Blog / 2024 / Tiny Victory

They did it! The D&R Canal State Park finally took an interest in the Alexauken Creek Spillway Bridge and cleaned off the wood, removing both my glued-on rainbows and all the Trumpy carvings and scrawlings that they’d allowed to accumulate on the bridge over the last year.

I’ve been hoping for this moment for months, and I’ve been actively working towards it since the end of 2023, when I started my campaign of bandaids and asking community members to report the ongoing vandalism to the park. I’m a little sad to see the rainbows go because I thought they were pretty, but I’m happy that my walks won’t be interrupted by MAGAmania anymore.

In the last couple of weeks, the Trumpy graffiti had died down, likely due to the media attention I’d called to the bridge. (Unlike me, the knife-wielding alt-righter who kept defacing the bridge was ashamed of what they were doing.)

That said, as you can see from this photo, there was one bit of post-rainbow hatefulness.

But there was also this note of gratitude that balanced out the odiousness. I am now and forever a rainbow person!

And, as of today, everything has been removed. From what I can tell, the maintenance crew chewed up the bridge here and there with heavy machinery before realizing that wheatpaste can be cleaned off with water and a more careful approach. Still, they got the job done.

Or maybe I should say that they mostly did. They apparently gave up before completely removing this particularly deep carving. There’s basically no trace of any of the other engraved vandalism, but a shadow of this carving remains, and that definitely annoys me.

All-in-all though, I am relieved. I much prefer the bridge this way, and I’ll do everything I can to be sure that the park maintains it properly.

Speaking of, if you’d like to thank Park Superintendent Lauren Rojewski for seeing to it that the bridge was cleaned up, her contact info is here. Hopefully the gratitude will inspire her to keep on top of things at the Alexauken Creek Spillway Bridge.

In the meantime, I’ve pivoted and turned my big wheatpaste bandaids and rainbows into smaller stickers.

The abandoned train car near my town is a regular target for MAGAmania and it’s just as regularly painted over by graffiti writers who don’t worship Trump, but today I did my piece to heal the hate.

Rainbow bandaids like this one are March’s sticker club mailing! If you want one, sign up for my monthly sticker club via Patreon by the end of February. It’s all explained here.

Join via Patreon!

Or buy a version of it from my print-on-demand shop. The design is available on t-shirts and other fun items as well as on stickers.