I’d thought the two most unhinged local politics stories as of late were the photos of an older resident using ginormous font to mean-text during a recent city council meeting, or literally anything the fireman’s wife is doing/has done, but no, it’s the Furnace Brook golf course poo bandit lawsuit.
Never let me be accused of harshing the vibe, but is this how rich people live? Because if I shit on the floor of an establishment twice for any reason and was subsequently never invited back, I wouldn’t dream of then suing them for $250k and blaming kidney disease. But if you’re on the deed, and a founding member, perhaps you might assume that there is some unlucky staff person whose job it is to clean up whatever personal biohazard you quietly leave, no matter how far outside a toilet it might be.
So now you’ve got the city solicitor saying that both sides are good people (which honestly given his track record is the quickest way for me to suspect that neither are), and he hopes they work it out, but the mayor and the commissioner of natural resources are quietly backing the clubhouse staff that are saying hell no, he did it on purpose!
Now, let me just say that I had a nonprofit job once where there was a poo bandit on staff. It had a chilling effect on the workplace. Nobody wanted to be in the office late, with its’ keycard entry, imagining the poo bandit might be lurking there too, about to smear feces on the restroom walls and then walk back out amongst us like everything was normal. So there was an HR meeting at the all-staff, where this poor human relations lady, almost shaking with indignation, said through gritted teeth, “if you know who this person is, tell us so we can help them. If YOU are the person doing this, let us know, so we can get you the help you need.” Both times she emphasized the word help, looking like she personally wanted to take a baseball bat to the guy, so unsurprisingly no one came forward and by the time my contract ended, they still hadn’t found the culprit.
Poo bandits can be hard to catch.
My ex also had one of these people at an equipment rentals lot he worked at. They called theirs the Unibomber. Unsure if it was a staff person, a repeat client, or one of the laborers from a local halfway house, they’d call it in over walkie talkie whenever another incident occurred, saying the unibomber has struck again.
All this to say that no matter how much this is being described as a two-incident number two situation, I would not be surprised if that’s merely all that’s been proven beyond a doubt, and the golf course has been dealing with mysteriously foul bathrooms long enough to be considering just paying the guy $250k to keep him and his recurring restroom carnage out.
Anyway, unfortunately this is not the only golf course owned by the city, full of rich members, that is on the taxpayer dole and having exponential excrement problems.
Quarry Hills, being the proud water-abaters and fancy-golfers that they are, had a community meeting a couple years back where they said we listened, and bragged about all the trail signs they’d installed. I’ve been meaning to hike that trail ever since, but putting it off, especially since it had been described to me as dogshit. But I was unprepared for just how literally dogshit it was.
A couple weeks ago a group of us attempted to walk it and I have a photo collage of the experience to share below. It almost didn’t happen because a crew painting the water tower nearby had set up a construction site directly over the trail, without a detour, blocking it off with caution tape. After we got them to let us through, there were some spots that hinted at the possibility of it being beautiful, if someone gave a damn, and others that could at least have served as semi-scenic cut-throughs behind apartment complexes. But I couldn’t get over the fact that after all their we heard you talk (acting like it was added generosity rather than that they weren’t maintaining their existing contractual obligation for trail upkeep), there were low tree branches overhanging the walking path at several points, and most of the plants lining the trails were invasive. Even some of the ones that look pretty, like oxeye daisies, shouldn’t be there, and native plants that should be, such as white vervain, goldenrod, and fleabane, were few and far between. The only thing we saw evidence of being recently cut back was ironically the one thing that should not have been touched. Giant Japanese knotweed had been weedwhacked down and left in place behind a residential area, contributing to the infestation, as each of those pieces can regrow a whole new monster plant.
Japanese knotweed looks a little bit like bamboo and is an ecological problem in this area. An awful weed with a huge underground runner system that evolved to survive lava flows in Japan, it threatens home foundations and natural areas and needs a once-a-year specialized herbicide application in the Fall, for three years in a row, to remediate it. To be fair, I would probably not be aware of just how terrible it is either except that this was the only way I got rid of it in my own backyard. But now I always hate seeing it, especially left unremediated or carelessly spread, knowing what damage it does.
