It’s been nearly five years since I last wrote about picking up roadside trash along my woods, and I discovered last week, as I walked and stooped in the ditches — and muttered under my breath — that I am just as ticked off about it now as I was then. Call it an obsessive compulsive disorder if you like, but my wife and I are people who feel their property looks better when it doesn’t resemble a landfill.
So, bolstered by a blue sky and warming temperatures one day last week, I grabbed my two-wheeled handcart, tarp-strapped a garbage bag-lined metal trashcan to it, hung a 6-gallon bucket from the handle, grabbed my well-used “grabber” (euphemistically referred to by one advertiser as an “ergonomically-designed life tool”), pulled on a grubby outfit suitable for the task, and set out to do battle with that which had been blown, dropped, or tossed from passing cars, trucks and trailers over the past few wet and windy months.
With years of experience to guide me, I took advantage of low mid-afternoon traffic volume and a bright yellow hunting shirt to accomplish my deed. I only own about a third of a mile along the roadside, but, as is often the case, I grossly underestimated just how much trash I’d encounter.
I expected the hassles of briars and locust tree thorns, the irritation of disintegrating Styrofoam, the stares of gawking passers-by, and the grim reality of tobacco juice-filled spit bottles. I also knew that despite my best intentions, the wind and the capacity of my garbage bag would keep me from picking up everything I saw.
As in all the other years I have cleaned near my place — about 40 of them now — I found a shoe. Mind you, in all my experience at cleaning along roadsides, I have yet to find a pair of shoes; it is always one mate-less sole, and I have often wondered why someone driving by got so fed up with one of his or her shoes to toss it out a window, yet, for some reason decided to keep the other. The same goes for gloves; it’s a mystery akin to missing dryer socks.
More than anything else, I found single-use plastic. Be it water or soda bottles, beef jerky packaging, fast-food drink tops and straws, or flimsy shopping bags, I found things that seem to have no other purpose than to be used once, then thrown out; I found four tiny plastic whiskey bottles, too.
We are told that “microplastics,” bits of the stuff that are less than .20 of an inch, are everywhere now. They are found in table salt and deep in the oceans, in Arctic ice and in rural tap water, in the fish we eat, and in the soil in which we plant our flowers. Surely a Parke County woodland has its share too.
We are inundated with plastics, and I got first-hand evidence as to why, as I also discovered vape cartridges, meat wrappers and chewing gum packaging; I picked up smokeless tobacco “cans,” a shattered car fender, a shredded plastic tow rope, and a number of grocery store deli snack trays—useless once their cheese and salami and crackers were gone.
At least the cellophane wrappers I picked up are biodegradable, yet the filters from the cigarettes they secured, now fraying and blown in the wind like bleached sycamore seed pods, are made of cellulose acetate, which takes at least a decade to decompose.
Members of the Society of Trash Baggers are veterans of the refuse wars, and there’s very little they haven’t seen along the roads. Bagger Amy Butwin, who serves as Chairman of “Keep Terre Haute Beautiful,” says, “The problem has gotten worse, especially in the city boundary. It has always been bad in the country. … I think educating our young would help raise awareness, but I believe most adults know it’s wrong. Laziness is the main culprit, but it’s also the attitude of just not caring, or thinking, ‘someone else will clean it up.’”
Brent Youngblood, a Trash Bagger who lives in southern Vigo County, says, “In my area it’s a little better than a few years ago … the worst problem is drinking and driving. They (the litterers) don’t want to get caught with bottles and cans in their vehicles. We find the same alcohol containers in the same areas like clockwork. We need signage stating there is a $500 fine for littering, and cameras in use.”
Jennifer Mullen, another very active Bagger who thinks the national anti-littering campaigns of decades ago are needed again, adds, “We have a lot of convenience purchases, and with convenience comes a lot of plastic containers. I truly think throwing trash on the ground or out of a car window just becomes a thoughtless habit. … If you don’t pick up litter, you don’t even realize it’s there. Once you start picking it up, you notice it everywhere.”
I have tried to believe that the beer cans and paper face masks, the milk shake cups and the candy bar wrappers I have found along our roads — for years, Joanie and I have routinely policed a mile or two in each direction — were thrown there by strangers to our county.
I want to hope that the people I know or taught in school or see when I fill up at the gas station or post office aren’t really trashing their own back yards, or mine. The words of Karen Thomas Long, yet another Trash Bagger, say it all: “We need to educate young people about the problems littering causes, and to promote personal responsibility. … We only have one earth; we need to love where we live.”
As I slowly made my way home with my handcart of trash that day, by then occasionally stopping to pick up what had fallen out of my own over-stuffed containers, I saw one last reminder of a war that we can only fight, but probably never win. A plastic grocery store bag, caught on the branches of a fencerow hedge apple tree, was flapping in the stiff breeze. As an old fisherman’s patched sail was once described, the bag “…looked like a flag of permanent defeat.”
But I grabbed it nonetheless.