Building a Legacy for the Neighborhood

Shane Birchfield is 10, a fifth-grader at Blanche Reynolds Elementary School, and he is instructing a visitor on the precise use of a very nasty-looking tool:

“You put the hook right through the mesh here, and sort of push it around over the bars to where the wire is, and then if you can you hook the wire with the hook, you know, and once you get a good grip on it, you pull it real hard and it twists the wire around. It’s pretty cool.”

Easier said than done, thank you.

But then it took another Reynolds fifth-grader the day before to show adults on this playground construction project that a tool known as a bag-tie twister could also be used to build Orca the Whale.

Orca, a skeleton of reinforcing bars onto which mesh screen is wired tight and then slathered over with concrete, is a gravity-defying whale that is one of two sculptural highlights of the Rainbow Bridge Playground.

Students such as Shane were joined by parents and neighbors last week and through the weekend in a barn-raising-style project: putting up a $100,000 playground behind the Reynolds School.

For Shane, the job wasn’t exactly rocket science. Orca had its difficulties, but Shane actually preferred his other duties of spreading gravel as a foundation beneath the play area.

“That was the best, the most fun,” he says. “I spent hours just flattening rocks.”

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Jobs in projects of this kind do become heroic.

It’s only natural, since most people in their lifetimes never get a chance to flatten rocks, put a bag-tie twister beyond its intended capacities--or see their parents perform in ways that leave a tangible legacy in the neighborhood.

Lisa Hall, the kindergarten teacher who spearheaded the project, notes that some children have kept journals chronicling the Rainbow Playground’s development and have drawn images of their parents erecting swings or towers or bridges--but without anyone else in the picture. Sometimes, the image will carry a caption such as, “My dad built this, he is so strong!”

This certainly stretches artistic license, as on each of the five days of construction more than 250 volunteers showed up and swarmed the building site to erect those swing sets, towers and bridges. But Hall cites the magic of empowerment that comes from doing new things together.

“We’re building the spirit, which is as important as building the playground,” she says. Indeed, the lure was strong enough to attract one woman from Oxnard whose 8-month-old child she hopes will attend Reynolds. And Hassan Kasraie, a public works engineer for Ventura County, was working on Orca alongside Shane on his day off. Kasraie hoped his 4-year-old son would attend Reynolds next year.

The Rainbow Bridge Playground Project is but one of more than 800 Playscapes around the world designed by Robert Leather & Associates of Ithaca, N.Y. The playgrounds are canny, engaging designs in that they incorporate the wishes of the children who will use them. In the case of the Reynolds School, Leather met with every class to hear what the students wanted and to narrow the list to priorities that drove his final design.

Those design sketches were actually done in the school cafeteria and available for anyone to review midstream. As a result, the rainbow project took on its own, indigenous qualities: Orca and a dolphin from the nearby sea, the Rainbow Bridge drawn from the myths of Chumash Indians, an earthquake house, mesas for climbing that echo regional topography.

That only volunteers build the playground roots it most deeply of all.

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Still, you can’t always count on things going perfectly.

Makita may have donated $14,000 worth of power tools for use by volunteers, Pinky’s may have given used truck tires to be the quake house rock ‘n’ roll foundation, and numerous restaurants may have donated tacos and burgers and salads so that everyone who turns a bead of sweat gets fed, but . . .

Well to the other side of the playground from Shane and his bag-tie magic on Orca, Jim Rasmussen lies on a table, knotted up. Rasmussen by day is a businessman who travels. On this day, however, he operated a donated Bobcat bulldozer at the playground site and shoveled heavy gravel. It took him a bit out of his game.

“My hands and fingertips were going numb and tingling,” he says, rolling over on the table.

Patti Temple, a Ventura chiropractor and volunteer, helps him make the move. She bends him happily into a snapping, cracking pretzel and sends him back to his labors.

Rasmussen will be followed by others, among them retired Oxnard policeman John Avila, whose oldest child attends Reynolds and whose efforts at the project are marked by lugging heavy beams.

“Luckily,” he says, “in my younger days I lifted weights, so I know how to dead lift. But I just locked up today. This chiropractic thing is amazing. I can get back to work now.”

Temple plays down her contributions, even though they keep ordinary people heroic, saying “I’m just here to take the edge off.”

Pausing, she adds: “You don’t put up a playground every day.”

Surely, neither Shane nor anyone else finding his or her way with a new tool and a work mate could agree more.