I’d like to take you back in time to 1997…I was eight years old living in Chelsea with my parents and siblings. My parents got involved in this community effort called TimberTown, where they helped build an amazing wooden playground about a mile from our house. The preparation took months but the structure was built during a week-long community build (just like the Kaboom Playground in Parks and Rec!). My siblings and I went to TimberTown Camp at our elementary school during the build, where we soaped up screws and made a paper chain for the ribbon cutting. Once the park was open, we played there frequently.
Flash forward to 2006, when Lucas and I were in high school. Our first unofficial date was actually at TimberTown, where we went to hang out with our friends Amanda and Sean. Sounds innocent enough except it was after dark (the park closed at dusk) and my parents did not know Amanda and I were there with boys. I got in big trouble once they found out and I was grounded for a week. Tough start to our relationship. A few days later, I was still grounded, but Lucas didn’t know that, and he called to officially ask me out on a date. I had to ask my parents permission to break my grounding to go out with this sweet guy. They allowed it and we went on our awkward way to see Snakes on a Plane, a thrilling blockbuster but terrible first date movie.
A few months later, Lucas and I had a “run in” with the law at TimberTown. We were again hanging out there after dark, this time in the Kizer family minivan. While there, a local police officer (who graduated from high school with my brother), tapped on our steamed-up windows. We were terrified. He ran our IDs and then told us to go home. Emily and Lucas, the making-out trespassers!
Long story long, TimberTown has been an important part of my life for many years, which brings us back to the present. For the past year, my dad has chaired Chelsea’s effort to freshen up this aging playground. Through the committee’s tremendous efforts and the generosity of the community, enough money was raised for a total revitalization of the park. The rebuild week was set for early August. It was to a Hardcastle/Kizer family affair too as Uncle Rob, Mike and Susan were recruited by my dad for some of the skilled woodwork and my siblings all volunteered to work too. Lucas and I knew we couldn’t miss it.
We headed downstate on Tuesday, August 6, the first official day of the project. We had a great drive back. The volunteers at TimberTown had a very wet first day, it poured nearly the entire day. My mom and dad got soaked with the other volunteers but spirits were high when we all arrived back at the house that night.
The next morning, Wednesday, August 7, we got up early and headed to the worksite, tools in hand. I had signed us up for a 8 a.m. – noon shift. We arrived and my dad, with a grin on his face, pulled us aside and took us over to the assembly station. We were assigned the Orb Rocker, the world’s most robust teeter totter. A note about the playground design: while it is called TimberTown and most of the main structure is wood, new and more accessible elements were being added. These elements were mostly metal and were shipped, IKEA style, partly assembled with limited instructions and most of their parts. It was our job to decipher the instructions, find all the parts and put together these elements. And we needed to do it quickly, since these elements needed to be concreted in place and the concrete truck was coming the next morning. My dad had a grin on his face because he knew that we, (mostly Lucas), were the perfect people for this Orb Rocker. And the battle began! We happily spent the rest of the day working on our project. Lucas made a few runs to his dad’s workshop for specific tools and by the late afternoon, the Orb Rocker was assembled.
As Lucas finished up a few things on the rocker, I started helping place some of the other assembled items within the park. By the time I reconnected with Lucas, he had been assigned a new project – build the concrete forms needed to secure the Orb Rocker in place. And so began, project #2. We have done a lot of projects, including some limited concrete work, but we had never done something like this and the field directions were a little slim. Lucas was an absolute champ and by 8 p.m., had constructed a great form. Twelve hours into our four-hour morning shift, Day 2 of the build was officially in the books.
Day 3 was another beautiful day and a perfect day for the concrete truck! All around us, the new park elements were really coming together. It was amazing to see so many people working towards one goal. We fine-tuned the concrete form a bit more before the truck arrived. Using wheelbarrows and shovels, concrete was poured into most of the playground elements including our Orb Rocker. Once the concrete was done, it was just a waiting game for it to cure. We used this as an excuse to leave early that day. We cleaned ourselves up, visited with Lucas’ grandparents and Aunt Missy and then went sailing with Bill and Brandie in Lake Erie.
Friday morning was another beautiful day and we headed back to the worksite for the 8 a.m. shift. I worked with Katie and Steve, my sister and brother-in-law, to secure wooden platforms in the kid’s area, while Lucas was assigned the finicky merry-go-round. This thing was a pain in the butt to calibrate, there were very tight tolerances to make it spin correctly. Again, Lucas was the perfect person for the job. By late morning, the higher-ups deemed the concrete cured on our Orb Rocker, so Lucas went back to the final assembly of our 600-lbs structure. After it was all in place, he switched right back to the merry-go-round. Lucas worked all afternoon on getting it right, while I bailed after lunch (I promise I had a good reason).
The good reason: Earlier in the summer, Michael, my 12-year-old nephew, asked me if I would play golf with him when I was home next…how could I say “no” to that offer!? Michael and I made a whole afternoon of it, we played golf, went out to dinner and even got ice cream. We had a blast, it was a fun throwback to when he and I played golf together ahead of his seventh birthday.
Our last day on the site was Saturday, August 10. Again, we were assigned a tricky project – the custom snake balance beam. By this time in the week, the professional build team had sized Lucas up and fallen for his engineering skills. They saved this snake project for him. Our assignment was to finish the snake design that someone else had started the day before. We then had to fill in the body of the snake in order to place deck boards on top. Our final task was to inlay spots for the snake’s back. We worked all day on this snake, making sure it was strong enough for lots of small children to jump on it and that it matched the designer’s drawing. After lunch, we got some reinforcements in the form of Bill, one of the senior builders on the project. The three of us got the snake decked by the dinner break but Lucas and I had to leave before the inlay process. Bill did an amazing job getting the snake across the finish line that evening.
Our week at TimberTown had come to an end, it was time to get back to Mackinac Island. The week went by so quickly and we had a blast. The official build week wrapped up the next day, it was a massive community effort to get everything done. While we were getting settled back into island life, they held a soft opening of the park for volunteers and their families. My nieces and nephews absolutely loved it! The park opened to the public a week later, once the special poured walkway surfaces had time to cure. I can’t wait to go check it out when we are back in October.
It was really special to be a part of such a wonderful community project. We ran into so many friends, their parents, former teachers and others who were all volunteering their time. I’m so proud of my parents, especially my dad, for organizing such a massive effort. Chelsea was a very special place to grow up and it remains a wonderful place, now with a killer new TimberTown.
If you want to read more about the TimberTown Reimagined Project, check out these articles in our local paper.
