Way Down the Old Plank Road: History and Faith Under Our Feet

I went for a short hike last weekend in the beautiful, hilly, wooded area behind St. Louis County’s Faust Park, located just off the busy, four-lane, suburban neighborhood-lined Olive Street Road. Less than a quarter-mile off the noisy road I slipped silently into the woods and back in time. Entering the canopy of ancient oaks and elms, I knew I could have been walking where Native Americans and pioneers tread hundreds of years ago.
The narrow, rough path through the woods is contemporary and no doubt made by park rangers and summer workers, but the land belongs to another time and to generations of walkers, workers, hunters and gatherers. As I completed the mile loop through the woods and emerged on the other side of the park and just a stone’s toss west of the traffic-filled road where I started, I came across a historic marker that brought me up short. It read:

Pioneer Path
Olive Street – Central Plank Road

This road was first a buffalo trace and a Native American Trail; then a widely used dirt road and a vital river-to-river connection for the early pioneers pressing westward. In 1851, first covered with oak planks to improve it and was called the Central Plank Road. [I’m not responsible for the bad sentence structure on the sign…]

And here’s the thought that came to my mind: How easy it is in our age of constant movement and information to forget that others have come before us. How simple to believe that the “here and now“ is the only reality that matters. We like to think of ourselves as independent  — as individuals who create our own trails and invent our own lives. And that’s true only up to a point. For the truth is that we begin our own journeys at starting points created by those who blazed trails before us. Whether those people were our own ancestors, the pioneers and missionaries who “pressed westward” or the Native people who have called the land their home for much, much longer, we walk on ground every day made sacred by generations of blood, sweat and tears.

The more we drive our cars and sit at computers and the less we walk and really look at the world around us, the more likely it is that we will forget this obvious fact. The slightly scary part of this whole worldview is the crucial role that every single one of our ancestors played in getting us to today. If not for their lives and loves, their good decisions and their bad, their moments of both courage and cowardice, we do not live and breathe. If my Irish or German ancestors had gotten off the boat and moved south instead of west, their world and the people they chose to love and continue the family line with are different — and I do not exist. It’s mind boggling and, yet, in the midst of it all I see not chance but God and a life of meaning and purpose.

We’re all here because we have been called to be. What we do with that one life is our vocation, our response to the call of God and the echo of generations of those on the road before us.

Lyle Lovett writes of this interconnection of generations in his song, “Family Reserve”:

And there are more I remember
And more I could mention
Than words I could write in a song.
But I feel them watching
And I see them laughing
And I hear them singing along.

We’re all gonna be here forever
So Mama don’t you make such a stir
Just put down that camera
And come on and join up
The last of the family reserve.