On July 24, my co-interns and i took a trip to San Francisco. We knew that we were going to a park, but we had no imagination to what the park would look like. The view caught us by surprise. We went to Heron’s Head Park, which is located in the Bay View. From what our supervisors told us, we knew that we were going to do garden work. I thought that mean planting plants, but soon to find out that wasn’t the gardening work that we would be doing.
When we first got the park, we weren’t only amazed by the how the park looked but what surrounded it. Heron’s Head Park, is located near the Recology Center, on top of having a lot of construction work. As we got off the bus, we made our way up to the Eco Center that is new to the park. The Eco Center was interesting as well. The walls were a majority of huge glass windows, the electrical wiring was on the outside of the walls instead of being inside. There was also a “man made wetlands” that they had in a small room that was located right next to the main room of the building.
As we all wet inside the building, we gathered around in a circle. Raynelle who was our park educator gave us the tour the park and enlightened our minds with the history making of it all. With her was another high school intern named Jennifer and a volunteer from Parks and Rec named David. But after everyone introduced themselves , they guided us to their outdoor classroom-the Stomping Grounds of the park. The wood stomps was made into a shape of a circle. It was sort of like a little campfire, but not including the fire of course, that would burn down the park. We did our first activity from there. We looked at maps from space and it got closer every time another group went. Working with the maps and seeing it from many points of view was interesting i guess you can say.
After that we went to go do our gardening work in the wetlands. We found out that we were gonna get rid of a living species, when i heard this i thought Raynelle meant animals but really she meant a plant. We were going to pull out weeds called Algerian sea lavender, which has been invading the naive California sea lavender. See at first they both looked the same to me, but when Raynella explained the difference, I realized the difference. We split up into groups, Ranisha, Jessica and I were a group and we got to picking all the sea lavender. The boys on the other team made it a competition to see who could fill up their bag the most. They ended up stealing our bag, but we got it back. We walked all the way down the transition area and almost hit the ending length of the wetland. We filled up our bag almost to the top, we got to work on pulling those weeds out.
Once we finished our garden work, carried our coffee sack with the weeds in it back to the ECO building. We cleaned up and started our next activity. In this activity was a collection of pictures and we were separated into three different groups: water, energy, and design. I was group number one which was water. My group members were John and William,. We discovered how the water was stored, how the rooftop garden helped store the water and how it helped keep the building in cool temperature. We also learned that to save water when using the bathroom you flush up for number one, and down for number two. Another thing we learned was that the water was used in a recycle system, it always got reused in one way or another. Due to the green tanks one that cleaned and separated the water for solids and stuff like that.
So fieldtrip was fun, in the end of it all I learned a lot about the park and I can say I was engaged in the work. When it was time for us to go home we were all ready to go and hungry. Before we left, we gathered into a circle again. This time everyone in the circle said one word to describe how the day went for them. My word was “wow.” After that, we made our sandwiches to go, packed our belongings and headed back to the church. The day was spent pretty well i can say.
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