Sam Gurwitt Photos
Richard Watkins held a measuring tape in the position for a steel pole while Matt Viens leaned his weight into a drill that choked fragrant pink sawdust out of a slowly-forming hole in a red cedar post.
The future safety of New Haven’s stone stairway to the heavens hung in the balance.
Watkins and Viens had put the post in the ground a few days earlier, and were now preparing it to support a new handrail on the Giant Steps trail in East Rock Park.
Viens, who works for the Urban Resources Initiative (URI), was helping lead the installation of the new railing for the 285-foot stairway trial, which hikers navigate through a gauntlet of rectangular chunks of basalt every day as the fastest route to the summit.
With a $6,274 grant from the outdoor gear company REI, URI hired Watkins and one other worker from EMERGE Connecticut, Inc. for the repairs.
Above Viens and Watkins, the rectangular chunks of basalt jutted out of the cliff face through which the steep stairs wound. The 200-plus steps are over 100 years old, said Viens (though he said had been unable to find exactly how old).
Decades of rain, snow, and wind had rotted the posts that held up the old railing, and damaged the steps themselves. So URI was there Wednesday morning to replace the railing. It was the crew’s third day on the steps. They had already made erosion controls and replaced the rotting posts, which meant widening two-foot-deep holes and filling in rocks and mortar around the new cedar.
URI Associate Director Chris Ozyck (pictured above) oversaw the operation and showed his four neon-clad workers what to do. Once all of the equipment had been hauled up the now-closed portion of English Drive to the top section of steps, he explained the plan. Drill holes in the posts, widen the eye bolts enough so they fit around the poles, put the bolts in the posts, thread the poles through the eyebolts, attach sections of pole to each other.
“Easy enough? In theory?” he asked.
“In theory,” echoed Maurice Kiett. Kiett, along with Watkins, is a supervisor at EMERGE. EMERGE employs formerly incarcerated New Haven-area residents for construction work to help them build a life outside of prison.
Kiett stayed by the truck with URI Field Crew Representative William Tisdale and pried open the eyes of the eyebolts with a chisel so they would fit around the poles. He would take a few hits with a hammer on the end of the chisel and hand the bolt up to Tisdale, who tested it on the poles whose ends poked out the back of a pickup-truck bed.
Meanwhile, Viens (pictured above) began to lean his weight into the drill to bore holes in the new posts three feet above the ground. Watkins held the tape measure where the pole would go so Viens could drill in the right direction.
The fragrance of the eastern red cedar’s pink heartwood wafted around them. Once the drill burst through the wood, pink sawdust spotted the snow that had caked onto the side of the post.
Once the holes were drilled and the bolts fitted, Watkins carried up the first steel pole. Together, he, Viens, and Ozyck pushed it through the eye of the first bolt. It was tight, as it needed to be. Viens used the flat part of a monkey wrench to hammer it in further until the end lined up with the bottom of the next section of railing. They put the bolt for the next post on the pole, slid it up to where it needed to be, and pushed it into the hole in the post.
Then came the fun part. Ozyck held up the loose end of the pole, and Viens and Watkins carefully screwed the next pole into the connector. Cross thread it, said Ozyck, and it will strip the threads.
Once they had secured the next section of the pole, they bent the now-attached poles down to the next post and slotted the bolt, whose eye was already around the pole, into the post.
They repeated the process until the railing reached the bottom of that section of steps, where Kiett and Tisdale (pictured below, in that order) held the end of the pole.
Viens, Kiett, and Tisdale moved on to the next, lower section. This time, Kiett did the drilling.
While they drilled into the posts, Watkins used the back end of the hammer to pry open the eyes of the next set of eyebolts.
Watkins said he has been with EMERGE for 16 months. He said his parole officer gave him a flyer for the organization after he had served his three-year prison sentence.
At first he was skeptical. But he went to a meeting to get more information. The leader asked those in the room how many of them had held jobs before going to prison. Watkins said everyone in the room raised their hand. The leader then asked how many held jobs after leaving prison and then still went back. Again, most hands in the room showed.
Watkins said that struck him: “It’s not just having a job but being able to keep it.” That’s where EMERGE’s model comes in. It employs people, he said, but it focuses most on its employees’ personal growth.
Every Friday it holds a mandatory “real talk” meeting. Someone chooses a topic, and everyone discusses it, holding nothing back, he said. They’ve talked about everything from loss to family members returning from prison with nowhere to go to finances, he said. The discussions are raw and sometimes tough. Nonetheless, he said, “we all look forward to it. It’s therapy.”
After prying open each eyebolt, Watkins stood up and tried it out for size on the polls that poked out the back of the pickup above him.
“The only ceiling that you have is the one you place over yourself,” he said. He said someone told him that recently, and it stuck with him. “For me, that keeps me moving forward.”
If Watkins chooses to move forward on the Giant Steps Trail, he’ll have a new railing to help him along. And in the spring, URI plans to return with a mason to fix the steps themselves.