Flotsam and Fishbones: The Alaskan Waters

Last summer, 2010, I was one of the luckiest people in the world. I got to go see Alaska and British Columbia’s Inside Passage, not on a cruise ship, but on a study tour with 23 other college professors & instructors, most expenses paid by the National Endowment for the Humanities. We started in Juneau at the University of Alaska Southeast (in nearby Auke Bay), and ended in Vancouver, being shuttled around by planes, ferries, and busses. We were studying the native cultures of the Yup’ik Eskimos and the Northwest Coast (especially Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Coast Salish). It was definitely a highlight of my life, and I got to share a lot of what I learned with my students all last year. I also presented to the Western Maryland Division of the Archaeological Society of Maryland this past March.

Anyway, as soon as I got settled in my dorm at UAS, I walked down to Auke Bay to see the water. The scenery was amazing, of course, and everything looked raw and pristine. But the first thing I saw washing up from the water was an ammunition belt, buckled, full of bullets! The next day a paperback book washed in.

This summer I read a book called Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings by Jonathan Raban, published in 1999, about a trip he took in a sailboat from Seattle to Juneau and back. I highly recommend it! He writes kind of like Bill Bryson. But anyway, he has a passage in there about the junk in the oceans—even in a supposedly untouched place like Alaska, the last frontier.

The tide ran in lazy swirls and fingerling whirlpools. I drove through a tide-meet of flotsam—a sinuous, unbroken line of stray logs, green branches, yellowed chunks of polystyrene packing, soft-drink cans, condoms, fish crates, frayed rope-ends, old boots, half-eaten apples, a broken caneback chair, a rubber ball. Wherever two tidal currents come into collision, they form a long thin floating junkyard, to which all superfluous items in the neighborhood eventually gravitate. These trailing windrows suggest to the eye the natural affinity of the unwanted: all the local orphans collect here, jostling together in a buoyant democracy of abuse and neglect. I passed through every tide-meet with care, always hoping to rescue an abandoned fender, a Japanese glass float, or any of the other useful and decorative things that sometimes showed up in these anfractuous garbage dumps. Nothing this morning. The gulls were having a good time of it, though, picking over such delicacies as the triple-decker club sandwich that most likely had been tossed by a sated cruise-ship passenger. (333-4)

That last image reminds me of an incident this summer. I was in Wal-mart’s parking lot, directly in front of the store, with cars and pedestrians milling around. A two-seater pickup turned right in front of me, and as it was turning, the back window opened and a teenaged girl threw a half-eaten sandwich on the pavement, right at my feet! I tried to catch her eye and yelled Hey!—but they were gone. I was stunned and angry. Now, admittedly, half-eaten sandwiches are biodegradable, but who wants to see them or step on them?

So you might wonder if we have anything to learn from the Native Americans on this issue. You know, there you are out in a vast natural landscape. All your food scraps and raw materials are from the earth and will return to the earth. So what do you do with your fish bones and seal bones, etc. Toss them, right?

Wrong. First of all, most people know that Natives are notorious for using the entire animal. Every body part has a use. But what about fish bones? Fish bones are discarded, but not just tossed. In both the Yup’ik and Northwest Coast cultures, every part of the universe is alive and sentient. Every rock, every piece of driftwood, every fish bone, and even the dirt and garbage on the ground is alive and aware. If you treat those fish bones with disrespect, leaving them around for people to step on, you won’t have any luck fishing next year. You have to carefully collect them and place them in a thankful manner back in the water near where they were found to ensure those fish will want to return to you the next year. Whenever I pass a squished animal in the road, I think how horrified the Yup’ik people would be to see how we treat animals.

Related to this, driftwood was what made travel into the Western Hemisphere possible. The original people came along the coast, not inland, using driftwood for fuel. The Yup’ik and Northwest Coast people believe you shouldn’t pull driftwood out of the water but only use driftwood that’s washed up and dried out of its own accord. Otherwise, you may have trouble finding more driftwood in the future. Then, when it’s beached and dry, it has offered itself to you for your use. But you should also turn driftwood over now and then, so it doesn’t get tired of being in the same position.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ammo belt and book had fallen off of a boat owned and operated by Tlingits. The Natives quickly acquired and put to use any modern tools that would help them, and attempts were made by both the American and Canadian governments and missionaries to wipe out the Native languages and cultures. Many Yup’iit still have a subsistence culture, though using some modern tools, and many still speak their language. Along the Northwest Coast, very few survive who grew up speaking their native languages and living in the old ways, though their values have often been passed down. And there is a huge revival, and attempts are being made to resurrect the old customs and arts all up and down the Inside Passage.

Lyme Disease, Corporations, and Rising Above It All

from “The Ponds” by Mary Oliver:

     Still, what I want in my life
     is to be willing
     to be dazzled—
     to cast aside the weight of facts

     and maybe even
     to float a little
     above this difficult world.

