The Sign We Need To Put Up

The Santa Fe Trail passes through our pasture about 500 feet from my front door.

When I was a kid, school buses would occasionally pull up our driveway and deposit a group of curious locals who would tromp out through the grass to look at the ruts. I watched this happen more than once, which is probably where I first got the sense that whatever was out there was worth seeing.

My parents would walk me out and say, “here they are.” I nodded along for years, pretending I could see something. I was expecting wagon wheel tracks — two narrow parallel grooves, like something out of an old Western. 

What’s actually there is nothing like that. The swales are highway-wide. Eight or nine parallel routes run side by side, worn into the earth by thousands of wagons traveling the trail between 1821 and 1866. The ground rises and falls in a broad, grassy band, and you could walk straight across them and have no idea what you were standing in.

We joined the Santa Fe Trail Association this year (which has always felt a little AARP-adjacent—no offense). Their quarterly publication arrived in our mailbox this week, which reminded me that our local chapter chair asked us to put up a sign — a big historical marker that says “Nelson’s Swales” so people driving past know what’s on the other side of the fence line. 

She sent me a letter a year ago, but I haven’t done anything about it. Getting the magazine reminded me why it’s important.

Every week I hear the same thing from multiple organizations: “We do such great work and have amazing things happening. But nobody knows.”

I’ve heard it from community foundations, food banks, civic organizations, health systems doing real and sometimes extraordinary work that almost no one outside their immediate orbit knows about or understands.

They have the Santa Fe Trail in their pasture. They just don’t have the sign and tour guide.

And it’s not only the sign missing. People don’t know what they’re looking at even when they’re standing in the middle of it.

The swales aren’t invisible. They’re right there. Once you see and understand what created the broad, grassy paths, you can’t unsee it. I stood in that pasture as a child, with my parents pointing, and saw nothing because I didn’t know what I was looking at.

(Neither did my husband until this morning, and he’s looked straight at them every day for 17 years.)

For most organizations, people drive past their work every day and don’t recognize it. Their neighbors, if asked, couldn’t tell you what the organization does, who it serves, or why it matters to them personally. Without consistent communication that helps people understand what they’re seeing, they walk past and see tall grass.

The ruts are real and they’re deep, and if you know what you’re looking for, you can find them.

But “if you know what you’re looking for” is not a communications strategy.

Now I just need to remember where I put that trail sign paperwork before the chapter chair sees my confession online. 

Lori