Greenbelt a cool place to pitch in

A forest is a handy refuge on a hot day.

I'd forgotten that until I visited one last Thursday when Seattle hit 95 degrees, setting a heat record for the date.

I was thinking about the approaching record when I saw an invitation for volunteers to help with restoration work on the West Duwamish Greenbelt, a 182-acre ribbon of public forest in West Seattle. Those poor people, I thought, laboring outside on a scorching day while other folks are lazing on a beach or staying inside.

Wrong.

I walked up the trail and saw Arthur Larson wrestling with blackberries. I asked about the heat.

"What we're doing is trying to stay in the shade. That's the good thing about being in a forest," he said with a big smile. Yep, it was all shade under the trees and deliciously cool.

The Northwest is known for its forests, but sometimes in the city, I think, we take trees for granted, even forget that forests aren't only out in the wilderness. They still exist around built-up Puget Sound, and they still matter.

Larson was part of a work party organized by the Nature Consortium, a local group dedicated to "connecting people, arts and nature," which includes leading several groups of volunteers each week to clear invasive species from the greenbelt.

He worked as a carpenter for 30 years and said he found the Nature Consortium's restoration project when he was looking for volunteer opportunities after he retired.

Since October, Larson has been helping a couple of days a week, because "I live in the neighborhood and I like to improve our green spaces for everyone to use." And, he said, because it's satisfying work, good exercise and he gets to meet new people.

Thursday he was pulling out Scotch broom, ivy and blackberries, plants that make life difficult for trees. It's labor intensive, but it's better to have humans clear out the plants than to use pesticides, he said.

I asked how he was going to deal with the heat once he left the forest and got home.

"I shouldn't admit this, but I have air conditioning," he said. "It comes in handy about three times a year."

When I stopped by, the temperature was in the 80s. There was a little grousing about mosquitoes and blackberry thorns, but not about the day's heat.

Pere-Lluis Huguet Cabot was glad the temperature was going up. He's visiting from Barcelona, and as the temperature rose, he said, Seattle began to feel like home.

He's staying with a host family here and working on his English before going back to start his final year of high school. His host suggested volunteering as an activity for him and for her nephew.

"You can visit the Space Needle, but that is tourist stuff," he said.

Noah Silber, 13, was working alongside his new friend. He lives in Sacramento but is visiting his aunt this summer. "This is cool for me," he said. "I hear all the neighbors and everybody whining about the heat, but I like the heat." Thursday was their second volunteer day. "We came Tuesday morning, and it was a lot of fun, and it was nice to see all the work we'd done."

On a different section of trail, a group of high-school students was trying to get the hang of the work. Tizita Assefa, a program coordinator for The Service Board, said the students are earning community-service credits. A big part of Seattle-based TSB's mission is to get teens involved in public service.

Trees are aesthetically pleasing, but they are also important actors in the region's environment, cleaning the air, limiting water runoff and even keeping us cool.

The other program coordinator working with the kids, Mike Hodapp, said it's important to get city kids into the forest. "A lot of youth from here don't know this space exists." Now some do.

One of the students, Tammy Lui, who'll be a senior at Franklin in the fall, told me, "I think a day at the beach with family is nice, but building a better community with other people, I think that's really great, too."

I just felt a refreshing breeze.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.