Northwood News ♦ June 2011

Capricious Weather Leads to Festival Cancellation But There’s Still Plenty of Fun to Be Had in the RCM

By Carole Barth

After much agonizing, and hours of obsessively checking weather maps and predictions, festival organizers made a decision Saturday evening [14 May] to cancel the Rachel Carson Meadow Festival planned for the next day.  This was a very difficult decision, given how much work, love, and coordination goes into this event.  As the rain bucketed down later that night, and water started roaring through Lockridge Creek, we felt we had done the right thing.  By making the decision Saturday night, we didn’t keep the musicians, singers, dancers, volunteers, exhibitors, and those leading workshops hanging in suspense until the last moment.

Of course, once we had given up any hope of better weather, the weather turned and Sunday was, in fact, a beautiful day.  A-a-rghhh!  This hit especially hard because we had no rain date to fall back on.  (It is quite a coup to get the Washington Revels to schedule a Festival Day in our community, given their tightly packed performance schedule.  Moreover, our special-use permit from the Parks Department is both date- and time-specific.)

Still, it’s important to remember why we created the festival in the first place.  The communities of Four Corners have been fighting for eight years to save this open space in North Four Corners Park which is slated to be bulldozed, leveled, and buried under 20 feet of fill dirt in order to build an adult soccer field and a 50-car parking lot at a cost of $5-6 million sometime around 2014.  The same CIP project would also remove the park’s existing youth soccer field.

We fight because the meadow serves as our “village green” where Four Corners residents walk dogs, chat, watch fireflies, sled, toss a frisbee, read, and enjoy a hundred other pursuits.  It’s a convenient spot for families, where kids can engage in unstructured outdoor play.  Next door to The Oaks independent living facility, it’s also convenient for seniors.  All of these uses, however, are effectively invisible to the Parks Department and ignored by park planners because they require no construction or permitting.

So we created the meadow festival to demonstrate what a valuable resource this is for the highly developed, densely populated, and diverse communities of down-county.  We have also named this plot of land “Rachel Carson Meadow” to honor the pioneering environmentalist who lived just across the Northwest Branch, and to celebrate her last book, The Sense of Wonder, about the importance of sharing nature with children.

But we also want to celebrate and demonstrate how we use and enjoy the meadow all year long.  To that end, we created a facebook page, www.facebook.com/pages/Friends-of-North-Four-Corners-Park.  On this page, you can watch the video of last year’s festival, post pictures, and tell us what you like to do in the meadow.  Whether it’s hunting Easter eggs in spring, watching fireflies in summer, collecting walnuts in fall, or sledding in winter, it’s important to show this is a well-used park, not vacant land awaiting development.

If you want to help the meadow with deeds as well as words, call Brian Morrissey or myself [contact details redacted] and we will be glad to show you the invasive plants you can help remove and the native plants we are fighting to save.  And speaking of deeds, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank everyone involved:  the Washington Revels, Jim Zepp, Brian Morrissey, Linda Perlman, Tony Tran, Catherine Zimmerman, Carrie Ganz, Reuven Walder, Fiona Morrissey, M.J. Gallagher, Sarah Stecher, Aleks Beltran, Jacquie Bokow, Tiffany Wright, and everyone who helped prepare for the festival and/or who volunteered to be part of it.   ■