Mankind hustles in its attempts at dominion over nature. The chore proves arduous, and you better pack a lunch to get it done.

Besides the heavy lifting, it takes mental toughness, a vision that confounds indigenous principles preceding detailed follow-through.

An idea without ensuing labor means little ... a football team with a great game plan and no execution.

People stand on an observation platform and look down on Hoover Dam, a 726-foot wall of concrete that holds back the Colorado River.

In these parts, the Missouri River causes intermittent and levee-testing distress. In 1905, the Colorado got loose, filled a valley and created a 150-square-mile lake for two years before getting back to its original channel.

The river cut a destructive path. Given 270 million years, it helped carve the Grand Canyon. Taming it seemed, at best, a bit loopy.

But the idea arose to try. In that oppressive desert environment, in a forbidding canyon, in the Great Depression, the nation committed itself to a plan to green up and light up a broad swath of the American Southwest.

From the moment of bid awarding to the last pouring of concrete, the project took four years. Today, it provides hydroelectric power to 1.3 million people and irrigates 1.5 million acres of now usable farm land.

At every quiet moment, voices could be heard saying it shouldn’t be done, couldn’t be done, would never return its investment.

The desert would always be the desert, and a wild river would always be wild.

Some dreamers and doers just never listen.

Last week, Hoover Dam stood at my feet, one stop on a sand-and-cactus audacity tour. Instead of suffering the Hades of the construction-era diversion tunneling, where workers toughed out 135 degree temperatures in wool clothing, I could see miles any direction from an air-conditioned visitors’ center.

Not many miles away, a different sort of boldness shows up in the cityscape of Las Vegas, which in turn reflects the skylines of Venice, Paris, New York and other places medieval and nautical.

True, gangsters provided the initial effrontery, but any metropolitan area with more than 150,000 hotel rooms and 10-story-tall advertisements for Carrot Top deserves some enduring recognition for over-the-topness.

In St. Joseph, the nerve and ambitions come in more modest packages. The concrete we pour never gets measured in millions of cubic yards.

But it took a dream to get the Kansas City Chiefs’ training camp to locate in St. Joseph. Then, it took hard work to negotiate the funding. With Monday’s groundbreaking for the new facility at Missouri Western State University, a final phase begins with an expectation of getting the job done right.

St. Joseph works its way through the fits and starts of community betterment initiatives.

Citizens have fussed about festivals, gabbed about gambling, tangled about TIFs, warred about a water park and raged about refuse disposal.

Libraries and museums are places of repose. Here, we managed to make them battlefields.

St. Joseph loves its kids. It fights over where to send them to class.

Our audacity can paralyze and fracture. In some cases, it pushes us to greater things.

Ken Newton’s column runs on Tuesday and Sunday.