When we walk the looping streets of our neighborhood, up hills and down, I always think about the streets of my past, and imagine these California ways covered with ice and snow. How impossible the angles, how brutally slippery these would be if this area experienced real winter in a New Hampshire sense. The reaching oaks in their slow dance, the bamboos, the bougainvillea spilling in tumultuous magenta, and the violent green grass of California February assault us with contrast and beauty, while I still think of ice.
But of course there’s more than beauty. We always carry second or third use plastic bags with us, to pick up roadside trash. On a four-mile wander, sometimes we fill these bags, the same bags we bought our six heads of Romaine lettuce in. We lack the room to take all we find, so we often bury the kind of paper trash that we know will decay quickly in the duff and soil, using my husband’s walking cane as our tool.
We make up stories about some items. Why do we find entire packs of Marlboro Lights, with possibly only one or two cigarettes missing? Sometimes the boxes aren’t even opened. We have tended to find one of these packs about every ten days, not always on the same stretch of road. So was this person trying to quit? Do they know that eating a cigarette can kill a toddler or a dog? Or was it a driver checking the glove compartment, finding a stashed box of cigarettes and in a rage hurling it out the window so spouse or partner would not indulge? Then we stopped finding the packs for over a year. Three weeks ago we found two more– so whatever this story really is, it’s not over yet.
Who managed to produce empty bottles of Josefsbrau (Trader Joe’s) Heller Bock beer along a quarter mile stretch of road, consistently? Every day or two we’d pick up between three and six empties in this stretch, tossed onto the steep banks of ice plant and hedge. At 7% alcohol, a high impact beer, pardon the pun. Sometimes the numbers soared. Sometimes, declined to a mere one or two, but overall, I cannot easily assess how many recycling bins we filled with just this brand of bottle. I wish I had kept track because this went on for about four or five years. Did whoever tossed these out save up the day’s empties to leave on this particular stretch? But who threw them? The driver would scarcely have had time and attention to drive and throw. And we believe from the trajectories and plant bruising that the bottles were flung from a car driving up hill on the right side of this section. We also were struck by the sheer quantity. Was someone trying to disguise their intake from family? Or parents? And how many people were involved in this drinking? Then overnight, it stopped. No more bottles. I’m sure you can come up with any number of possible histories too, to explain this pattern.
But, as I swoop down on yet another collection of In-N-Out burger wrappings, or pick up a Blender’s cup with its straw and plastic top, I do wonder. I spy a squeezed-out packet of some bicycler’s energy gel, or one of the hundreds of doggie bags stuffed with some pet’s gastrointestinal production, and I think about us as a species and a community. What inspires a person with trash to imagine that if they toss it out of the car window or from their bike, it will go away? That packing up your dog’s poo in plastic and leaving it to slowly degrade and add more plastic fragments to the soil represents virtue? That any of these discards can really be left behind? When a driver doesn’t correct a child in their car from dropping a wad of gum, or a hand wipe out the window, do they believe that the great outdoors will purify it all? Is there a thrill to the breaking of the law, in this anonymous way? Yet what courage is there in anonymity?
What is broken here is courtesy, what’s flouted is common sense, what’s dimmed is the simple beauty of dirt and growing things.
But we, I confess, walking on the side of the road with our bags, find that picking up the rubbish adds to our entertainment. We can see a difference as we go and come, and that simple accomplishment informs our progress. We can grin over the stories we create to explain the stranger things, the little aluminum medal with etched birds, the string of green glass grape cluster lights in the original box destroyed by seasons of weather– that when we plugged in at home, still worked, and now graces our beverage table at all our outdoor events. The metal-work heron, four feet high that I hauled out of its partial burial in the mud under the roadside shrubbery. I walked it home under my arm. It stands near our back door now, and appears to be quite content.
Sometimes a stranger in a car or truck slows down and says thank you for our road cleaning, never imagining, I’m sure, how we laugh together and marvel at our common human foolishness all along our way.
robinwinter 