Great Kills Beach 9/26
Waking up early was necessary to make the commute from Greenpoint, Brooklyn to Great Kills Beach in Staten Island, which involved biking to lower Manhattan to catch the Staten Island ferry, then biking about 8 miles down the coast and finding the cleanup. I had phoned the previous week to inquire a bit more about the cleanup and confirm that it was happening. Yet the phone conversation had not provided any specific details about exactly where to meet for the cleanup, simply on the beach which stretches for a few thousand meters. Upon entering the Gateway National Recreation Area, nearly 2 hours since leaving our apartment, we simply had to snoop and ask around to try and locate the clean-up. We ended up having a number of interesting interactions throughout the journey (see opposite), but the most helpful was with the only park ranger we could find. By the time we had biked past most of the beach and not seen any cleanup efforts or spoken with anyone who knew anything about a cleanup, we found a hurried ranger doing some routine maintenance at the end of the road.
When asked about the cleanup that was scheduled for today, he simply laughed in an irritated and self pitying sort of fashion. He elaborated with details about how understaffed they, the NYC branch of the National Parks Department, were, and his lack of surprise that a planned cleanup was in fact not happening. Funding had recently been cut in drastic proportions, leaving less resources and employees to tend to the park, the management was a total mess, and one of the head rangers had recently suffered a death in the family, which meant even less people on staff and further reason to skip the cleanup. He radioed a colleague, who confirmed that the cleanup had been cancelled. He apologized for the frustratingly disordered management that inconvenienced his life, and now ours. I mentioned that we would still like to help clean the beach seeing as we had come from so far and asked if he could spare any materials. He gave us a few large garbage bags, and joked about how he could barely afford to do this. He was very helpful in the end, just more stressed and over worked than I had thought a park ranger might be.
Alas, a two person clean up was in effect. With no other volunteers to compete with in our search and disposal of litter, we calmly took to a section of the beach. Nothing hyper-unusual really. Some plastic bottles, styrofoam cups, and fishing line left over from beach visitors. Some single-use plastic bags, old shoes, beer cans, and unidentifiable shards of plastic and metal that had been aging in these Atlantic Ocean sands. We did a thorough clean for one section, stored our filled bags behind the restroom hut, and headed out for some lunch before returning to clean more.
After our trip back from a local strip mall (which was the nearest eatery, sans a hotdog truck, that we could locate) we resumed cleaning on the Eastern side of the shore. We had to consolidate our gatherings from earlier, two bags into one, to maximize our collecting potential. We cleaned for another 100 meters or so, filled all our bags to max capacity and called it a clean-up. There was a dumpster in the parking area, which we took great pleasure in heaving our filled bags into. Perhaps a little disappointed that the clean-up was canceled, we were still happy to have an excuse to travel to a new beach and comb through some of the local flotsam.
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