Undaunted Courage

This way ahead….

OFF THE MAP

I am reading Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose, the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition across North America.

Lewis and Clark set out in 1804 to chart the overland path from St. Louis to the Pacific through the Northwest.  They followed the Mississippi and Missouri, for as long as they would carry them, in the hopes of meeting up with the Columbia River and making their way to the Pacific.  No one had ever done this before.

The land to the west of the Mississippi and Missouri was hardly unpopulated. Native Americans had been there for thousands of years, but they had also remained realtively isolated. No one had made the traverse until Lewis and Clark tried.

What made the voyage all the more interesting was that once Lewis and Clark had passed into present day Montana and Idaho, they were in completely uncharted territory, not only for themselves but also for their Indian guides. None of them had ever crossed the Rockies.  Indeed, no one from the United States to the East had even seen them.  President Jefferson, who sent them on their mission only knew the Appalachians as a North American mountain chain.  Jefferson believed it would be but a short hike from the head of the Missouri to the head of the Columbia, if they did not even meet up at all.

Yet when Lewis and Clark had finally made it past the headwaters of the Missouri they found themselves confronted with the massive Rocky Mountains, snow-capped even in August. And it was this they now had to traverse – without map, without guide, without any knowledge of what was to come or even what lay on the other side.

The ‘undaunted courage’ of Lewis and Clark really beings when they go beyond the map.  At this point, faced with this seemingly impenetrable barrier, they could have turned back. They were almost out of food. They were out of river and easy travel.  They could have set their canoes back in the Missouri and headed back to St. Louis, from whence they had come nearly two years prior. They had already achieved a great deal and seen places no one else had seen.

Yet instead they pressed on.  They went ‘off the map’, into uncharted territory in the sure and certain belief that the Pacific lay on the other side of those massive mountains, and that ‘come hell or high water’, they were going to get there.

In the world of video, we now stand at the base of the Rockies.

We have followed the well-established route as far as it will take us.

We have seen the craft move from a state in which a small handful of people had access to the technology to one in which literally billions of people can now produce content on their own.

Yet, up until now, we have, for the most part, used this powerful technology merely to imitate what we have seen before.  Imitative, but not yet creative.  People take the cameras and laptops and create very professional iterations of what they have already seen on TV or online; all of which is fine, but it only begins to scratch the surface of what the technology can do.

Like Lewis and Clark, we have achieved a great deal, but we now find outselves at the base of the Rockies, staring up at the snow-capped peaks, with nothing but our mules and our horses and our backpacks.  We know the general direction in which we have to go, but we have no map.  No one has ever been here before.

What we need now is courage.

On Friday, I wrote about CBS News and their ‘new’ news show with Scott Pelley, which is so imitative of the old that they have re-instituted Walter Cronkite’s map of the world.  CBS News is fearful of moving forward without a map.  They have put their canoes in the Missouri and are paddlng back to St. Louis as fast as they can.

We don’t have to do this.

We don’t want to do this.

Instead, we know where the future lays.

So with cameras and laptops firmly in hand, we are starting to march into the mountains.  We don’t know exactly how to get there, but we know that there is no future in going back.

There will be mistakes along the way.  We may lose the trail, but if we are strong and we persevere, we will not only reach the summit, we will put our feet in the Pacific – we will have conquered a continent and seen the new world.