Post # 1 - What's going on here?

I have begun this blog under the auspices of my newly formed company, Passy Cassini & Associates, but it may not end up that way. I am a recovering journalist and newspaper owner (small weeklies and business journals in the western states). This blog is part of my desire to do what I love in a different way. The idea of Traversing Borderlands is to record the experiences of many people who will hopefully answer the challenge of traversing the actual borders of our country's states and will record their experiences here and on a companion website.

The idea grew out of an old notebook entry I found in my idea file during the gray period after selling my newspapers as I was wondering what would come next. The scribbled entry simply said, "walk the borders of a square state."

Of course there aren't really any square states. I must have been thinking about Wyoming or Colorado, the two that come the closest. But I started to dig into the idea and became more intrigued as I did.

Western states in particular, but not exclusively, stand out on a map for their straight lines. Who decided, and why, to drop these straight lines on the borders. What kind of consequences did and does that have for people, plants, animals, resources, businesses, watersheds -- the whole range of entities that populate and are affected by the borderlands? Was there any rhyme or reason to it at all?

I started to think also about other areas of the world -- the Mideast in particular -- where the relatively recent drawing of arbitrary borders has had far-ranging consequences. And that borders aren't just geographic but social, political, psychological, intellectual, linguistic -- it goes on and on.

As a 30-plus year journalist and struggling owner for the past ten years, I was also frankly burned out on the news business as it is. But I am still impassioned about what it could be. The traditional definition of news, how we track it, who gets to create and distribute it, how it gets subsidized (some might say bastardized) by total dependence on advertising -- this stuff kept kept knocking up against the interests of real people I talk with every day.

The old news paradigms also seemed contrary to how real people actually learn about the things that are important to them.

I have been intrigued by William Least Heat-Moon's description of his book, PrairyErth." He called it a "deep map" of Chase County, Kansas. That is how I envision Traversing Borderlands.

I'm new to blogging and the community out there, unmet as yet. But I think this first post is too long already so I'm going to close now and add more in following posts. I'll include the preliminary outline of how the project works, sponsors, all of that. But in the meantime I'll be interested to see what kind -- if any -- input comes this way. I believe Traversing Borderlands could be a mother lode for deep mapping.

bt+editor