Last Saturday, I participated in Into the Streets for a second year with Rose House.  Our team was assigned to the Tompkins County YMCA, which is located near the Ithaca Mall north of campus.  When we got in the taxi, though, I was confused to find that we were headed west, off campus, through downtown, and up into the hills…  I briefly considered that we may be being kidnapped, but soon we came to a trailhead way up in the hills.  It turns out that the YMCA has a massive outdoor education facility!  There’s an area with picnic tables and camping space in the front, and then acres of woods and trails beyond that.  Our YMCA representative explained that they teach classes year-round on everything from snowshoeing to orienteering to machete throwing, and run popular summer camps for kids.

First, some of the Rose students were tasked with adding to and filling in holes in a small shelter made of woven grapevines.  My group was assigned to carry branches from piles near the entrance to back by the stack of firewood.  Once those were moved, we were reassigned to pulling down said grapevines.  I found this slightly humorous, because that’s pretty much same thing we did on Westhaven Farm last year – pulling down tomato vines.

Unfortunately, tomato vines and grape vines are not at all the same thing.  It turns out that the wilderness is much more difficult to grapple with than an artificially cultivated greenhouse.  Grapevines are much, much tougher than tomato vines, and at least four times as thick and tall.  They are rooted firmly in the ground, and then wind up around tree trunks and into the branches.  They are remarkably flexible, which means that they’re good for weaving into a shelter, but nearly impossible to break.

They don’t just come down when you yank on them.  We tried pulling with four people at a time, and got nothing.  We tried to snap the vines by bending them and stepping on them together.  I tried digging the roots out of the ground, but they went too deep to manage without a shovel.  I tried putting my full body weight on these things and swinging around like George of the Jungle.  No dice.  The only solution was to move on and try to pick on a vine your own size.  In 2 hours, I conquered approximately 7 vines total.  I do understand why the YMCA couldn’t just hand out machetes like Halloween candy to 60+ college students, but I would have been eternally grateful for some kind of cutting utensil.

Unlike last year, I can’t say I quite understood how what we were doing was helping, at first.  I carried branches and logs from one pile…to another pile a few meters away.  Then I tramped around braving ticks and poison ivy in order to generally fail to gather grapevines.  I know that the YMCA is an amazing resource for the people, and especially kids, of Tompkins county…but why do they need a little hut?  Why does it need to be made out of specifically grapevines, which are nigh on impossible to gather?  Other groups were organizing equipment, picking up trash, extending trails…and I was just wandering around, losing fights with plants over and over.  My role was maximum effort, minimum efficiency, and didn’t really seem useful.  I had really been looking forward to this volunteer opportunity, and I couldn’t help but be disappointed that I didn’t seem to be personally helping the community in a tangible manner.

I didn’t really see how my volunteering was helping at all, until the end of the day, when a huge group of the volunteers spent the last 45 minutes working together to clear sticks and rocks out of a clearing in the woods.  The YMCA representative explained that he had a vision of all the kids being able to play things like soccer and flag football, but the entire property had been covered in trees.  So, he’d chosen a massive area of forest (I would estimate 50 feet in diameter), and then personally cut down all the trees and removed the stumps.  You know, as one does.  Our job was just to start clearing the ground so grass could grow there in the spring.  I heard a fair amount of grumbling about, “How are we supposed to clear all the sticks?!  The entire ground is sticks!”  But with the instructor’s vision in mind, I could understand why this was important for us to do.  With ~30 people participating, by the end I could actually see progress being made towards that goal.

The major purposes of the outdoor facility are to teach people to be more comfortable with nature and provide fun and unique outdoors experiences.  Part of that is not just having equipment and teachers, it’s having existing areas where people (and especially children) can do fun activities while in the woods.  Part of it is having trails to hike on and fields for soccer.  While it might not seem like as big a deal, I suppose part of making kids feel welcome in the wilderness is having little shelters them to hang out and roast marshmallows in in the winter.  If our host can spend weeks cutting down trees to clear a meadow single-handedly, I think I should be able to come to terms with tugging down some vines and moving sticks and branches.   If a task is necessary to your ultimate vision, it’s important to do it even if it seems useless or futile or terribly slow.

With regard to Into the Streets as a program, I was super happy to see so many Rose House volunteers this year!  There were only two of us last year, plus the GRFs, so I was proud to be part of a much larger Rose group this year.  ITS 2017 was well organized, the communication was effective, and I’m glad to have participated.  The Rose House team is apparently in the process of becoming master plant-fighters – we’ve now done tomato vines on a farm and grapevines in the woods.  ITS 2018 is going to have to find some magic beanstalks for us next year.