Now then, friend — before your boots touch a single trail today, let's get acquainted over the oldest thing either of us will ever lay a hand on. Name's Ranger Boone Merrick, and seeing as we'll be keeping company all day, this seems like the right story to start with.
Every cliff you'll stand under today — the rugged ones up at Cantwell, the stone house in the middle of the park, that great gray room down at the south end — every one is carved from the same body of rock. The geologists call it Blackhand Sandstone. And thereby hangs a tale, because that name didn't come from these hills at all.
Ride about fifty miles north of here, to a gorge on the Licking River, east of Newark. Long before Ohio was a state, there was a mark on the cliff there — a great dark hand, set into the stone, big and bold and old past anybody's telling. The first settlers who came up that river found it already ancient. Nobody living knows whose hand it was, or when it was made.
But the people who traveled that water knew what it meant. As best the old accounts can tell, the hand pointed the way to Flint Ridge — quarry country, where people had come since ancient times for the glassy stone that made arrow points, knives, and tools. And the story goes it marked something more: safe ground. Past the black hand, you set your quarrels down, because everybody — every nation, every traveler — needed flint. A dark hand on a cliff face, saying in no language and every language: you may pass.
Then came eighteen twenty-eight. Ohio was digging a canal through that gorge — progress by the boatload. The crews needed the cliff out of the way, and they blasted it. A mark that had watched over that river for more years than anyone could count was gone in an afternoon of black powder. And nobody rides a canal boat through Ohio today. Sit with that one a minute.
Afterward, folks told love stories about the hand — a maiden called Ahyoma, a suitor called Waconsta, a hand turned black with sorrow. Pretty tales, and I pass them along the way I got them, which is to say: don't bet the farm.
But here's the part I love, and it's true as bedrock. When the rock men came through later and needed a name for this whole great run of sandstone — every cliff, every hollow, every cave from here to that gorge on the Licking — they named it for the hand. Blackhand Sandstone. The mark they blasted off the cliff never really left. It's under your wheels right now. It's the cliff country you're driving into.
So do me a favor today, friend. Somewhere in there you'll lay your palm flat against that cool sandstone — everybody does; you won't be able to help yourself. When you do, think of that other hand — the dark one, fifty miles north and two hundred years gone — still holding up every hill in this country, with your own hand resting right on top of it.
