off-trail adventures

Define your dash: Plant. Build. Teach.

Leave shade for people you will never meet.

Who Was Stephen Girard?

Girard is a Pennsylvania-sized paradox.

He stayed in Philadelphia during the 1793 yellow fever outbreak and helped run the Bush Hill hospital with Peter Helm. (Clio, Hidden City Philadelphia)

Direct action before the term existed. No committee, just work that needed doing.

Thousands died, but the place functioned because neighbors chose duty over comfort.

Two decades later he did something only a handful of humans could do.

He underwrote as much as 95 percent of a crucial federal loan when U.S. credit collapsed during the War of 1812. (Encyclopedia Britannica, Girard College)

If you ever wondered whether one person can change the arc of a story, there is your answer in ledgers and loan payments.

Trader. Slaver.

But his story isn’t clean.

Girard’s fortune was built inside systems that exploited people. He owned enslaved people in Pennsylvania and Louisiana. The Library Company preserves an 1894 photograph labeled ‘Girard Slave Pens’ from a Louisiana property. (Teachers Institute of Philadelphia, Library Company of Philadelphia)

Grim architecture that outlived him.

Legacies are forests. Some trees give shade. Many grew from poisoned soil.

His will created Girard College. That’s a residential school endowed for “poor, white, male orphans”; desegregated in 1968 after prolonged legal fights; girls admitted in 1984.

It took years of organizing and multiple court battles before the color line fell, and girls were admitted much later. (National Archives, Girard College)

A public gift with locks on the door that Philadelphians spent generations battering down.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So… what do we do with a legacy like that?

Off-roaders inherit our own contradictions.

We love wild places. We also drive to them.

We celebrate freedom, then post a trail that cannot survive fame.

The answer isn’t guilt. It’s responsibility. Horizontal habits don’t need committees.

Stewardship in Practice

Consent and care are key.

Pack a spare trash bag and a shovel because strangers will need both. Bury what needs burying the right way or pack it out.

If a gate is closed, the conversation ends. The commons is only common if we act like we share it.

Invest in collective capabilities. Teach a friend to air down and air up. Show your kid how to spot a line without shouting. Lend the cross wrench and show them how it’s done.

The point of competence is not superiority. It is liberation for the next person who learns it.

Define Your Dash

Family history folks have a phrase I love: “Define your dash.” (FamilySearch)

Everything between the dates is yours to write, and the time between is so much more limited than we can possibly realize.

Maybe your dash will never buy a bank or endow a school. Good.

You have Tuesday nights in the garage and parking lots where somebody needs a jump.

You have small creeks that need one more bag of trash packed out.

You have a voice at the land use meeting when a place you love risks being priced, paved, or parceled out of public use.

Spreadsheets Can’t Define Your Dash

If tomorrow were your last, plant something today.

A sapling in your yard. A habit in your crew. A path of least damage across a wet section you could have chopped to pieces.

History says legacies are mixed, even for people with statues. Our job is to stack the deck.

Leave more shade than exhaust.

Leave more skills than stories.

Leave places and people better than we found them. That’s how we define our dash and earn whatever future parks its wheels in our ruts.