Still exploring, six decades into the adventure

Star Trek and I share a milestone this month. I’m thinking about where Southpoint Access should go next.

Source: Paramount Pictures

On Tuesday afternoon, when I ordinarily might’ve been sitting in a carpool line waiting to pick up one of the kids, I was sitting in a movie theater instead.

My wife, Catherine, gave me a break. She handled the pickups while I snuck out to AMC Southpoint for a double feature: “Space Seed,” the original Star Trek episode that introduced Khan Noonien Singh, followed by its cinematic sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Star Trek anniversary swag - and an early birthday present! Photo: Wes Platt

This wasn’t entirely random. Tuesday was Sept. 8, exactly 60 years after Star Trek premiered on NBC. And on Sept. 22, I’ll turn 60, exactly 60 years after the episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before” aired.

Apparently, I’ve been on a collision course with this column since birth.

Watching “Space Seed” and The Wrath of Khan together makes the passage of time impossible to ignore.

In “Space Seed,” the crew of the Enterprise discovers Khan and his followers in suspended animation aboard a drifting ship. Khan is brilliant, charismatic, genetically engineered, and utterly convinced that his superior abilities give him the right to rule.

Then The Wrath of Khan catches up with him 15 years later. It also catches up with James T. Kirk.

Kirk's older. He’s an admiral behind a desk while younger people take the Enterprise out on missions. His friend McCoy gives him reading glasses for his birthday. He’s restless and uneasy, wondering whether the adventures that defined him are over.

Khan returns carrying the consequences of choices Kirk made years earlier.

That’s what makes the movie endure. The spaceships and battles are terrific, but the real subject is time. What do we do with the lives we’ve already lived? What happens when the past comes looking for us? How do we respond when our bodies, circumstances, and responsibilities remind us that we aren’t the people we were at 25? And what are we supposed to do with whatever time remains?

Those questions land differently when you’re about to turn 60.

I’ve loved Star Trek for most of my life. It helped fuel my fascination with science fiction, writing, role-playing games, and collaborative storytelling. It offered a future where curiosity mattered, knowledge mattered, and people with profoundly different backgrounds could sit around the same table and solve problems together.

It wasn’t a perfect vision. No 60-year-old television franchise could be. But at its best, Star Trek argues that humanity doesn’t have to remain trapped by its worst instincts.

We can learn. We can cooperate. We can become wiser. We can build institutions devoted to exploration and service rather than exploitation.

That stubborn optimism feels especially valuable now.

It also has a lot to do with why I keep building Southpoint Access.

South Durham doesn’t need a starship captain. It certainly doesn’t need a genetically engineered ruler from the 20th century. But it needs people willing to pay attention. It needs someone to sit through the government meetings, read the agenda packets, follow the school board decisions, ask what’s happening with the road project that never seems to get finished, and find out what that unfamiliar zoning sign could mean for the people living nearby.

It needs dependable information about schools, restaurants, jobs, youth activities, parks, faith communities, public meetings, and the other parts of everyday life that rarely qualify as breaking news but still help determine whether a community feels understandable and navigable.

That’s the frontier I see for Southpoint Access.

“Frontier” can be a troublesome word. Too often, it has described places as empty simply because the people already living there didn’t count in the eyes of newcomers.

South Durham isn’t uncharted territory. It’s full of people, histories, neighborhoods, institutions, tensions, and connections. The new frontier of community news isn’t about planting a flag or claiming territory. Rather, it's more about paying closer attention to the people who are already here.

It’s about returning to the same schools, intersections, neighborhoods, boards, and public projects until we understand not only what happened today, but also how it connects to what happened six months or six years ago. Or six years from now.

It’s about choosing usefulness over noise, verification over rumor, and sustained attention over the fleeting rush of a viral post.

It’s about building a local news organization that doesn’t merely deliver information to a community, but learns alongside that community.

That work can be difficult to sustain. Southpoint Access remains a small, independent operation, and much of its momentum still depends on me. There are days when the list of things I want to build and stories I want to tell is far longer than the hours available to build them.

There are also days when I need Catherine to take the carpool shift so I can spend an afternoon with Kirk, Khan, and the Enterprise.

Turning 60 makes the limits harder to ignore. It also makes time feel more valuable. But The Wrath of Khan isn’t ultimately a story about surrendering to age. Kirk begins the movie feeling old. He ends it understanding that age and possibility aren’t opposites.

He can’t go backward. None of us can. What he can do is carry his experience forward. I’m trying to do the same.

I’ve spent decades reporting, writing, teaching, creating games, building imaginary worlds, and gathering people around stories. Southpoint Access brings those experiences together in ways I couldn’t have anticipated when I was younger.

Journalism gives it discipline. Storytelling gives it a voice. Teaching reminds me to explain how systems work instead of assuming everyone already knows. Game design taught me that communities become stronger when people can participate rather than merely observe.

The next phase is about turning those pieces into something durable. I want Southpoint Access to become more than a website where I publish articles. I want it to be a community information service, a collection of useful living guides, a place for neighbors to ask questions, and a newsroom that stays with stories after everyone else has moved on.

I want it to help South Durham understand itself.

That’s an ambitious mission for one person approaching 60. But maybe 60 isn’t a deadline. Maybe it’s a vantage point.

At this age, I have a clearer sense of what I’m good at, what matters to me, and what I want the work to accomplish. I also understand that building something meant to serve a community requires other people. Readers, sources, supporters, sponsors, contributors, and neighbors all have roles to play.

The Enterprise was never really about one captain. Its strength came from the crew. Southpoint Access needs a crew, too.

When the lights came up at AMC Southpoint, I walked back into the same South Durham I’d left a few hours earlier. No starships. No nebulae. No device promising to create a new world.

Just schools, shopping centers, construction zones, neighborhoods, government meetings, local businesses, and people trying to understand what’s changing around them.

There’s plenty to explore.

On Sept. 22, 1966, Star Trek invited viewers to consider “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

On Sept. 22, 2026, I’ll turn 60. I don’t know exactly where Southpoint Access will go from here. But I know I’m not finished going. And I'm glad you're coming along for this adventure.

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