'Pulling weeds at River City High School':
a 'My Back Pages' column
Copyright News-Ledger, July 4, 2007
By Daryl Fisher
Features Editor
For many years now, I have been going on long walks in the West Sacramento neighborhood I have called home for almost three decades. I usually try to get my walk over early in the morning before I have to go to work, but on days when I just can’t seem to force myself out of my warm bed, I try to take an evening stroll after dinner, when the heat of the day has finally begun to fade away. Lately, the mornings have been nice and cool and the evenings have been blessed with a wonderful sea breeze, so going for a leisurely walk in either the morning or the evening has been a joy -- with one big exception -- which brings me to my little story.
I live only a couple of blocks away from River City High School and sometimes, rather than wander aimlessly from street to street on my walks, I just go on over to the high school and quick-step it around the track for an hour or so. Not only does it bring back fond memories of the long ago days when I was a member of the James Marshall High School track team, but it also allows me to calculate exactly how far I have walked. Two or three miles is usually plenty for me, but unfortunately, that is also plenty of time to see in great detail the lack of attention our school district pays to River City High School’s athletic fields.
I won’t even go into all the gopher holes waiting for a River City High School student or athlete to step in and break an ankle, or all the basketball hoops without decent nets, or the decrepit football bleachers that desperately need to be replaced (or at least painted). Instead, I will simply talk about weeds.
The 'shrubbery' along one of River City High School's ballfields
I have always hated weeds! They pop up where they don’t belong, they stay around for as long as no one cares, and they come in all different kinds of hideous shapes, sizes, and smells. And everywhere one looks on or near River City High School’s athletic fields, there are weeds. They are at the entrance to the football field where you get your ticket for a game; they engulf the girl’s varsity softball dugouts; they stand like ugly sentries around the school bus parking lot and the Maintenance, Operations and Transportation (MOT) back portables; they are all along the wire fences which separate the grandstands from the football field; and they are even in and under the stands themselves. But worst of all is the outfield fence on the varsity baseball diamond. It has huge weeds growing up on both sides of it, some high enough that they will soon be blocking out the business banners of some of the local sponsors who support River City’s baseball Raiders. And while most baseball fields have a well-manicured dirt warning track so racing outfielders chasing down fly balls won’t go crashing into walls, River City has nothing but a warning track full of thick weeds.
Anyway, as I was observing all of the above the other evening while I was strolling around the high school track and grounds, a name suddenly popped into my head -- Leonard Triboli. Now for those of you who don’t know Leonard, he is an energetic, longtime West Sacramento resident who hates litter in much the same way I hate weeds -- only he does something about it. For years now, he has been spending a few hours, two or three times a week, picking up trash and other debris he finds by the Westacre Road underpass. He looks upon his efforts as simply doing his small part to take better care of the earth we all inhabit, and his local beautification work has been acknowledged by the City of West Sacramento and mentioned before in this newspaper.
So, using Leonard as my guiding light, I hurried home, got out my weeding gloves, shoved them in my back pocket, and back to the high school I went. And a couple of hours later, I had actually made a small dent in getting rid of some of the ugliest, nastiest weeds River City has to offer.
And we’re not talking your normal little garden weeds here! The weeds I was trying to pull out by the roots had obviously been there for months -- maybe years -- and some of them were tall enough to look me in the eye. Many of them had made their home in concrete cracks and looked like they would need a jackhammer to dislodge. Others had spread out so far on the ground that they appeared to be mutated species I had never encountered before. And one of the taller weeds I attacked near the front entrance of the football field was so big and hardy it even seemed to make wounded animal noises when I began yanking on it.
You know, back when I was on the school board, I learned that the Washington Unified School District has a huge maintenance budget, with hundreds of employees who have been hired to keep the district up and running and looking like a place where kids might actually want to be during the school year. And it also seems like a month hardly passes nowadays without the district hiring a new administrator of one kind or another, most of whom
are incredibly well-paid, and you would think that one of them would have the energy to pick up a phone, call someone over in the maintenance department, and simply say, “Hey, why in the hell are the River City High School athletic fields covered in weeds?”
Who knows, maybe even one of the school board members knows how to make that kind of phone call? I mean, with yet another school bond measure coming before local voters soon, you would think that the school district and its trustees would be interested in convincing taxpayers that they are actually capable of taking care of the facilities they already have, not to mention the new ones they want us to build for them.
Anyway, I don’t think I will hold my breath waiting for such a phone call to be made, so in the days to come, I plan on doing some more weeding over at River City. But unlike Leonard, who wants no attention drawn to his West Sacramento beautification efforts, I’m hoping that maybe my pulling of weeds at the high school will lead to one of those nice little plaques that the school district hands out from time to time. Or better yet, one of those fancy City of West Sacramento proclamations that Mayor Cabaldon signs with his very own hand. At the very least, I think I will find out what the new minimum wage is, keep track of my hours, and see if somewhere down the line I can get the school district to cut me a check.