This morning I took a participate in the volunteer activity for Gowanus Canal Conservancy. At first, I had no idea what I would do today until I saw the bolar gloves. I realized that we were gonna do something with soil. As expected, when we got to the site, I was told that we had to use shovels and utility carts to move the compost windrows which were 8,000lbs of food scraps from one place to another. The workflow was one volunteer loaded the composts, one transported from here to there, and another guy unloaded to the top of the old compost windrow. After a circle, the empty utility cart would go back to the original compost windrow. Then another circle would start again.
After I loaded my first cart, I tried to move it to another place, however, the full utility cart were so heavy that I couln’d even keep balance of it. After that, I gave up and stayed just for the loading of the compost windrow. The compost windrow was made of food scraps. It takes about 6 weeks to turn natural material into compost, heats up to 160 degrees fahrenheit and needs to be turned, to evenly expose all of the compost to the sun, about 4 times. We did it for three hours and all the old compost were moved to another place. Even though my arms were painful, I still have a yummy lunch which served by the conservancy.
After I loaded my first cart, I tried to move it to another place, however, the full utility cart were so heavy that I couln’d even keep balance of it. After that, I gave up and stayed just for the loading of the compost windrow. The compost windrow was made of food scraps. It takes about 6 weeks to turn natural material into compost, heats up to 160 degrees fahrenheit and needs to be turned, to evenly expose all of the compost to the sun, about 4 times. We did it for three hours and all the old compost were moved to another place. Even though my arms were painful, I still have a yummy lunch which served by the conservancy.
After the wonderful work with other volunteers, we had a quick but happy lunch beside the road in front of a bar. The hotdog was really delicious for me because we just did a good job. Than, we took a a little bit long transfer by subway and bus to the south part of Brooklyn. Finally we arrived at the coastline in the south of Brooklyn which was a beautiful beach with a sunny and windy day. The only sad was that it was not the right season so that there wasn’t so many people at the beach. After a short conversation with the bicycle rent office, we got many beach bicycle and I rode with Yichao on a double bicycle because she was really not good at it. So you could imagine that I needed to ride hard, but still we finished it and not too bad. We crossed a express and went to a waterfront of a bay or lake I was not sure. There were a lot of people fishing and camping beside the water. The water was pretty beautiful and clear under sunlight with several boats on the surface. I went to the edge and tried to touch the water, really cold but refreshing. Not far away from the water, it was gonna be many sites for landscape design and architecture. I guessed it should be a wonderful site to create attractive place for New Yorkers and visitors in the future. There were enough open spaces and vegetations to be organized and planned by architects and landscape architects. We did spent to much time in front of the water and rode back to the beach which was extremely different with the waterfront. Standing before the coastline, I could get huge sound of roar from sea. However, what was strange was that it could help me calm down and meditate, even though I was tired enough after a busy day.
