Date: Saturday, April 20, 2013; 9:00 am-12:00 pm
In was a terrific Saturday
morning as I set off for the Lincoln Conservatory. I had been to Lincoln Park several times, but
never to the Conservatory. I arrived
early and stood admiring the city view from the lawn, waiting for the doors to
open. It seemed like a perfect day to be
working on a nature project, my first such endeavor through Chicago Cares. By the end of this one, not only was I the
most exhausted that I have ever been after a Chicago Cares project, I was
covered in mud from head to toe and would need to shower again and throw out
my shoes. Oh joy!
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| Sunrise over the conservatory |
Exactly at 9 am they started
letting us in and I joined the other volunteers inside. Besides our Volunteer leader Dave, there was
another Dave, who also leads this project at times. There were three other volunteers, including
a lady Linda. Both Dave’s have been
helping out in the conservatory for over 6 years and are quite familiar with
the place as well as the staff. One of them,
Jen, would be guiding us this morning.
After dropping off our stuff in her office, she took us for our first
task, which was plucking flowers stems of a species of plants. The plant blooms only for a few weeks in the
year and now the time had passed. In
order to prepare for the cycle the following year, we needed to clean up the
plant by removing flower stems and rendering it totally bare. Some of the flowers had already fallen off,
while some were shriveled. But some were
still in glorious bloom and it was a shame that we would have to take them
off. But Jen knew more about this than us and so
that’s what we did. Although the plant
was quite dense to work with, this task wasn't exactly ‘Repotting the Mandrakes’. It
still involved a lot of plucking and moving around the plant. Dave was playing the radio to keep us
entertained, and while I prefer chatting with my fellow volunteers, this was by
and large a very quiet group.
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| The plant before plucking |
It took me over an hour to finish
plucking my plant and was looking to move to another one. In the meanwhile the other Dave and Linda had
been called for another project and he had come asking if anyone could join
them and help. I raised my hand and what
followed was the most uncomfortable session of my Chicago Cares career. The project was digging the bed in Orchid
garden. I went and saw that Dave had a
shovel in hand and looked exhausted.
There were several problems, one of which was a stone ledge, and the bed
which we had to dig was between this ledge and the wall, making it an awkward
angle. Furthermore, the soil was wet and
sticky and not very easy to remove.
While Dave was digging and scooping into a bucket, Linda would have to
scrape off the wet soil sticking to the shovel – which was not as easy as it
sounds. The buckets, which filled up quite
fast, then had to be taken to a hopper and emptied by lifting them up almost
shoulder high – again, not a very comfortable task. This is what I had gotten myself into.
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| And after |
I asked Dave to take a break and
took the shovel. Within 10 seconds I
realized what a monumental mistake that was for all parties. Dave and Linda were guiding me on how I could
use my leg to push the shovel into the ground and scoop out the mud. The
stickiness was making that very difficult and try as I may, I was not getting
enough out of the ground. While Dave was
filling up the bucket in 4-5 scoops, I would be requiring more than 10. Linda suggested that I step inside the ditch
in order to get a better angle and when I did that, I immediately sunk my shoes
in the soft soil. It was apparent to
both, Dave and Linda that I was struggling and Dave said that he was ready to
come back in. However he had been doing
this for a long time and clearly needed a break. The temperature inside the orchid garden was
higher than outside and that did not help either. This was back breaking work and I was out of
breath quite frequently. After some time
I came out and Dave resumed the digging, while I did a bit of scraping and emptying
of the buckets. After a couple more
shifts, where my contribution was a minimum, Jen said that it was enough and we
were ready to fill the ditch with bark.
Having never been around gardens and yards while growing up, I had no
idea what “filling a ditch with bark”
meant, but I was ecstatic to hear that we were done digging.
Jen said that the bags of bark were
in the basement and so Dave and I headed there.
Now, the entrance and the stairs leading to the basement were exactly the
type one finds in scary movies. We made
our way down and found some big bags which we hauled on to a shopping cart.
Next job was getting the cart to the top level and for that we were going to
employ an elevator that was truly from the dark ages. You pressed a button - that looked like one
of those emergency red buttons - to summon the elevator, and the doors opened only
after some lights stopped flashing. Then
we had to load the cart and send the elevator back up. Once at the top, we hoped that the cart had
made it and to our delight, and mild surprise, it had. But the smile was wiped out when Jen said
that we had brought the wrong bark and so we had to repeat the entire process
of sending down the elevator, going down to the basement, unloading and loading
new bags and then sending up the elevator.
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| The bed filled with bark |
We took the bags of bark to our
ditch and then using a saw which Dave had found somewhere, tore opened the bags
and spread the bark in the ditch. We
required all of the bark that we had picked up from the basement and soon we
were done. With the bark in there the
ditch it looked…fantastic. My back was
hurting, hands were blistered and I was covered in mud, but it was a great
sight to see a job well done. I took the
bus back, knowing that I would have to put all my clothes in the laundry basket
and take another shower before my next project, which was a jacket and tie
affair. This had been my first environmental project and I wasn't sure if it was my thing. I was glad to have had this experience, but I
really enjoy the projects with human interaction and this wasn't one of them.
No praise can be too high for
Dave and Linda, who had done infinitely more hard work than me. But it wasn’t just that, Linda had never once
abandoned her great spirit. She was
encouraging me a lot and Dave was fantastic as well. He had toiled away while the other Dave, who
was the leader on the project, had been plucking flowers. I am not ready to draw conclusions based on
just one data point, but a leader always leads by example and as far as I was
concerned, only one of the Dave’s had exhibited that today. He told me that he was a primary leader for
Serve-A-Thon and based on what I had seen of him, we are lucky to have him
represent us that day. Yes, I did learn a lot today. I had learned that sometimes beautiful plants need to be destroyed in order to keep them alive. I had learned that an ordinary thing like bark can make something extraordinary. And I had learned that Pirates really do need to work hard to bury their treasure.
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