We Become the Land We Inhabit

The people of the Ozarks are shaped by the land as much as they are shapers of the land.  Try it for yourself.  Stand in an Ozark valley with a clear, rocky, stream running beside you and look down-valley.  Do you sense the hills on either side?  Like muscular shoulders lifting the sky.  Does the strong close presence of those hills make you feel the strength in your legs and back? Now use this strength to climb the steep hills to the ridge overlooking the valley.  The climb will strip you, carve you. Find a prominence to look out from.  There are many to be found. See, the vista laying out before you.  Feel the open presence of the air all around you filling your lungs and lifting you up as you gaze upon the airy grandeur of the near and distant hills and valleys. Do you feel your back straighten, your shoulders rise and your chest swell?  Don't you see yourself being fitted by this land for this land? Day by day experience this and the land will carve you strong and bright and make you an Ozarker.

Down Home

Although I was born in the city I have always been from the hills and deep valleys of the Missouri Ozarks. Long before I was born I was stamped with a permanence that would forever bind me to the land of spring feed creeks and deep river valleys. I could no more change that, than I could change the color of my eyes. I have inhabited many places but have lived in only a few. I have spent most of my life outside of the Ozarks but the Ozarks have rarely been outside of me, not even for a moment.

Like many others of her time my mother moved to St. Louis after World War II to find opportunity.  I was born there but spent my childhood summers with my grandparents on a little Ozark's farm.  They watched after me, but as I grew older I was allowed more and more freedom to venture around the farm, down to the creek and beyond...a freedom lost to many today.  Now fifty years have gone by and those idyllic days are still with me.  In those moments when I look back, through the haze of time like the mists of fall I can still see the land, the people...still feel the cool grass and hear the summer breezes sighing through the trees.

They say you can't go home again. I guess that's true enough. Times change, people grow old and die. We change. But there are some places that never leave you. They stay with you no matter where you are. They call you back to them, even after many years.