No ‘day in the park’

AmeriCorps group’s service sojourn includes work on the Wissahickon

Paul Krupski from Washington state saws a tree stump while Tennessean Colin Campbell rakes mulch alongside a tributary of the Wissahickon.

by JAMES STURDIVANT

A group of young volunteers from around the country converged on the Wissahickon Valley last week as part of a 10-month-long series of service projects undertaken through the National Civilian Community Corps, a division of AmeriCorps.

The work — hauling dirt and rocks, sawing tree stumps, rebuilding trails, removing invasive plants and repairing fences — would be daunting for anyone, but is nothing new for these 11 recent high school and college graduates. The group did work for FEMA in Florida after last year’s hurricanes. They then went to West Virginia for a park project before moving to York, Pa. to work with Habitat for Humanity and Washington, D.C. to help set up a charter school. In Philadelphia for the past six weeks, they have become intimately acquainted with of one of the world’s largest city parks, learning its history and enjoying the urban wilderness.

Not that they have much time to sit and contemplate their surroundings. On an already-sweltering morning last Thursday, the group unloaded from a van on Forbidden Drive near the Rex Avenue footbridge to get their marching orders from volunteer coordinator David Bower.

“This watershed brought rock and soil down that completely overflowed the head wall here,” Bower said, referring to floodwaters that washed down the Cathedral Road tributary into the Wissahickon during last September’s storm. Bower pointed out a rock wall recently repaired by park stonemasons and stumps that had been ground up the day before by park arborists. The NCCC team would be finishing the job of clearing and rebuilding the portion of the Cathedral Road trail that runs down to Forbidden Drive, using dirt and leaf litter composted by the city.

Bower started unloading a garden shed’s worth of tools from the back of a pickup.

“Are we gonna get to use one of those guys,” a group member asked as he hoisted out a two-man saw.

“If you want to,” Bower said.

Soon the volunteers were at work, and Bower was explaining what they’d been doing on the Cathedral Road trail over the past few days.

“These guys took two great big loads like that,” Bower said, gesturing toward some piles of dirt as big as sedans. “They spent the whole day in the hot sun on Tuesday rebuilding about a hundred-yard section of trail. Yesterday we started on this section, rebuilding the trail and repairing some of the fencing.”

“After the storm, this was completely filled in,” Bower said, referring to the tributary’s streambed, where water bubbled over rocks about eight feet below the drive. “This is the base flow, this is what it looks like on a normal day, and during the hurricanes … we’re each about six feet tall, and we would have been underwater.”

A flood like that causes erosion and other damage, which explains in part why the park commission applied for a natural lands restoration grant from the NCCC, whose mission involves assisting communities around the nation in any one of five areas: disaster relief, education, the environment, unmet human needs and public safety. Modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, the program provides 18-24 year-olds with food, lodging, health benefits, a living allowance, student loan forbearance and a tuition grant. Participants are assigned to a team that stays together is it moves around the country doing service work. This particular team, which is staying at the Cedars House near on Forbidden Drive near Northwestern Avenue, is based out of Washington, D.C.

“I wanted to do something different before I started a real job,” Kentucky native Jen Prall said. “I had some friends who had done this program before, and it sounded like a lot of fun, a great way to travel and meet new people and try new things.”

Prall said that she would be returning to the program again next year as a team leader.

For teammate David Ross, a recent high school graduate, one of the appeals of the program was the $4,725 educational award participants receive upon completion.

“I’d been working a part-time job for about a year, and I just really needed to do something else. A big draw to this program was the educational award … which will be some start up money for me [for college],” he said.