honoring the waters of NYC
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Map
Story & Experience
On June 16, 2024, seven of us from Woodstock, New York and the surrounding area, spent the afternoon hiking to the Yale Quarry, a large quarry that supplied much of the stone as well as the concrete used to build the Ashokan Reservoir in the early 1900’s. There are the remains an ancient railroad track still there into which cars workers loaded the stone to get it to the still-empty reservoir. Our hike was somewhat arduous on a hot June day. We walked up to the top of the quarry and then down to the bottom where we looked up at it. There was a small swampy pond at the bottom of the quarry. We spent some time in silence there, and then made our RadJoy bird.
We talked about what we felt in that space. Mostly we felt a degree of peace, since the activity there had ended more than a hundred years ago. We did feel compassion for the workers who toiled there, though, imagining how very difficult that must have been. We saw our Global Earth Exchange as a simple act of restoration and healing for those workers and gratitude for the gifts nature gave for our human benefit.
This was our tenth consecutive Global Earth Exchange as a group.
On June 16, 2024, seven of us from Woodstock, New York and the surrounding area, spent the afternoon hiking to the Yale Quarry, a large quarry that supplied much of the stone as well as the concrete used to build the Ashokan Reservoir in the early 1900’s. There are the remains an ancient railroad track still there into which cars workers loaded the stone to get it to the still-empty reservoir. Our hike was somewhat arduous on a hot June day. We walked up to the top of the quarry and then down to the bottom where we looked up at it. There was a small swampy pond at the bottom of the quarry. We spent some time in silence there, and then made our RadJoy bird.
We talked about what we felt in that space. Mostly we felt a degree of peace, since the activity there had ended more than a hundred years ago. We did feel compassion for the workers who toiled there, though, imagining how very difficult that must have been. We saw our Global Earth Exchange as a simple act of restoration and healing for those workers and gratitude for the gifts nature gave for our human benefit.
This was our tenth consecutive Global Earth Exchange as a group.
Why this Place?
Yale Quarry, Ashokan Reservoir, NYS
It was a large quarry that contributed massively to the building of the first reservoir in the Catskillls to send water to New York City
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