Nature Center Day one:

September, 26th 2018

Today is our first day out of six classes that we will be volunteering at the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge. I have never been here before but we were able to find it fairly easily. Others is our class struggled a little more in finding where we needed to meet so while we waited we got to know a little bit more about some of the people who work there and what the center encompasses. They have bison and multiple pastures for them, as well as many hiking trails and a lake. Once everyone arrived they gave us a brief history of the center and the purpose of each of their jobs and then we learned that today we would be helping finish up a greenhouse they were building. They were given grant money and the Greenhouse needed to be completed in a few days.

It had been raining the past few days and this morning, so they offered all of us mud boots and I took them up on this offer, which was generous. The place there we were going to be working was muddy to the point that every step I took my boot would squish down a few inches, so I was glad to have them. We were lucky that by the time we were working though it had stopped raining, and it was cooler out with a gentle breeze. For the greenhouse we needed to help set up the water tank, but to do this we had to dig trenched and lay wood timbers in them to build a base, and a walkway. I stated helping out originally by caring over piece of wood. These were long pieces of wood and needed two of us to carry each one. Teresa and I worked together as a team to accomplish this. Many piece of the wood had old rusty nails sticking out of them and we had to be careful not to accidentally hurt ourselves. We made multiple trips along with two other teams to carry about twenty pieces of wood over to where we were working. This reminded me of when I was younger and would have to help carry and stack the firewood because I grew up with a wood-burning fireplace.

Once we had carried enough wood over, I decided I would give digging trenched a try so I picked up a pickaxe. I have never used a pickaxe before or ever dug a trench, but I found that it was not too hard. I did not need as much arm strength as I thought I would, because I used my upper body as a lever to build momentum that gave the axe power. Davis and I worked from either end to dig one trench and when we got to close we took turns, then Reilly or Teresa would come over with a shovel and help clear the dirt away and widen the trench. As we dug we found a few big rocks and pieces of concrete. The workers informed us that some of this dirt used to be a part of roads or construction projects, which I found interesting. As we dug our trenches we commented on the fact that during WWI and WWII the soldiers had to dig trenches and how hard that must have been. We found digging out our little trench in soft dirt hard, but they had to build ones that fit their whole bodies and their lives depended on it.

I enjoyed working in the cool weather and being outside and active. I also really liked to get to know everyone better while we were completing a task and see how everyone responded to doing such physical labor, because many of us are active, just not in this way.

Day one: working on the greenhouse