What's Left Behind

As I've been digging up old dump sites lately, I start to reflect on the items I use on a regular basis that will survive me.  Someday, like Hamlet examining a skull, someone will find pieces of this pot or these dishes or this car, and they will try to reconstruct what my life was like.  It's impossible to do, of course, which is why I don't like reading fictional accounts set in prehistoric times.  What gall!

BUT----I do love having that close contact with people's lives, handling what they've left behind.  Before I was horrified by old dump sites, found everywhere near old house sites, in nearby ravines.  I felt it was such a travesty!  And while I still do, I also, now, see them as an opportunity to explore the past.  Some things "sink," get covered up by inches of decaying leaves and roots and plants.  There they become part of the new lives of bugs and roots and mosses and molds.  Sometimes I'm reluctant to disrupt these new adaptations; I've found roots going in one end of a broken bottle and out the other, and I've found entire ant colonies living in old bottles.  I've found bottles that look like little terrariums, full of diverse plantlife.  But I do disrupt them.  I feel I'm healing the earth by removing broken glass and rusty metal debris, like splinters under the skin.

And sometimes things get uplifted to the surface, probably by frost heaves.  The other day I was walking in the woods and saw the side of a flask-shaped brown bottle.  I nudged it with my toe, and it came out whole, a beautiful antique medicine bottle, embossed with words.  I looked it up on the internet, and it's worth about $47.  It was made in the late 1800s by a doctor in Cincinnati for diseases of the lungs.  I started probing with a trowel in that area, and found several buckets of broken glass and rusty metal.  The latter included lots of big nails, some of them square; pieces of chain; and a broken spatula.  One bottle piece was a beer bottle embossed by the Cumberland Brewing Company, which was in business from the late 1800s until the early 1950s.

Here's a picture of the Youghiogheny River, which was up and muddy, near whose banks I found an old dump site:

And here's what I found:  the tip of the iceberg:

It was in what looked like an old mill race, parallel to the river.  Lots of crockery, glass, and a few metal pots.

This summer my husband and two friends paddled down a most pristine part of the upper Blackwater River in Canaan Valley, WV.  The river is narrow and meanders in a round-about way through a bushy nature preserve.  They did sixteen miles that day.

And THIS was the ONLY piece of trash they found on the entire trip:

They had great debates about what it was, and finally decided it was a golf ball!!!  Another example of how wildlife tries to eat and can be harmed by trash.  Imagine how like an egg this must have looked!





Picking Up Trash

An unlikely topic for a blog, you say? Well, think again. Like John Brown's prophetic oath, I am devoting the rest of my life to picking up trash. Litter. You know, the junk on the sides of the roads and rivers.

I love walking along country roads and along rivers, and I do it a lot anyways, so why not bring a bag along and pick up ignorant people's trash while I walk? It's such a simple concept, I don't know why everyone isn't doing it!

So why am I picking up trash?

*****For the animals, so they don't eat it or get caught in it. Those cigarette butts look like mighty tasty, fat grubs.

*****For the exercise and vitamin D. It really is exercise! Why walk and pump and stretch in one place inside a smelly gym, when you could be out in the beautiful day, wandering around like John Muir, and helping mother earth at the same time?

*****So it doesn't get washed into streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean, where the sunlight breaks down the plastic into bits that float below the surface, looking for all the world like tasty, nutritious krill, fish, plankton, etc., that MORE animals eat and feed to their young, who all starve to death, their stomachs full of Bic lighters and McDonald's straws.

*****Because I have trouble sleeping. I need a lot of exercise in order to even have a chance of sleeping, and I need to feel I'm doing something to help repair the poor abused earth in order to not lie there worrying about it and feel like I'm part of the problem all night.

*****To set a good example. People will see what I'm doing, and they'll hit themselves in the foreheads and say, "Why didn't I think of that?" And before you know it, there will be all sorts of people getting off their lazy butts, bending over and over and over, picking up trash. And they'll smile at the sun and the wind and each other, and say, "Hi!"

*****To recycle. A lot of the trash you see along the roads is recylable, which makes the people who threw it out of their car windows doubly damned. I'll have to update Dante's Inferno to add another layer to Hell for these folks. "Litterbug" is too touchy-feely a word.

OK, so I've just quit teaching after fifteen years of it. That was enough. I've paid my dues. Now I want to seriously walk all over my county picking up trash. I got my grades in on Sunday.

Yesterday, Monday, I went to Lowe's and bought three big trash bins with lids. (This was after much measuring of my trunk and potential bins.) Two fit in the trunk of my Toyota Echo (42 mpg!), and one sits on the back seat with a seat belt around it. One is for plastic, one for glass and aluminum, and one for trash. I also bought gloves coated with rubber. I put a small bucket on the floor of the back seat to hold my gloves and some plastic grocery bags (light weight and have handles) and some clippers for briars, in case I need them. Armed with old jeans, hiking boots, a cap with a bill, and sun glasses, I started out.

I started at the bottom of my hill, which is near a grocery store. All kinds of trash there. I picked up mainly TRASH trash, and relatively few recyclables: plastic bags, plastic straws, cardboard and styrofoam cups and lids, newspaper inserts, real estate signs, bottles, cans, about a hundred Christmas present tags (?), about a million cigarette butts, etc. At first I wasn't going to pick up the cigarette butts, but then there were so MANY of them, and I thought about how they might look like food to a bird or small mammal. So I'm glad I got them.

A man in a pickup pulling a trailer stopped and yelled out the window to thank me. I yelled back, "You're welcome." He seemed to think it all came from the grocery store, but I informed him that it's everywhere, which it is. I've been looking.

I worked up a sweat out in the sun, and although it's good exercise, like any exercise, it might be best to do it during non-peak sun hours. I'd use two bags, one for trash and one for recyclables. When one was full, I'd go back to the car and sort them into their bins. It was kind of hard to avoid getting the handles of the car dirty, even with the gloves, which are kind of a pain to keep taking off and putting on. But they're worth the effort. I should probably start carrying wet wipes, too.

When the trash bin was full, I drove to the nearest trash collection & recycling center. I explained to the attendant what I was doing, as I don't have a sticker for my car. He laughed, for some reason. (?) And he let me dump my trash bin without a sticker. The recycling is free, of course. I even recycled a couple of pieces of non-aluminum metal.

So I'm pooped and a bit done in by the sun, but boy, it looks better down the hill!