Two tunes are running through my mind as I sit in the Philadelphia Airport waiting for my flight to St. Louis. The first is a line from Bob Dylan’s”Mr. Tambourine Man,” “My weariness amazes me.” I had always thought the line to be poetic nonsense, but today I understand it perfectly. I’m truly amazed at how weary I feel. I can’t seem to understand my lethargy today — I usually am energized by travel, particularly from travel to a new place. Maybe it’s the complimentary cocktail in my blood, or the turmoil at home. Perhaps it’s the fact that I arrive in St. Louis at night, and must drive for several hours to the small college town of Columbia, where I’m teaching early tomorrow morning.

The other tune is from the folk song “Shenandoah,” the line “..away, I’m bound away, across the wide Missouri.” Though I’m not near the Shenandoah river, I’m flying to the Missouri, and the beautiful Native American name Shenandoah has a lot to do with flight. It means “Daughter of the Sky,” and was the name they gave an airship built here in Philadelphia in the 20s. The Shenandoah was a true American Zeppelin, based on designs taken from a downed WWI German behemoth. In 1923, it made its first cross-country trip from Lakehurst New Jersey to Lambert Field in St. Louis (my destination today). After a few years of service it crashed spectacularly in bad weather.

What little else I know about St. Louis comes from the wonderful recent book “Undaunted Courage” by Stephen E. Ambrose. It was from there that Merriwether Lewis set out with his corps of explorers to cross the unknown lands to the Pacific and it was there that Lewis spent his last years as a bureaucrat, administering the newly-purchased Louisiana territory — pretty much everything west of the Mississippi not held by Spain. Napoleon sold it at a bargain price, losing hope in his American colonies after Haitian slaves revolted and won their independence.

When I read “Undaunted Courage”, I found myself wishing I could have been with those explorers. President Jefferson charged Lewis and Clark to seek out new worlds and new civilizations and boldly going where no man had gone before — a real-life “Star Trek.” In fact the journey was more remarkable than anything our best science-fiction writers have dreamt up. Jefferson genuinely hoped that they would discover living mastodons in the American West. He asked them to study the theology of the newly-met nations, and when they contacted people who had never seen white men, to try to resolve the issue of whether Syphilis came from the old world or new. They had no idea what the Rocky mountains were like, and expected something like the Alleghenies. What Lewis, Clark, and his group saw would challenge George Lucas’s crew.

After this mind-blowing experience, Lewis’s years as administrator of the Missouri territory must have been a let-down, and he was never really happy again. In the end he descended into depression and killed himself.

The flight to St. Louis is on a narrow, cramped jet, on which I’m served “Cheddar and Sour Cream flavored Pretzels,” the most disgusting thing I’ve ever willingly put in my mouth. I arrive after dark in a now-familiar tired and crabby mood and pick up my rental car. Luckily there is nobody upon whom I can take out my wrath, and I settle into the two-hour drive from St. Louis to Columbia. My route runs along Interstate 70, upstream along the Missouri river that Lewis and Clark rode North and West to seek those new worlds.

I cross the wide Missouri. It’s still plenty wide, but is now limned by brightly-lit billboards for the many casinos floating on its banks. The rental car has a CD player, and I’ve brought a few of my favorite disks. I listen to Donovan as I hurtle West in the dark. The music brings back vivid memories from thirty years ago and I settle into a nostalgic fugue, letting the songs evoke my teenage years. Through a small miracle in the music I somehow relive the joy and pain and longing of a 15-year-old boy in the flush of early love. I’m almost in tears from the music and the memories.