My Garden is a Park. Really.
By Jim Loftin
As a gardener, I am basically a dilettante. I have neither the passion nor temperament necessary to be a horticulturist extraordinaire. Above all, I have no desire to be an indentured servant to my yard. A more unlikely person to become the driving force in the rebirth of a small park would be difficult to find, and yet ...
A few years ago I became involved with an ad hoc group interested in improving an economically depressed section of Coos Bay, Oregon. There were many ills that needed to be addressed in the targeted neighborhood, but it was the consensus of the members of Concerned Citizens of Empire that fixing up Ed Lund Park would be the most attainable short-term goal with long-term impact.
The park was comprised of swathes of overgrown, parched, and dandelion-infested grass bordered by a few trees and bushes—unkempt and choked with weeds and blackberry plants—around its perimeter and along two sides of a small poorly maintained building. Any amenities one might expect to find in a park were absent. There was not even a place to sit besides the ground.
This quarter-acre park once boasted a rose garden and a small library, which had since been converted to a studio for government access cable television. It used to be the social center of Empire before that city was annexed by Coos Bay in the mid 70s. However, the region had undergone considerable economic hardship in the intervening years, and financial belt-tightening had spawned a policy of spending the majority of money allocated to the parks department on Coos Bay's two showcase parks and allowing all its other parks to decline. None so completely as Ed Lund Park.
Perhaps if we had floated just the park proposal to the city council, it might have taken some positive action on it. But having been presented along with a laundry list of requests for help from the city, we received only a vague and, as it turned out, disingenuous public promise from then-mayor Joe Bennetti that something would be done to improve the park.
After a month passed without any visible improvement, my long-dormant issues with authority resurfaced when I saw picnic tables on sale at Bi-Mart for $50 each and decided to buy one for the park. When I approached the group's vice president about using her pickup to transport the picnic table, she agreed readily and insisted on giving me $20 to help pay for the table. While we were making our plans, another supporter arrived and, upon learning what we were up to, contributed $20 as well. My grand gesture ended up only costing me ten bucks. What a deal!
The deed was executed without a hitch. The picnic table was light enough that June Est-Pundt and I were able to lift it onto the back of her truck with ease, but heavy enough that it didn't need to be strapped down for the short drive from the store to the park. We were like two kids on an adventure as we surreptitiously slid the table off the truck bed, positioned it under a large pine tree, and then drove off, laughing maniacally all the while.
The presence of the picnic table went unnoticed by the city for quite some time, but not by the neighborhood's homeless contingent, which was considerable then due to the proximity of South Coast Gospel Mission's shelter and kitchen. Almost immediately I started seeing small, scruffy groups sitting at the table whenever I passed by the park. It was gratifying to actually see people in the park, and to see them using the meager amenity we had provided.
Before long I also noticed that the table was moving around the park. One day it would be in its original location, on a small rise overlooking the largest expanse of "grass," and the next it would be alongside the park building. Other days it would be somewhere in between.
I was somewhat amused by this development, figuring the park's constituency had spoken. Besides which, it seemed reasonable to me that the only people using the park should have the freedom to put the table anyplace that suited them. Apparently this laissez faire attitude was not shared by the city. One day I discovered that it had chained the table to the tree we had first placed it under. It was a puzzlement to be sure.
The next, more focused, round with the city council did not go well. A lukewarm reception quickly deteriorated after we suggested that $1,200 was a good starting point for funding park improvements considering that the council had earlier in the evening graciously granted that amount—described as a relatively small sum by the mayor and glowingly endorsed as an inexpensive opportunity to engender international good will (sigh) by the gift's sponsoring councilman, Roger Gould—to a local non-profit sponsoring a foreign exchange student luncheon.
To avoid that hot potato, the mayor directed the city's operations administrator to put our request on the agenda of the next parks committee meeting. In a moment of candor, the operations administrator later revealed that the mayor did not intend for the city to do anything substantive to improve that park. Steve Doty said that having us meet with the parks committee was just the mayor's way of making the problem go away (while publicly appearing to be helpful).
