Today is Friday the thirteenth, and there were thunderstorms roaming around all day, so I didn't get out until four. Meanwhile, I went through five bags of office paper from my office, setting most of it aside for recycling. Man, I put a LOT of work into preparing for all those classes! Some of it I'd forgotten about, like the grammar quiz for my seventh graders at Frankfort Middle School, which must have been around Halloween, because all the sentences had to do with vampires, ghosts, bats, wolfman, etc. And questions about the movie Moby Dick, the version starring Patrick Stewart, that I showed my 11th graders at Keyser High School. I loved that movie. And all the vocabulary and quotes and discussion points about The Red Badge of Courage and Things Fall Apart... It was hard to throw it all away. (In fact, I saved some. ;) )
So I ended up with five cloth bags, each half full, of office paper for recycling. On my way to the recycling center, I decided to pick up some trash along Mosser Road on the hill near 219. There wasn't a whole lot there, for a change, but I did get a plastic grocery bag full of trash between the bottom and top of the hill. But then I thought to look at the bottom of the hill below the guard rail, and OMG---another motherlode of trash, and it's all so close to the lake!!! It was horrible! And of course it's been collecting there for years, way down in a grassy wasteland, out of sight from the road. Walking down the hill in the grass, I could HEAR plastic bottles crunching under my weight, out of sight beneath the matted grass. I filled four more bags full, but I'm going to have to go back another day.
We should all be ashamed. This area I'm talking about has a little stream down to the lake and is a prime duck nesting habitat, right next to a quiet part of the lake, with bushes and privacy, although it's in sight of Funland. Perhaps the most insidious trash was pieces of broken styrofoam coolers, little chunks of them here and there in the grass. They come apart into tinier bits, little orbs of styrofoam about the size of a capital "O" on this page. I'm sure such bits look like food to some birds and animals, and they float forever...
I'm definitely going back there soon with bigger trash bags. I wonder how many tributaries into the lake are like this one?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
In the sixteenth mile between my house and Mountaindale general store each spring I remove about 2 kitchen trash bags of recyclables and one or two large trashbags of trash. There are at least 20 plastic bottles used as spitoons with lids on, thrown out the window of a vehicle into the woods by the road as it turns into the subdivision where no doubt the driver lives. This year I threw these into the street and haven't been back to pick them up. DISGUSTING PIG PEOPLE!
ReplyDeleteIwww! That's really gross! Walter says he's picked those up on our road too. So far, I haven't encountered tobacco spit, knock on wood. Sour milk has been the grossest thing so far.
ReplyDelete