Monday, August 13, 2007
Weary bikers, heat- slowed walkers, and anyone just looking for a shady spot to sit out the dog days should head west along the bike path and take a seat on a new earthen bench that is as beautiful as it is comfortable.
Sitting proud under signs that invite passersby to “have a seat” in four languages, the bench, tucked back off the bike path on the back side of 8 High Street, is the inspiration of artisan April Weeks, but a labor of love for some 20 people who helped build it.
There had been a homemade birch bench at the site for the past few years (along with a public phone, bicycle pump, and a lending library), but the years (and the rain) had taken its toll, and the bench was rotting, Weeks said.
The new bench, which was finished the first second of July, began to take form early in the summer, at the birthday party of Alex Jarrett, who lives at the house on High Street (he’s one of the founders of the Pedal People). Everyone at the party was charged with making cob, an ancient building material made of sand, clay, straw and water, to be layered on top of a concrete base to build the bench.
Weeks, a traveling cobber, has built cob houses in Virginia and out west for the past five years. “I just love playing in the mud,” she said. Although cob projects require a lot of labor, the materials are dirt cheap.
Once the cob was mixed (all of the ingredients are put into a tarp and people take turns jumping around, pushing, pulling, doing whatever it takes to mix it up), a group of friends laid it on the foundation (made of recycled sidewalk) a foot at a time.
While the shape of the foundation dictated the general shape of the bench, the final design evolved as different people took turns at working on it, Weeks said. And the bench building truly was a neighborhood endeavor. One neighbor came by with tiles to place in the bench, another came and helped dig the foundation, other passersby helped out with the plastering that covers the cob.
The whole project, which also includes a new shelter to keep bench sitters dry, took three months, Weeks said, and she estimates that more than 20 people worked on it.