The parks committee only meets on an as needed basis, which is practically never, so a special meeting had to be arranged for this exercise in futility. The end result was a single trashcan for the park and permission for our group to make just about any park improvement we wanted at our own expense. Gee, thanks a lot.
Soon thereafter providence smiled upon our little group and the residents of Empire. A fledgling Kiwanis club offered to help us revitalize Ed Lund Park. My memory is a bit fuzzy as to whether I volunteered or was shanghaied, but I became the liaison for the venture between the two entities. And thus it was that my career as Park Dude was launched.
For awhile I became immersed in a sort of shuttle diplomacy as the partnership developed. Ultimately a pragmatic plan of action was agreed upon: address the years of deferred maintenance and neglect, make the park aesthetically pleasing, and add enough simple amenities to make it a desirable place to visit.
Somehow my role as liaison expanded into being the project's publicist as well. Hoping to attract volunteers and community support, I sent out public service announcements in advance of work parties at the park. This eventually led to a front-page article in The World and an interview on KCBY. To its surprise, the Bay Area Kiwanis club attained near-celebrity status in the local service club community as a result of the free publicity provided by various Coos County media outlets.
There were more people in Ed Lund Park for the initial work party—upward of thirty—than had been there at one time in at least a decade. Joining the core groups were a local youth organization, a service club for developmentally disabled adults, and a smattering of other civic minded individuals. Volunteer firemen from the fire station next to the park also lent their support by serving free coffee and donuts and making their restrooms available.
Once things got started, there was a virtual whirlwind of activity. Advance crews cut back overgrown foliage and stacked the resultant debris. Those following behind defined the garden beds with landscaping cloth and borders. A wheelbarrow and shovel brigade brought up the rear spreading bark mulch wherever it was needed. Within a few hours that long-neglected property started to look like a park again, it was a glorious day.
More work parties took place over the next few months. They were not on the grand scale as the first one, generally limited to selective pruning or adding some amenity to the park. By the time spring rolled around three benches, a pair of horseshoe pits, a sandbox, and a very sturdy picnic table accompanied the park's lone trashcan and original picnic table.
Like proud parents everywhere, we worried about our progeny's future. The city's mantra had all along been that it didn't have the manpower to do more than minimal maintenance at its low priority parks. So we approached a non-profit organization with an ongoing contract for maintaining some of the city's parkways and bumpouts and asked it to submit a modest proposal to the city for maintaining Ed Lund Park in an acceptable manner.
Since it was located conveniently close—just across the alley—to Ed Lund Park, and many of its clients and employees had participated in the cleanup project, this seemed like a symbiotic relationship made in heaven. A bid of $125 per month was submitted to the budget committee, where it subsequently died. We learned of its demise through a newspaper article that noted a committee member "hoped that some service organization would adopt the park" after the proposal was rejected.
If that committee member's aside was aimed at getting the Kiwanis club to relieve the city of its responsibility, apparently s/he had not been informed of similar deflected feelers from the city. That club is focused on short-term projects. Adopting anything is not on its agenda. So, unfortunately for the residents of Coos Bay, the city remained in charge of Ed Lund Park's care and nurturing. Predictably, alas, it was not up to the task and the park once again began to suffer from neglect.
The entirety of the city's maintenance regimen consisted of mowing the lawn "as needed" during the growing season, roughly late April through early September. Usually the lawn was so overgrown by the time it got cut that after each visit from the city's crew large drifts of grass cuttings were scattered throughout the lawn and a two-foot wide film of coarse grass coated the garden beds' perimeters. Given this limited interpretation of maintenance, it was hardly surprising that eventually weeds started sprouting in the garden beds and even the sandbox and horseshoe pits, and that many bushes and trees became overgrown and unsightly.
About a year after the cleanup project ended, I went to Ed Lund Park a few times during a week my wife was out of town and spent some time weeding and pruning. I systematically plodded along, pausing often to rest or drink Gatorade. By the end of the week I was pleased at how much I had accomplished. So much so that I decided to continue doing it as my free time and motivation dictated.
