The Chris Moeller Archives

Spanish Lake

I spent the summer of 1994 driving an ice cream truck in St. Louis. Each driver was assigned to a specific neighborhood or suburb. Inside each truck there was a 2 by 2 foot metal board with a map affixed to it showing your route. My map and my route were for Black Jack, an unincorporated area in the far north part of St. Louis County. But part of my area, when I would journey east across Lewis and Clark Boulevard, included the CDP (not a town, technically, but rather a "Census-designated place") of Spanish Lake. It is the nearest Missouri township to Jones-Confluence Point State Park, where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers come together.

Spanish Lake is now the subject of a documentary film, directed by Philip Andrew Morton, who was a 15-year-old resident of Spanish Lake in 1994, and is now a 32-year-old veteran of Hollywood, having edited trailers for films by Terrence Malick and Steven Soderbergh. The film, who's trailer appears with this Post-Dispatch story, tackles the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in Spanish Lake since Morton left in 1997.

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Lakhdar Boumediene was an innocent man held at the United States concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for seven years. He was taken from Sarajevo, Bosnia on October 19th, 2001, tortured, and denied a trial until 2008. He was freed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009 as the main plantiff in the case of Boumediene v. Bush. The judgment established that Guantanamo prisoners have a right to the habeus corpus under the U.S. Constitution and that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 had violated the Constitution in suspending their rights. Boumediene's editorial in yesterday's New York Times is a must-read.

posted by CM @ 6:23 PM