Serving as an Ampact Community Forestry Corps Member with Mississippi Park Connection
Written by: Alanna Elder, Ampact Community Forestry Initiative Member, Mississippi Park Connection
Lately, I keep waxing on about “Crosby Walks” – schleps from the pavilion to the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change plots in one of Saint Paul’s largest parks, where MPC & NPS hold regular volunteer events. If you have ever signed up for a Crosby Crew, you have seen the routine mention of this journey: “The experiment is about a 20-minute walk from the parking lot along a paved path.” Sure, this can be a hindrance to getting projects done, but the timing fluctuates, depending on the season and how long it takes to make a few stops — to pop jewelweed seed pods, check a map of emerald ash borer galleries, or take photos inside the big cottonwood that looks like both a fairy castle and an anatomical heart. I was always too distracted to clock the trip.
Usually, Crosby Crews are as small as six and as large as 25 acquaintances and strangers. As we file across the open field behind the pavilion and wind through the forest, people have extra time to get to know each other. Especially in the social clumsiness that followed pandemic lockdowns, I suspect I am not the only one who has sometimes found it easier to get to know someone new when I can be moving at the same time. Without fail, I have drawn from these walks a good laugh, a fascinating detail from someone’s life, or a surprising connection. I eavesdrop enough to know that similar conversations are happening all the way down the line. They are even better on the return walk, after two hours working together.
Ask anyone on the MPC/NPS volunteer team and they will tell you: our volunteers’ life experiences make all our programs richer. There is something special about working beside a person you have never met to care for a place you share, whether or not you say a word. But catching snippets of people’s stories or worldviews makes these moments even more meaningful. Usually, volunteers have insights or questions about plants and animals around us that help draw out their stories, too. At one Crosby Crew, we found pale green frogs hanging out on the branches of the research trees, and someone did a quick search to identify them as either eastern gray or Cope’s gray treefrog, which are pretty much identical except for their call. While removing burdock, one volunteer talked about the widespread use of its roots in medicinal teas and asked if we could do more with it than stuff it in bags for the city’s compost. The group also constantly exchanged the gift of noticing, a woodpecker, snapping turtle, or jack-in-the-pulpit, for instance, an invitation to pause for a few moments together in another being’s orbit.
I really can’t imagine a better way to get to know a new city (or two). When I moved to Minnesota, I had no idea how quickly this place would begin to feel like home or how completely the Mississippi River would win me over. This kind of experience happens to be MPC’s whole thing – connecting people to the river and each other – and I’m forever grateful to be part of it. I’m excited to follow the organization’s work to make the river corridor a safer, more welcoming place for all people to find joy and community.
The past year and a half has been a whirlwind. In habitat restoration work with Mississippi Park Connection and the National Park Service, I’d guess that 70% of what we talk about relates to change. The other 30 is some combination of which vehicle to drive, where the bathrooms are, how the storage room has swallowed a tool we need, and whether we can justify a coffee for the road. But back to change: the past year and a half of serving as an Americorps Member with MPC has shifted the way I think about it in ways I’m just beginning to grasp.
Alanna Elder served with Mississippi Park Connection as a GreenCorps member and later an Ampact Community Forestry Initiative AmeriCorps member. After her service term, she is taking a job as a producer for Minnesota Public Radio. She says: “I am leaving full of gratitude for all the staff, volunteers, and partners I have been able to spend time with during my AmeriCorps term.”