Digging Our New Site!

Yesterday a whole bunch of folks showed up to work, which was great to see! And we got so much done! I arrived a little after 1 pm with Andre, and the garden site was full of people raking and shovelling chunks of rubble and random junk out of the ground and leveling it out, and over the course of the day some of the more interesting items ended up as decorations on the fence. Brower was artfully assembling a sine-curve shaped urban version of a New England stone wall near the back of the site, made out of all the debris being dislodged from the dirt -- mostly rocks, various concrete fragments, and rusted metal objects. There were already some railroad ties and GIANT mill beams piled up. It took about three or four people to move just one of those beams. We managed to lift, pull, roll, flop, drag, and shove them around to form a 6'x16' bed about 14 inches deep. The railroad ties were much easier to lift and we had enough to build one bed 2 ties deep. We needed many more, so a small caravan of vehicles left to fetch more from our well-stocked local derelict railroad. We were able to gather about 6 or 8 ties onto Brower's truck, and a ton more onto Gerry's truck, along with some other lumber. I got to ride in Steve's bumble-bee colored SUV on the way back, and we got to experience some adrenaline as he played in the off-road terrain. Steve took a lot of pictures throughout the day which I hope to post here eventually. We stopped at Wholefoods on the way back to pick up some free buckets they saved for us, and when we got back to the site there were even more people than before and things were cleaning up nicely. We unloaded and built a few more beds.
Dauna had membership certificates to sign and keys to hand out, which helped me to feel like it's really ours now.
Yarrow, the man from whom we are leasing the land, was right there with us in the sweat and dirt, helping enthusiastically. He also owns a legal grafitti supply and car customizing shop adjacent to our site, and there is some really amazing art happening there. I would like to take this opportunity to thank him, and to thank everyone else, who came out to work yesterday. Good Job!
The Lippitt St. lot needed some more bed building materials too, so 6 of us went to make one last scavenging trip in our friend's truck. We got 10 decent ties and were heading back home when the two people in the truck got pulled over by the police. I was in my car with the 3 others and pulled over as well to see what the deal was, and the policeman came over to talk to us. After a stressful few minutes of him making us feel like we'd done something wrong, he called the railroad company and they informed him that no, they didn't mind us taking the railroad ties for our project. "It's your lucky day," he said.
Thank you, Providence Worcester Railroad Co.! Rest assured that your half-decomposed, decade-old ties are being put to good use!