On Friday, Sept. 14, I picked up trash in a drainage ditch all afternoon and never felt better.

On that day, JSC’s SERVE Fri program was supposed to assist the Lamoille County Firewood Project, which provides fuel to low-income families that depend on wood stoves. The volunteers would gather the piles of wood left after the initial delivery and stack them into neat cords for people to take.

Last year, almost the entire stock of wood was stolen in the middle of the night, leaving some would-be recipients out in the cold and volunteer workers twiddling their thumbs. This year, there were no problems with theft.

That is because the Firewood Project had more help this year. In fact, there was nothing for SERVE Fri to do at all. According to JSC Graduate Assistant and SERVE member Tara Robinson, advertising was partially responsible for wider participation this year.

“The Firewood Project had a lot of good advertising this year, so there were over 100 volunteers on Sept. 11,”she said. Because Sept. 11 is now a national day of service in the United States, there was a huge wave of support that moved all the wood in one day. Even Governor Peter Shumlin was present.

Johnson State College’s volunteer workers normally have some cleanup to do, but now they had to perform a different service for the second year in a row.

This year, SERVE asked the Firewood Project’s program coordinator Dan Noyes about other volunteer opportunities, and was informed of the neglected culverts in Morrisville.

Soon enough, I was standing next to environmental scientist Jim Pease, a member of Vermont’s Ecosystem Restoration Program, discussing a drainage ditch.

It turns out a drainage ditch is more complicated than it looks. “The gravel at the bottom of this culvert is tailings from a steek plant,  given to us almost free, except for shipping,” said Pease.

The type of rock used for the gravel is somewhat porous, and absorbs phosphorous in the water.  Excess phosphorous in water can cause algae blooms and other ecosystem-wrecking disasters, so a simply designed filter is helpful.

Everything about the culverts in Morrisville are designed to filter water with no complex machinery. In particular, the vegetation planted there was carefully chosen for hardiness, ability to absorb toxins and aesthetic appeal, such as a dogwood tree that will grow quickly and provide root binding for the ground there.

But even this simple system could not survive by itself. The culverts experience entropy on all sides, as passers-by will occasionally leave a snack wrapper or polystyrene cup floating along, not giving it a second thought. The polystyrene is particularly horrible, according to Pease. “The worm containers [for fishing] fall apart, but they don’t decompose,” he said. “They turn into a pile of floating pellets that gets coated in algae and causes problems.”

The most significant damage came from nature itself, or at least the invasive kind of nature that can survive in the middle of a populated town. The carefully designed gardens very quickly fall prey to weeds whose seeds and pollen are carried by the wind. While these weeds can help filter the water, they also take away nutrients that the other plants need more.

It was up to my friends and me at SERVE Fri to pull those weeds. Besides Tara and me, there was volunteer regular Liz Spier, and fresh faces such as Trevor Mealy and Jennel Molleur.

Trevor found himself lucky enough to be using a weed whacker while the rest of us made do with spades, rakes, and what appeared to be a giant chisel. The weeds were varied and all very persistent, ranging from twisting, choking vines and dusty ragweed to wildflowers that, despite their beauty, did not belong there.

As we worked, a lady living in a nearby duplex watched. She was running a garage sale at the time and was pleased to see the patch of scrubby weeds next to her home come back to life. She told us she remembered when the culvert was clean, before weeds choked it.

Even though it wasn’t what we signed up for, this project was satisfying in its own way. The new volunteers said they will probably continue to work with SERVE, and I will too, starting with a Sept. 21 gleaning project for the Food Shelf.