Steven Birge

The Country Beyond: Based on the True Story of a Pioneer Migrant, a Step Ahead of Civilization, from Ohio to Kansas to California Steven Birge

Small town eastern America during and after the Civil War was home to an imaginative boy with a great intellectual eagerness. Confused by the loss of his family, unstimulated by the town around him, he seemed clothed in a viscosity that slowed his movements and held his thoughts down. He read literature and dwelled in the lives of its heroes, but his own existence seemed to him unimportant. He seemed set apart from the rest of reality. Then through a chain of improbable events, he brightened into an unmistakable glory. He poured out from his innermost being a great and wonderful thing, unlike any other, a gift to the world that only one person can give. The glory that rises in us is the beginning of all invention and the thing that separates each of us from all the others. Its seeds hide in the trivia all around, ruminating, festering, growing where we do not see.