Last week I participated in my 6th event with Tourism
Cares, on the beaches of New York.
Though the years I have undertaken many *very* glamorous projects, such
as painting chain-link fences, pulling out rose bushes, moving artifacts in a
museum, and my all-time favorite, cleaning a ditch. We usually visit an underfunded state or
national park that is in need of a little TLC, and swarm in like bees and touch
as much as we can in a few short hours.
It is absolutely amazing the amount of work a group that size can
accomplish in just a few hours.
Tourism Cares has always organized each event so we have
time to visit with each other, spend quality time working, and to also explore
the destination. Every one of these
trips has given me memories of sites I may never have seen otherwise, and days
spent with new and old friends giving back to the industry that has given us
all so much. It's a day to embrace the
grassroots of our industry, and the local areas that really need our help.
I was introduced to Tourism Cares by a childhood friend,
who is now the general manager of a tour company in Sacramento. As I live in North Carolina, we were lucky to
see each other once every other year or two.
My career has always been on the agency side and our paths haven't
crossed professionally, though we have both been in the industry for more than
15 years. He was attending the
Gettysburg event in 2009 and asked if I'd have time for a visit since he'd be
nearby (it's all relative: it was a 9 hour drive for me but he lives in CA, so
sure, I'd be "nearby"). I
asked if I could come too and that was it - I was hooked. We spent my first event in a battlefield
clearing "non-historic vegetation" from the perimeter of the property
(translation: pulling out rose bushes).
One of my favorite memories was lying in the grass at lunch, imagining
what a day in that field was like for soldiers who were there 150 years
earlier, in heavy wool uniforms, having walked hundreds of miles from home to
fight.
Later projects have taken me to Mystic Seaport in
Connecticut (moving artifacts in the museum), Washington DC (where I painted
fencing at my favorite monument), Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay
(cleaning a ditch of debris and stacking firewood in a fire line of 100
people), and one of my favorites,
cleaning up Gold Rush-era grave sites at the old city cemetery in my hometown
of Sacramento last fall.
This spring's trip was announced for Coney Island and
Jamaica Bay a few months before Hurricane Sandy hit the area. I was already planning to go but once the
storm hit I felt a stronger pull to go help the area that saw so much
devastation. My group spent a very sunny
Friday at Fort Tilden (on Jamaica Bay in Queens) where our group cleared a road
that had been buried in sand, put up fencing to help recreate the protective
dunes that were lost, and cleared trash and building materials (nails, roof
tiles, bricks) from the sand so that hopefully by the end of summer children
will be able to play there again.
Several generations ago my family came to America and settled in Jamaica
Bay, so this was a very interesting connection for me, thinking of my
tenth-great-grandparents walking these same beaches more than 300 years before.
Once I've visited each of these areas and spent a day
helping with whatever task I am assigned, by the end of the day I have a new
place that I care about and feel a connection to that area. I may never go back to any of these places
and see the results of the work we've done but I know groups of school kids are
probably at Gettysburg on field trips this week, and Mystic Seaport will have
large crowds soon, and hopefully Coney Island and Tilden Beach will be fully
back in business by the end of the summer.
All of those places were touched by people who cared enough to come
help, and didn't ask anything in return except for a sunny day with friends and
colleagues.
Next fall we will meet up again at Plymoth Plantation in
Massachusetts. I'll see old friends and
make some new ones, and probably spend the day painting or pulling weeds for a
few hours. At the end of the day we'll
leave it a little better off than when we arrived and I'll have a new place to
care about. I can't wait.
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