My progress made me realize how little was required to keep the park looking good. It started me thinking in terms of following the path of least resistance with the park. I resolved to find a way to get the city to become a partner rather than an obstacle.
As I plugged along I began stacking the debris my efforts created by the trashcan, thinking that would be a convenient place for the maintenance crew when it came for the weekly trash pick-up. Inexplicably, even though the trash got picked up regularly, the nearby debris did not, and before very long the pile became quite large. When there was very little weeding and pruning left to be done, I e-mailed the operations administrator and suggested that he send someone to haul away the pile of debris that I had generated. Included in this message was an offer to provide the manpower for some other projects at Ed Lund Park if the city would be willing to provide the materials needed.
Two weeks passed before the debris disappeared. I did not receive so much as an acknowledgement of my offer. Determined to get a response, I sent Steve another e-mail in which I sarcastically outlined possible reasons why he didn't reply to the offer of help. I am not particularly proud of my action, but it was effective. I received an e-mailed note a couple days later tersely stating that the city would provide the materials requested, and directing me to coordinate everything with the maintenance crew chief.
Hooking up with the crew chief was a daunting endeavor. When two e-mails to the address I had been given went unanswered, I dropped by the public works yard in hopes of catching up with him. Following a lead I received from there, I finally cornered him several days later as he was eating his lunch in Mingus Park, the primary recipient of Coos Bay's park maintenance money. Taking the high road, I accepted his lame excuse for not answering my e-mails with good humor and was rewarded for doing so with an appointment to meet him at Ed Lund Park that very afternoon.
Phil Christiana was helpful and appreciative of my efforts at the park. Together we fleshed out a rough timetable for various projects and the logistics for getting me what I had requested. We also agreed that I would leave anything that needed to be hauled away at the southeast corner of the park to make it easier for his crew to pick up. I managed not to smile when he related it took an hour to manually load the last pile of debris on a truck because they couldn't use their loader where it was located. As I spoke with him, I gained insight into how departmental downsizing and cursory park maintenance policies had impacted his and other employee's job satisfaction and quality of life. By the time we parted, it was clear that we were confederates not adversaries.
Because of my disinclination to engage in activities involving drudgery, my mission to save the park was metered out in small increments. At most I spent two hours at a time on my labor of love, often less than an hour. And then only when the spirit moved me, which was generally during cooler times of day or when the area of the park I worked on was in the shade.
Increasingly I became attuned to the rhythm of the park. Some projects were put off until conditions were more favorable. The aha experience in that regard came when I attempted to rototill the infield of the horseshoe courts and discovered that the blades just bounced off the hard pan. Since there was no water source I could use to soften it up, I decided to wait until the weather did it for me. This tactic also worked well for removing unwanted plants and weeds from the lawns.
When painting the picnic table that the park crew had chained to the tree, I found out why its early users sometimes moved it from that spot. Situated between two mature pine trees, that spot was always in the shade and, as a consequence, the moist coastal air caused it to be damp and surprisingly cold even in the heat of the afternoon. This became apparent to me because the paint took a long time to dry there and pine needles fell and stuck to it before the paint had a chance to set up.
After processing that information I decided to relocate the table. Without too much effort I managed to pry open the s-hook connecting the chain, flip the table on its top, and slide it over near the trashcan to a warmer location protected from the rain by the park building's overhang. Initially I chained the table to a support post so as not to upset the sensibilities of the park workers. Many months later I removed the chain. The table has never wandered off, so I suppose that spot is acceptable to one and all.
One day I made the executive decision to convert the sandbox into a planter. It had become a king-sized, weed-infested cat box and as such was highly unsuitable for its original purpose. A small roll of landscaping cloth, several bags of bark mulch, and five drought-resistant bushes (rosemary on each corner and oleander in the middle) turned that eyesore-cum-nuisance into a sort of centerpiece for the park's southern quadrant.
