The Greenway: A love story, starring corned beef hash

Or the origin of a self-made popup breakfast restaurant

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This week’s newsletter is about the Great Rivers Greenway, to which I can walk to in less than a minute. A version of this newsletter appears in this month’s Missouri Life Magazine.

Also this week: I crossed off state No. 44 in my “states reported from” list (Nebraska). Much more on that later. I’ve visited all 50; now I’m in the home stretch of reporting from all of them, too.

The origin story of my self-made popup breakfast restaurant

I pedaled through the gray dark of a summer morning. A breeze tickled my arms. The dull roar of traffic followed me as I crossed a bridge and then cloverleafed under it to join the Greenway as it entered a wooded park.

After I rode under the bridge but before I entered the woods, I enjoyed 100 yards of silence. Then the screech of bugs turned overpowering. I was smack dab in the middle of suburban St. Louis, but it felt remote. I cranked on the pedals, right, left, right, left, until my headlight reflected off three sets of glowing eyes. Deer standing on the asphalt path looked at me, waited a beat, then bounded into the woods.

A fourth one crossed the trail so suddenly I almost hit it. I skidded to a halt, caught my breath and realized right then I was in love with the Greenway.

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This love affair has been going on for eight years and shows no sign of abating. I have spent hundreds of hours and covered thousands of miles walking, biking, hiking, running and bear-crawling on my beloved Dardenne Creek Greenway, part of the Great Rivers Greenway, a network of 30 trails covering 135 miles across the greater St. Louis area.

I have been on the Greenway in every hour of the day (yes, literally) and in every weather condition (same). Once I was part of an event that was a mix of an overnight hike and a leadership seminar, in which participants carried telephone poles, sandbags and wooden pallets. Another time I walked on the Greenway during an ice storm.

Or tried to.

I arrived at a footbridge that goes over Dardenne Creek, started to walk up it … and slid back down. I started to walk up it again … and slid back down again. Finally I dropped to my hands and knees, crawled until I reached the hand rail and ascended the bridge by holding it and shuffling my feet.

I use the Greenway mostly for exercise, but I’ve also taken it to the coffee shop, the hardware store, the grocery store, church and more, including creating what I’ll dub a self-made popup breakfast restaurant, which I’ll explain in a minute.

But it’s not how I use the Greenway that makes me love the Greenway. It’s what happens while I’m using it. I love the Greenway because it connects me to my community, to nature, to other users, to friends, my kids, my wife. I love the Greenway because those connections solve one of modern life’s biggest problems—loneliness.

Starting before the pandemic and increasing since, the world has become an increasingly lonely place, and St. Louis is particularly bad. One study put it among the top five loneliest cities in the country.

Harvard’s Making Caring Common Project reported that 51 percent of young mothers and 61 percent of young adults (ages 18 to 25) feel “serious loneliness.” A 2021 study by the American Perspectives Survey said 15 percent of men had zero close friendships—a five-fold increase from 1990.

We’re lonely, and it’s killing us. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Social isolation significantly increased a person’s risk of premature death from all causes.”

And all of that is going to get worse, because our loneliness epidemic is going to get worse. We are treating the problem with more of the problem: More of us work remote than ever before, and we lock ourselves in home offices and rarely venture out.

I see the Greenway as a cure.

Now more than ever, we need what experts call “third places.” First places are our homes, second places are work, and third places are public facilities where we gather—coffee shops, malls, parks, and yes, Greenways.

The Greenway was designed as if it knew this loneliness epidemic was coming. Great Rivers Greenway began in 2000 when voters in St. Charles County, St. Louis County and St. Louis City approved a sales tax to pay for the series of trails. Early projects included the Missouri Greenway, the Mississippi Greenway and River Des Peres Greenway.

The GRG has grown steadily ever since, and now includes 135 miles across 30 Greenways, including eight that opened in 2023. The long-term plan calls for the network to eventually feature 45 Greenways covering 600 miles.

By my calculations, counting organized events such as 5Ks and adventure races, I have hit the Greenway with more than 1,000 people. I use it a couple times a week to get to outdoor workouts with the friends I love most in the world. The Greenway has played a crucial role in helping me form the most important friendships of my adult life.

I called Emma Klues, vice president of communications and outreach of the Great Rivers Greenway (the entity that oversees the trail), and I was almost embarrassed to tell her all of this. It seemed heavy, deep, profound, maybe too much so for what is essentially a strip of asphalt.

But she loved to hear it. When I told Klues I sum up my Greenway love with one word— connect—it was as if I called a slipper company to report their product keeps my feet warm.

“I knew you were going to say that word because that’s our word,” she said. “Connecting people to each other, connecting people to nature, connecting communities together, connecting you to wherever you’re trying to go—work or school or running an errand. You’re connecting to the place, connecting to the land. Some people say connecting to themselves, connecting to their mental, physical, emotional, spiritual health, you name it. There is no shortage of ways to use that word.”

No shortage of ways—I’m glad she put it that way, because the most powerful connections I’ve made using the Greenway is at that self-made popup restaurant.

If riding my bike on the Greenway planted the seeds of love with it, eating breakfast on it watered it and made it grow.

Every Friday at 6:30 a.m., two friends and I arrive at Legacy Park, a trailhead of my beloved Dardenne Creek Greenway. Rob, Joel and I hug, warm up, and then do a 45-minute “park bench” workout — we run along the Greenway and stop at each bench for exercises.

A man we see weekly dubbed us The Park Bench Boys.

But we prefer the CBH Boys.

After our workout, I plug in my griddle and make fried eggs and corned beef hash—or CBH, as we call it. Rob’s job is to make coffee. Joel’s job is to make us laugh.

Something amazing happens when we cook breakfast outside together, a bonding that is both ineffable and obvious. It’s as simple as the fellowship that arises as food cooks, as profound as scooping a man’s breakfast onto his plate for him, and as fulfilling as watching men devour the meal you made for them.

As sweat drips off our bodies, we wrestle with life’s problems, which are abundant, as between us we have seven teen-agers. We discuss careers and kids, tragedies and triumphs, dreams hoped for, deferred and dashed.

We feast, we talk, we laugh, we grow.

And, of course, we connect.