When I was in high school, my dad read an account of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. As I recall, it was based on their diaries, and as such featured the kind of fun little detail that he liked to share at the dinner table. For example, how the first bear they encountered needed to be shot ten times before it finally died, and this after twenty minutes of its attempted escape. Or how the expedition journeyed with their supply-laden boats approximately 2,600 miles against the current of both the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, at times with no other option but to row against them.
But before the Lewis and Clark Expedition made the difficult journey west, before they stood in sight of the Pacific Ocean, they started in St. Louis, Missouri. Which is where I sit now, writing this piece as a new resident of this city. And if there is one thing it is clear this city loves, it is the Gateway Arch that looms over it and adorns nearly every street sign. Completed in 1965, the Gateway Arch stands as both one of the tallest man-made monuments in the Western hemisphere and as a specific commemoration of journeys like the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Those ventures that tread new paths to the country we are today both geographically and ideologically as we expanded westward—for better or worse.
I am sitting in the library of the university I will be attending for the next two years as I write this. For the first time in my life, I’ve journeyed beyond the borders of Michigan for more than a vacation; indeed, this is meant to be my home—at least for now. And despite the instabilities that accompany any transition, be they practical or emotional, I’m trying to capture the same curiosity that led forty-two men westward to see what exactly the world was that unfurled for miles ahead of them. I’m trying to believe that there will be moments of satisfaction, revelation even, like what I imagine they felt as they stood exhausted looking out at the Pacific, perhaps even tasting the salt on a breeze blown from it. I’m trying to know St. Louis as this city identifies itself: the Gateway to the West—the door to the rest of the world.
I loved it when my dad shared the little vignettes from his Lewis and Clark book. And even now they serve not only as entertaining or interesting slices-of-life from the gritty records of history, but a reminder of something I often forget. That along the way to the edge of the world—and to the edges of ourselves—there are moments of beauty, of humanity, realness, rawness even. And while my time in St. Louis may not lead to bear encounters or arduous bouts of rowing up the Mississippi River, it will be populated by what those stories are, at their core: experiences of discovery. So as I begin the trek into whatever is next for me in a new home, I am glad to begin it here, in a city whose history reminds me of these things, in a city that stands now as the gate to the rest of my life.
Kipp De Man graduated from Calvin University in 2023, having majored in film and media studies. He is currently working towards a master’s degree in the same discipline at Washington University in St. Louis. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, rock climbing, and Coke Zero.
