napa for a day to see an old friend.  Sometimes you need to see someone and you find a way to make that happen, no matter what sort of crazy journey you are on.  I’m glad I did.  Napa is a peaceful place, and I had a wonderful evening and day with my friend and his family.  Today, I left to the north, through Calistoga to Porter Creek, which I followed until it hit the Russian River, which I followed until it hit the Pacific Ocean.  From Stewart’s Point to just south of Fort Bragg, I travelled the “1” again.  I thought it might get old, this road of 10,000 post cards, but it doesn’t.  With near continual elevation changes and flora from deep forest to open pasture, there is a new frame around each bend for each new view.

It is, however, a place of almost frightening raw power.  To ride the “1” is to witness the battle of natural forces — the relentlessly pounding Pacific versus the proudly defiant rock walls of the continent, and the third player in the game; the water from the east.  While the shoreline has it backed bowed against the ocean, that same back is turned to the eastern mountains, where rain and snow — prodigious this year — land and begin a headlong rush downhill to the sea.  Everyone knows it is hard to hold back anything if you don’t have good footing, and this year, footing for the coastline is sketchy.  The erosive eastern tide of snowmelt and rainwater is washing out chunks of the coastline, and the “1” with it.  We, or at last I, am conditioned to respect the power of the crashing surf — it shakes the ground when you stand on the rocks to to take a picture of it — but the rain and snow seem more docile.  Not so here on the western edge.

Forced off the “1” I cross over the mountains via Route 20 and turn north again on the 101, which will join the “1” at Legget and continue from there to Olympic National Park in Washington.  Everyone out here calls roads by the word “the” and then the number, I don’t know why.  Anyway, the 101 takes me to Humboldt Redwoods State Park, via a scenic offshoot called Avenue of the Giants. 

The thing about Humboldt Redwoods is that it is the largest old growth redwood forest in the world. In the world.  And while these coast redwoods are not the oldest trees on the earth, or even in the US, they are the tallest.  Age is more an honor than a contest, however, and these trees have the honor of being around since before Christ, at least a few of them do.  I take two different hikes today through two different sections of the Rockefeller Forest in the wilderness section of the park.  On the ground, amongst these giants it is deeply peaceful. Coins in your pocket seem an intrusion as you walk along.  Their power is one of permanence.  As soon as you are about to be awed by the tallest redwood in the world (which I was, it is 361 feet tall and over 53 feet around) you realize that size is not nearly as important as staying power.  And this joker has staying power.  While the coastline was breaking off in chunks, many of these trees were enduring lightening strikes, floods and sawyers’ blades, only to refute them all and stand tall.  Stately, quiet, power.

I will move on up the coast tomorrow to Redwoods National Park, where I will see more, but not taller redwoods.  I hope to camp on the beach there. Like the rugged violent coastline, I don’t expect the presence of more redwoods to get old. I feel better when I’m around them.  I feel more certain about our future.

California Highway 1 is pretty much the epitome of what it means to travel on the edge. Planted and paved in a narrow space between the surging Pacific Ocean and the cliffs of the stubborn continent, it is literally and figuratively, the edge.  And you can drive on it.

Having spent restful night tucked in a cove behind Montana de Oro itself, amidst fir and Eucalyptus that hissed in the ocean wind, I awoke to ride the “1” north. The plan was to make it San Francisco and then turn inland for two days in Napa to re-charge, wash some clothes and see an old friend. Plans on the edge, as I know by now, rarely survive in tact. It turns out that Highway 1 is very nearly washed away between basically Hearst Castle around San Simeon and just south of Monterey. I drive to the spot of the closure where, by happy accident, I get to see a colony of Elephant Seals before turning back to find a route inland around the damage.  Among their many charms, Elephant Seals spend most of March and early April lying on the beach blowing snot out of their noses and shedding all their hair. The molted hair and skin leaves a piquant odor in the air and provides an all you can eat buffet for the noisy seagulls.  There are several hundred seals flopped up on the beach itching and snorting.  The males grow to 5,000 pounds and are 16 feet long. The females are a svelt 1,800 pounds and 12 feet long.  Not even including the juveniles you can begin to get a sense for the amount of hair and skin we are talking about. Educational, yes, and an interesting thing to check off the bucket list, but at this time of year at least, unpleasant.

So as it turns out, the rugged western edge is a fragile thing. A continent unmotivated to cede its ground and a sea determined to take it away. Add in a year of record rains, a good portion of which having hit the ground wants very badly to run to the sea and the edge is getting it from both sides.  The combination has proved too much this year and the mudslides and road collapses have forced an alteration to my plans.  I weave my way back over the coastal range and find suitable route north as far as necessary to rejoin Highway 1.  The same rains that have washed out the highway on the edge have fueled a spectacular outbreak of fertility on the eastern side of the coastal range.  The broad green valley, already known for its vegetable production is chock-a-block with new growth and every grower and farmhand is wearing a smile.  I think about the early settlers here as I drive along.  Some saw the coastal range and thought, just one more time we will see what’s on the other side.  Others saw the fertile valley on the eastern side and, after weeks in the desert, said this is where we will settle. And there they did, ultimately producing the bulk of an entire nation’s fruit and vegetables.  The other group crossed one more range only to damn near fall into the sea.  But there they settled also, hanging towns in the narrow gaps in the cliffs and exercising all manner of engineering to cantilever and prop up what soon became centers of fishing and financial and technological industries.  With the ocean as a backdrop and no plows to push, the western edge became the more popular and the required development pushed further still the boundaries of what one can and can’t do to a terrain to establish a home.  Periodically, we are reminded when we pushed too far — and the land simply takes it back. Whether through a shifting of the ground itself, or the sloughing off of hillsides under the weight of heavy rains.

