The Lost Frontier

I just read Grim's mention of another post by Cassandra. Grim also referenced Kim's excellent piece. All of these things deal with the same theme, and it is not a new theme. It is the theme of American boys either staying boys, or reverting to being girls. No, I am not talking about some sort of hermaphroditism, or transvetite fetishes or anything like that. I am talking, of course, about how the males in our society are acting like boys or girls, and not Men as a whole.

We see young men behaving in a manner inconsistent with manhood. Men are not, as Jeff Cooper illustrated, learning to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth. THey are instead learning to bum around, play Xbox, and engage in droll sophistry. Look at today's metrosexual. You have a male who primps himself like a girl, and instead of behaving in a manly manner, he uses a woman's charms of emotional embellishment, and "snesitivity," which are attributes not best exemplified by men.

While I believe that part of this is due to enabling by women who want a man that is "non-threatening" and "a good listener," I think that there is a far bleaker emptiness that is at play here in the dearth of manhood.

Where, I ask, are the frontiers?

It was not so long ago in this very country when a young man could go out into the great vastness of America, and carve for himself a future in remote or undeveloped lands where there were no real rules yet. I look at my own childhood, and in retrospect, myself and my friends all had a certain restlessness in our hearts. Some have called it Wanderlust, the desire to go out and wander. Some call it cabin fever. I do not know what to call it, but I know that it is real. Unfortunately, there were no frontiers for us to venture off into at that time. No, we had nowhere to explore, aqnd found ourselves bored very quickly by the terribly humdrum existence that passes for life as a teenager today. So, we did like so many did, and tried to make things "exciting." What followed was a fairly quick series of events and mishaps that made for wonderful stories that I still tell sometimes. Unfortunately, these stories are laced thoroughly with terms like "overdosed on" "drunk and passed out," "cops showed up and cuffed" "got into a fight" "had a gun under his seat" "was tweaked out on speed" "tripping balls on LSD" "Got Pregnant" "suicide attempt" "Wrecked the car" "Sent to detox" "pled out" and "got killed."

Yeah, they make for some great stories, but they aren't really adventures. We were just opting for danger over boredom, that's all. I know that everyone likes to say that "it's just a phase" and that kids are "testing boundaries." That rings false to me. In fact, seeing how some of my friends have unfortunately trapped themselves into the neverending high school summer, filled with a low-paying job, crummy apartment, POS car, where the only excitement is the weekend case of beer and cigarrettes, I would say that what they got into was not a phase, but a terminal condition. You might be able to argue that we were testing boundaries.

But for what? We had so little to gain, and so much to lose. Again, with the great retrospectiscope, I think that it was because there was nothing to be gained through risk, but the risk was the gain in and of itself. Unlike our more rural countrymen, we had no great outdoors. I remember my dad telling me about a time when he was in the desert. My father, btw, loves the southwest desert. I never understoof it, the desert for me was always a place of misery and armored vehicles, but I digress. So, one time, my father went out into the desert. He went out with a childhood friend, and some psychological casualty from Vietnam. Yup, an economist, PTSD Vet, and a bookworm went out into the Southwest desert. Now you may ask yourself why such an unusual trio would take it upon themselves to do such a thing. Well, there was a rumor out there that somewhere out in the New Mexico desert, some momks had buried their mission bells which were made of pure silver in order to hide them from raiders. Unfortunately, the raiders had burned down the whole mission, destroying the landmark for their burial site. Now, the thing is that those spanish missions were always a days ride apart. So, the logic went, that if you found a place where there was no spanish mission, and the nearest ones were a days ride away, you were near this site, and all you had to do  was find the ruins of this burned out mission, dig up the silver, and you were instantly wealthy and famous.

Now, some might ask what kind of a hair-brained idea it is to go out with a couple of tenderfoots and a mentally unbalanced individual into the unforgiving desert to look for, of all things, buried silver mission bells. Well, that was a frontier,  dammit, and there was an adventure and there was something worth finding out there to look for! So, they got a few guns, loaded up a jeep, and went out into the desert.

They never found the bells, btw.

They did run across some Federales, though.

In fact, they finally agreed that they were lost when they ran into a white picket fence that went in a straight line from one horizon to the other, and realixed that they were at the international border. Then, trying to get back to civilization, their jeep broke down, and they followed a dry creek bed down, luckily it went into a town, and they got out alive, even if only barely.

My dad has some pretty cool stories, too. The part of his story that stuck in my mind the most, more than the vet starting a cooking fire with a half can of gasoline, was when he described what it was like to be out there in the middle of the desert. He would be looking around (for signs of a burned out spanish mission, I assume) and, almost with a start realize that he was walking where no human being had been before. Dinosaurs had flourished and famished, civilizations had risen and fallen, man had gone to the moon, and come back, but not until my father left his bootprint in those sands had any of mankind set eyes upon that land.

So, my father had found a frontier, and he had pushed forth into it. Talking with my friends who are a little older or of a more rural upbringing, I am struck by how they had somewhere to go where the laws of man lost their power. Today, everyone in double digit years wants to "rebel." Nevermind that they are "rebelling" by Parroting exactly what a bunch of MTV execs have decided the next fad should be, or that they are questioning only what some clueless lefty propagandist says should be questioned. Everyone wants to rebel. Actually, what they really want to do is to exist unfettered. When you go off into the wilderness, you are free. You are unfettered. You do not need to rebel because there is nothing to rebel against. If you want to run around naked screaming "booga booga booga!" nobody is going to be shocked or dismayed, or call the cops, or call the TV station. In fact, all you have to worry about is not paying attention to the brambles your birthday suit is headed for. And if you do wander into those brambles, there will be nobody there to help you out of them, or tend to your wounds. There are no rules, no responsibilities, and no limitations. There are only consequences, and as long as you can handle that, then you can do whatever you want.

So, we now have a population of frontiersmen with no frontier. So they sit, stew and eventually rot.

Some of us get lucky, and avoid screwing up too badly before we can go out and at least see the frontiers, even if we cannot explore them. I do not know what the solution is. I just have this sneaking suspicion that if you were to tell a young man that he had a shot at wealth and prosperity which relied upon his own innate abilities, and not upon what school his degree is from, or whose ass he kisses, and how well he does it, that there was something out there which he could never find the end of, I bet you that a lot of this teenage horseshit would stop. How do I know this?

Because, every teenager has felt this urge. This urge to just get up, flick the cigarrette away, smash the bottle on the floor, and stride out. Yes, I have many times sat in a party, surrounded by a few friends and a lot of strangers, listening to them all say the same damned thing as everyone else does, and wearing the same damned things like a bunch of cookie cutter angst-riddled teenagers, and felt this great, almost paralyzing fear as a single horrific thought overwhelmed me.

What if this is all there is?

And then the urge would strike, and I would want to get up and leave. No explanations, no diatribes, no monologues. Just get up and leave. Just get out and get away to somewhere that is more real, and more meaningful. Somewhere I am unfettered.

But I didn't. Sometimes, I would just step outside for a walk, and wander the dank streets smoking and drunk, wishing I was somewhere else.

All real men need this frontier. All men need somewhere that they can prove themselves to be men. If they don't then they may never become one.

Respectfully Submitted,
-doc Russia