But the highlight (lowlight?) of the whole hike was seeing that rather than giving a damn, they’d made an actual dam over a local waterway. The loss of and disrespect to wildlife is subtle, because it’s hard to see what should be there, but isn’t. However, right over this earth dam is a pump that redirects the headwaters of a brook, now empty and unavailable for wildlife. The water goes into an old granite quarry that is then used as a makeshift reservoir for watering the golf course. Then, next to that, adjacent to some recently spray-painted gas line medallions (ostensibly because they’ve been getting more DEP visits as of late) stood the most overfilled bin of dogshit I’ve ever seen in my life. Parceled out into individual little poo-collection bags, the trash barrel was piled high with them, to the point of cracking and spilling, and had a bunch more poop bags just thrown vaguely in its’ general vicinity. This is directly across the street, although hidden from view, of the fancy clubhouse where you can see patrons dining on the veranda.
I wondered how long and how many dogs it would take to collect that much crap, and if any of the people stealing water from the birds and salamanders, or checking the gas lines ever go over there thinking you know, I could empty this thing?
But I guess not. It is clearly too yucky of a job, too heavy of a trash can for one person to carry, and so nobody wants to handle it. So clearly they simply have not, for months, perhaps a year. Maybe longer.
There were numerous other dog poo bags abandoned along the trail as well, including by one of the fancy signs, another on top of a nearby fire hydrant, and many more trampled underfoot by unlucky fellow hikers.
I asked Tom Palmer, our tour guide and fellow advocate, for more information on these paths and on the dam that became the demise of Cunningham Brook. He sent me the following email and map:
“Hi Heather
that would be the headwaters of Cunningham Brook
attached 1986 USGS map with lot overlay shows its former course in blue starting at the old landfill in white
during the project the former maple swamp in the bend of Ricciuti Drive became known as Wetland G and was slammed with runoff from the imported dirt, replacing the trees with phragmites
it still collects water but now that water flows to the standpipe we saw and gets pumped somewhere, probably to Lyons Quarry across the street
making Cunningham Brook about 1000 ft shorter
years ago I talked to an old-timer who remembered catching a trout in Cunningham Brook
here’s some photos from 20 yrs ago when they were building the neighboring apts
I think about how we have elders like Tom, serving as a cultural repository, a placeholder of sorts in the history of this area, and all my poop jokes suddenly feel a bit immature and silly, as flat as those small bags in the middle of the trail.
I want to see him get back and be able to hike across the golf course’s Blue Hills connecting trails he was once promised, in his lifetime. I want to see his tireless environmental work respected and given its’ due. I want us to know - like he does - what we are really missing, and what we are really looking at, when we visit a place like this.
I hear that Quarry Hills has hired a high-powered lobbyist instead, someone to try and get their corrupt home rule petition, one of the more controversial things the former city council passed in their regrettable recent rubber-stamping era, moved along at the state level. I’ve personally testified at the statehouse against this, and I hope us ordinary people can hold it off, because there is genuinely no reason for this golf course to get a lease re-written and claimed as a 50 year extension of their 30 year current lease, while the taxpayers get less than cents on the dollar of what the space is worth.
But in addition to that, we are looking at a private industry that has siphoned off natural areas that could look beautiful, much like the Blue Hills around it.
I do have to wonder at this point whether creating a literally shitty environment is some sort of a thug flex for the rich golfer set, a way to quietly humiliate those of us who don’t make a high six figures and hold membership in their exclusive club. Or maybe they just do not give a damn about what we have to deal with when they crap all over us?
I ask Tom a few follow up questions that he unfortunately can’t answer, including whether the golf course got a permit for the dam, or if anybody ever gave them permission to divert and use all that creek water for the golf course.
He did point out to me that there was no formal written plan to dry up the brook; most dams have a spillway, while this one does not; and there are certainly other, better, ways to handle flood control for the surrounding neighborhoods.
But I am left with the realization that just like one unchecked poo bandit can ruin a whole establishment for the rest of us, one greedy golf course owner and management team can ruin a whole ecosystem.
In the battle for best (or worst?) maintained golf course in Quincy, Dogshit Quarry has quietly kept some caca premises while neglecting their community promises and much of any sense of environmental ethics. And Furnace Brook is in the news for deciding to run a well-connected perpetrator (poo-petrator?) out. So it appears that at least one of these places is attempting to clean up something, whether our city Solicitor supports the effort or not.
I have tried to walk that "trail" as well! It is so sad!