Such is the beauty of this rugged edge that, regardless of the risks and penalties, we simply call in the big machines and start again.  California will re-open the lost sections of the Highway 1, edging them a bit closer into the cliffs, supporting them a bit more strongly with engineeried devices.  And one day, the land will take those back too.  Man decided the northern and most of the southern edge of our country, but nature created the western one.  And it’s not inclined to have its choices altered. And so the struggle continues out here on the edge.

At some point in the history of North America, the Mojave Indians forged a series of trails from their homes in the Mojave region to the Pacific Ocean.  This allowed trade with other tribes, and gave them a chance to get out of the arid desert region of southeastern California, traverse the mountains and explore the new terrain of the coast.  It enabled them to find the edge. And it allowed them to return home, richer and more informed, and perhaps more appreciative of the very special place that is the Mojave.  The Spanish Missionary Francisco Garces followed their tracks sometime later and made the same journey, and, in 1826, Jedidiah Smith became the first white man to follow this path and reach the Pacific overland from mid-America.  Today, along the exact same route, tested at times by the terrain, I left the Mojave and headed west to, as Jedidiah did, reach they Pacific from mid-America.

While I would be much aided by modern conveniences and roadways, for the first four hours, I followed his route — the route of the Mojave.  A simple two-track path out of the New York Mountains, across the lava fields and groves of Joshua trees, at a pace of around 10 miles an hour.  Where I travelled, they had travelled, where I went, they had lead. I saw one other traveler the entire route before arriving at a paved road and making my way to Baker California and from there onward to the coast.  I spend a fair amount of time appreciating the land over which I travel, but I don’t, I think, spend enough time realize how it is and why it is I am able to travel it.  Other people, for other reasons, with greater burdens than mine, found it, settled it, mapped it, routed through it and made it a way forward.  Today, amazed by all that I saw, I took a minute to think about them and to offer some measure of gratitude for my path to the edge.

At Baker California I was reminded of a quote my son recently sent me.  I can’t vouch for the attribution, but I believe it.  The quote is, or is close to, “Men argue, nature acts,” and it is attributed to Voltaire.  In Baker, nature acted.  50 mph constant straight line winds blew out of the west and scattered sand, dust and soda from the dry lake at Mojave in an apocalyptic scene of chaos.  Men and women scattered as well, from one lane to another in fist-shaking rage at all around us.  I tried, vainly in some cases, to focus on progress and to remember previous travelers and their hardships. And I kept my focus where their’s no doubt was — on progress to the sea.

With only a little slacking of the wind, I crossed the nation’s fruit basket between Bakersfield and Mojave, mesmerized and appreciative of the rows of almond and fruit trees.  I thought about the massive irrigation that kept them growing with water from the Colorado, and I thought about the signs posted saying “no water = no jobs.” And I thought about Voltaire.  This year, after many years without, nature is acting in abundance when it comes to water.  Not since 1983 have we seen this depth of snow pack that fuels the Colorado and other rivers that provide the water that grow our fruit. While we are arguing over who owns what water and what causes it to be more or less in abundance, nature is raining and snowing like we haven’t seen in years.  I don’t know why.

What I do know is that from Mojave along the Smooth road to Paso Robles, the result is as obvious as it is glorious.  The land is green.  In row after row of hills as large and smooth as great pachyderms’ backs, the grass is tall and green and lush.  In years of similar cycles the Mojave Indians making this trek must have thought they’d arrived in some paradise, as different from their homes as night is from day.  They knew very little of other places, but by comparison, my experience is vast, and I have not seen ground and terrain as beautiful in any place. I wonder if it will be this way next year, in any years hence, and I decide that it has been before and it will be again. To think otherwise is to project a dominion over this land that I simply do not believe we possess.

Closer to Paso Robles the great beasts of hills give way to slower rolling ground transected by the the geometry of vineyards.  The rhythm of the vine rows and stakes carries a tune as you pass along before the city intrudes. There is some sense of a terminus, but no evidence of one as I drop through the valley of the National Forest just south of Los Osos, draped with gum and Eucalyptus, hidden and dark and peaceful.  And then it happens.  The great ocean fills the scene as far and as wide as any author has ever described.  The edge.

Here at Montana de Oro I am at the western edge.  An edge that is so only grudgingly.  A land that fought and fights to continue.  Jagged and raw it cedes only to the power of thousands of miles of hydraulic force born in Asia and stenghthed with every swell until it breaks this landmass off at the Pacific cost.  This is an edge wrought not by men, but by nature.  This is as far as we could push, as far as we could dream.  To here we could travel, from here we could trade, but we could not make more land, we could not will more opportunity.  From this western edge, we would stand, turn eastward and realize that we now knew the extent of our country.  But we would have to make it one. And so we have.

Tomorrow, I follow this edge north. To learn more of who and what made the travel possible, and to learn more of what it means to know limits — and how to make the most of them.