By Khalida Sarwari
When 4-year-old Village preschooler Juliette Guyman and her little brother, Cole, saw graffiti on the wall along the train tracks behind their house, their first reaction was, “Monster!” But within a few hours the monsters and everything else scrawled on the wall were erased.
A week after helping to clean up the graffiti, Cole still remembers seeing a guy with his tongue sticking out and “trying to eat a fly.” Cole’s mother, Lisa Guyman, is probably glad that’s all her 2-year-old remembers, rather than another drawing of a more lewd nature or of a gun as part of the same mural on the wall.
It was Guyman, co-founder of food startup DrinkDrop along with husband Jeff, who had the idea to remove the graffiti after she and her kids encountered it on a routine walk along the tracks on a late January afternoon. The family had set out to look for wildflowers, but Guyman wasn’t surprised to find graffiti instead.
For Guyman, who has lived in the area for seven years, it wasn’t the first time she’d noticed graffiti on that wall. But what inspired her to do something about it was a man she’d regularly see biking along the tracks, which run along Highway 85, with a paint can hanging from his handlebars.
So she and the kids turned around and went back home to grab cans of paint, rollers and brushes from the garage. In less than two hours, the three of them had painted a shade of light brown over the drawings, removing any sign of graffiti.
Painting over the graffiti was a no-brainer, said Guyman. Not only did they not have anything better to do that day, but it was an opportunity to let the kids paint, an activity that they enjoy and can understand far better than the implications of graffiti or vandalism.
“They love to paint,” Guyman said. “They paint at school, so it’s something to do together. I probably wouldn’t [have been] able to do it alone.”
Guyman said she also tried to explain the concept of graffiti to the kids and what they were doing. Although they’re too young to grasp just why graffiti is wrong, they are more attuned to it now than most children. Guyman said they’ve pointed it out to her at the Westgate Shopping Center on some occasions.
As for herself, Guyman contends that while she can appreciate the talent of the artists behind most works of graffiti, she wishes that it could be channeled in a more positive way. She said she and her neighbors believe it’s a growing problem in Saratoga, but not one that necessarily requires the attention of law enforcement because, she said, “the police have other things to do.” She doesn’t mind taking taking the problem in her own hands, and hopes that her neighbors and fellow residents can be encouraged to do the same.
“It’s not our property, but I kind of feel like it’s part of our house–because it’s right behind our house–so we feel some responsibility to take care of it,” Guyman said.
