Allan Appel Photo
As Jazee Jackson and the Friends of Dover Beach planted the riverfront park’s 10th shade tree, two Z‑shaped rocks appeared. Near them, a foot below ground, a shiny paper appeared, with hard-to-decipher writing.
The horticultural adventure turned mysterious.
The Fair Haven School fourth-grader joined a dozen other kids and adults at the Friends’ regular planting Tuesday. Afterwards, he was looking forward to enjoying barbecued hot dogs and watermelon along the Quinnipiac River.
It was the culmination of the second year of the Friends of Dover Beach’s community-building efforts to fix the seawall and to re-plant and re-equip the beautiful riverine park, with $519,000 from the Q‑Terrace development and $123,00 from the parks department’s’s capital budget.
The pin oak that Jazee helped to plant along Front Street was not his first. Several weeks ago he’d worked with Urban Resources Initiative’s Jennifer Baldwin (pictured in red) to plant a linden tree some 10 yards away. That tree now flourished, surrounded by hostas. He said he enjoyed both digging and planting that one, too.
Baldwin drove up again in her truck Tuesday, and the project’s 10th and final tree was about to be stood upright.
As in the past, friends like Luis Jimenez (left in photo, in blue) and Taslim Mohammed (in white t‑shirt, beside Baldwin) pitched in, wielding shovels under Baldwin’s tutelage.
The tree planting started out quite normally, with Taslim measuring the oak’s ball.
Baldwin showed the boys that the hole had to be as deep as the burlap-wrapped ball of roots and twice the width. In this case, two feet down and four or five across.
Andrew Thompson and Kyle Bradford, two interns with the Elm City Parks Conservancy, were on hand to get the hole started.
The digging was tough going because construction debris was used to make the undersurface of the park, according to the Parks Department’s Doreen Oboyski, who was on hand to thank the volunteers and to take photos.
“It’s ‘crapfill’,” she said. She noted how hard the boys, large and small, were working. Several times Thompson’s pick struck rock, and sparks flew.
Brett Bissell, who with his wife Pat founded Friends of Dover Beach, said he thought the many pieces of brick and concrete that turned up were a sign that the road surface, which had been re-routed for the Q‑Terrace development, ultimately ended up in big pieces under the grass.
That pleased Jazee as his shovel now turned up two jagged rocks, one with stripes. They were shaped like a Z. So he called them “Zorro rocks.”
After showing them off, he tossed them carefully in a pile beside the deepening new home for the oak. The Zorro rocks were, alas, not for Jazee’s own keeping. “My mom won’t let me bring them in,” he said.
But his cousin has a rock collection. Jazee planned to contribute those to him. “I’ve given him about 90,” he added.
Just as he said those words, all the diggers noticed something slightly shiny emerging from the dirt wall on the side of the hole about a foot and half under the surface.
“It might have writing on it,” said Baldwin. She hoped it would have a date too, and give a sense of the archeology of Dover Beach.
Or, she added, with the irony of a forestry graduate who had dug many holes, maybe it would turn out to be “a hundred-year-old bag of potato chips.”
So she dug some more. Then because there was rock around it, she asked Andrew Thompson to use his pick axe. He did, and a few more sparks flew. Then Baldwin, like a latter-day Indiana Jones, brushed dirt carefully away with her hands.
Jazee, Taslim, and their friend Luis, a rising fourth-grader at John Martinez school, set down their shovels and gathered round. Baldwin got down on her knees and brushed the rich brown dirt off the mystery object.
It had stripes, in white and blue, but some lines were also curvy, suggesting a script. Writing appeared to be there, but she could not make it out.
Was this a moment of archeological discovery? Something maybe from the Civil War? The Revolution? Or some glittery buried treasure?
Alas.
“Oops, it’s a caution marker,” Baldwin announced after she had examined what she unearthed at close range.
The word “caution” emerged in bluish letters on a shiny white background.
Sure enough, that meant there was a pipe nearby. Baldwin called for Jazee, the other kids, and the interns to all put down their tools.
She said she had, as is standard operating procedure, been in touch with “Call Before You Dig,” the statewide program that ensures you don’t dig into gas or water pipes.
She had been told there was no problem. But clearly there was.
Baldwin took out her cell phone and called her boss, URI’s manager Chris Ozyck.
He asked her to describe the marker and where it was in relation to the sidewalk and the hole, now dug about three feet across at the right depth.
After a brief conversation, Baldwin hung up. The advice: Dig a foot or so farther toward the river, away from the marker. “There’s definitely a pipe nearby,” she said. What it was, she did not know.
However Ozyck assured her that the line was at least a foot if not more underneath the level of the marker, which was just about level with the bottom of the hole.
So Jazee and the other followed the new orders and dug gingerly away from the marker.
“It’s unlikely the roots [of the tree] will bother it [the pipe],” she reassured the kids.
What remained to be done was to cut the wire off the burlap ball, drop the tree in, add compost to the excavated dirt, and then use that to make a “donut” around the newly planted tree’s base.
Into that donut you must pour water and plant food and give the tree two buckets full of water twice a week for its first year. “Kind of like a pet,” Baldwin explained.
And that was that. “It’s unlikely anything more exciting than a barbecue” would happen after the tree was in the ground, she said.
Jazee worked diligently on. Luis left to get a hot dog.
Both boys were also excited to hear that the new playground equipment for Dover Beach Park would soon be delivered, with assembly to begin on Wednesday.
The boys are not going to be helping on that installation, just care for these and future trees. Taslim had worked with Jazee on most of the park’s 10 trees as well as putting in perennials in the butterfly garden.
“I feel very proud,” he said.