Although I was just quietly working my way through various projects at the park, people in the neighborhood and beyond took notice of the changes and managed to divine that I was responsible for them. On numerous occasions someone walking past or through the park while I was there made comments to me about how much better the park looked and thanked me for my efforts. Unsolicited, I received a gift of fully grown rhododendron, pieris, and azalea bushes—a dozen in all—along with help from a small crew to plant them. Since the rainy season was imminent, the timing for this was perfect.
The following spring I chanced upon an announcement that 1,000 bare-root Douglas Fir plants were available for free from the local Bureau of Land Management office. Even though it was only a matter of a few days from the date of the announcement, by the time I contacted BLM all the plants had been given away. But all was not lost because a new shipment was expected soon and I was able to get on the waiting list. Sure enough, in about a week I was notified that I could pick up my plants, only they were Port Orford Cedar instead of Douglas Fir. Hey, free is free. The universe spoke and I listened, so Ed Lund Park is now graced with 13 Port Orford Cedar trees. The downside of this windfall was that I had to hand water the trees weekly from early summer until late fall.
The more time I spent there, the more obvious it became to me that despite the park's overall improvement very few people used it. This realization inspired me to look for ways to attract people to the park. One day, while painting the trim on the park building, I started musing on how nondescript that building was. Before long it occurred to me that painting a combined mural and sign on its side would be a good way to draw the attention of passersby. This idea percolated through my brain for a few weeks before I had the brainstorm to ask a local artist who owed me money if she wanted to work off her debt by making my notion a reality.
Using mostly scraps of different colored house paint from her garage, Bittin Duggan put together a simple mural in the representative art style sometimes seen on elementary school buildings. Her mural resembles a young child's painting of a park, complete with a smiling sun looking down from a blue sky upon a stylized tree, a bright green lawn, and a girl jumping rope. The words Ed Lund Park are superimposed over it in large red letters. No one will ever again have to wonder what that place is and what goes on there.
Next my attention fell to the horseshoe pits. It seemed a shame that they weren't being used so I decided to organize horseshoe-pitching activities at the park. I sent out PSAs to the local media seeking interested players. Gradually responses began to trickle in and a core group of players emerged. KCBY was so intrigued by the idea that it ran a feature on our activities and invited me to be interviewed for a weekly public service broadcast.
The horseshoe pitching activities expanded to include periodic tournaments and open matches twice weekly from early spring until mid fall. To some extent this triggered the herd effect, drawing others to the park. Among them many clients and workers from the non-profit across the alley, who now regularly eat lunch and sit in the park during breaks. More and more local residents are spending time there enjoying its modest attributes and/or socializing. Perhaps the most significant indication of Ed Lund Park's improved status is that it is used to hold dog obedience classes during the spring and summer months and Star of Hope stages its annual picnic there.
Midway through my self-directed public service project, a Concerned Citizens of Empire member (one of my co-conspirators on the picnic table caper) managed to get herself elected to the city council. When I had gone about as far as I was willing to at the park, I sent Stephanie Kramer an e-mail informing her of my pending retirement from park rescue work and bequeathed Ed Lund Park's fate to her. To her credit she didn't make any false promises, but not long afterwards a crew of workers showed up at the park and gave it a shave and haircut that far surpassed any it had received in a very long time. Since then the time between visits from the regular crew has shortened considerably. Now when they finish, there is no mess left behind. Yay!
Considering the past resistance and no-can chorus from city officials, this shift in attitude is a major victory. I have gradually adopted a strength-based perspective in my dealings with the parks department and will continue to encourage good behavior from it. I suspect that I will need to intervene occasionally before it finally decides to address the still-ignored issue of planned weeding and pruning, but for the nonce I am taking a much needed rest. Elvis has left the premises.
Editors Note: Several months after this article was written, without fanfare or explanation the City of Coos Bay installed playground equipment in Ed Lund Park. On June 27, 2009, Ed Lund Park was the primary site of the first annual Empire Clamboree.
Vanity Press Series - My Garden is a Park. Really.
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