Sometimes that’s what it takes to not be discouraged by what has been done to the world—people to the earth, people to people, people to animals, animals to animals, “nature red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson so aptly described the latter.

And how about bacteria and viruses to people and animals? Yesterday I watched a documentary about chronic Lyme disease, called “Under Our Skin.” It’s really scary, but if the HMOs would stop controlling everything, the research holds out hope for those with Alzheimer’s, MS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Parkinson’s, not to mention Lyme disease!

How did we let our lives fall into the hands of the puppeteer HMOs? Though I mean this rhetorically, this is actually answered in Michael Moore’s movie, “Sicko,” which makes you feel sick to be living in the USA, with private companies running our health care. And related to HMOs are all corporations, which the documentary “The Corporation” explains have all the characteristics of sociopaths.

I highly recommend all three of these documentaries. They should be required viewing. What will it take to throw off the yoke of corporations? Laws and red tape have gotten so complex, people don’t even know they’re being abused—and outright killed—by these corporations. Paranoia? I think not. I think that’s the world we live in.

So either we live lives of engagement, involving constant anger and frustration, or we try to turn it off, to rise above it all and just enjoy what we can of what’s lovely in this world. I know for me, I do some of both. I contribute to some environmental groups which are grappling with the corporations in the courts and sign their e-mail petitions, and locally, I pick up trash and try to call people’s attention to that and other environmental problems I notice. And I try every day to get outdoors—out any doorway—and feel my way back into nature, to melt into the woods…

This is the balance I’ve found.

As for battling the HMOs, everyone viewing the films mentioned above would be a good start, including our representatives in the government!

Six-legged frogs, Japanese Knotweed, and Lawn Mowers

I'll have to add to my levels of hell, one level down from people who throw recyclables out their car windows, people who mow grass without picking up the trash first!  I spent several hours in the hot sun Saturday picking up shredded little bits of plastic and paper left by some idiot on a lawn mower.  This was at the bottom of Pysell Road---again.  I was so hot afterwards, I retreated to the cool, shady old dump site by the stream, further up Pysell Rd. in the woods, and fought with the greenbriar and deer flies instead.  There were some interesting finds there, most notably eight half-gallon-size brown glass bottles that said "Austin's A-1 Solution."  I googled it, and they're bleach bottles.  Unlike everything else I was finding, they weren't broken!  It's tempting to save some of these unbroken finds, but I don't think they're old enough to be worth much.  They all have twist-off lids.

Earlier in the week I was busy with other environmental concerns.  I happened to notice in the Garrett County Weekender that some Mennonite kids had a plastic duck regatta in the Casselman River near the old bridge (built in 1813).  I read the article to see how the heck putting a bunch of plastic ducks in a river can raise money for a charity, and hoping they got them all, when a line jumped out at me.  It said:  "The youth were delighted to spot a six-legged frog during the event." 

Well of course I was horrified, and the next day I was on the phone all morning, being referred to this person and that person, trying to notify the right people in the scientific community, at the Mennonite church, and the state EPA.  Finally I talked to Ed Thompson of the Natural Heritage Service who's doing a study of rare and endangered non-game species, such as hellbender salamanders, in the Casselman River.  He's the first person I'd spoken to who was a horrified as  I was.  The first thing he said was, "That's right where the Grantsville sewage treatment plant discharges into the Casselman!"  He said the presence of that frog may be a clue to the disappearance of the hellbenders, too.  We had a discussion about all the possible causes of such genetic deformities, including pharmacueticals not being removed at sewage treatment plants, herbicides and pesticides from farms, and plastics.

Here's the really frightening part, though.  He said there was no one to report this to.  He said there's no governmental organization set up to respond to environmental incidents like this.  But he said he'd try to involve those higher up, and I agreed to let the town of Grantsville's government know, which I did.  He was also going to talk to the church to see if anyone had collected the frog, which he wanted to see.

Then the next day, I put a letter to the editor in the local paper about how trash affects wildlife and ends up in the ocean affecting wildlife there, and explained Maryland's litter control law.  While I was there talking to the editor, I proposed an article about an invasive species, Japanese knotweed, which is taking over our river and stream banks.  He asked me to go through Liz McDowell at the Savage River Watershed Association, who has written such articles in the past.  I've got some good pictures of it.

It reallys scares me because it's huge, as you can see in this picture of an abandoned house in the Spring Lick flood plain!  It's about 8 feet tall, so it shades out and crowds out all the native plants, and it totally changes these unique stream valleys such as I described in my last blog, Sang Run.  It's really heart-breaking how it's changed Spring Lick.  I've seen it along the Savage (as shown here),

the Potomac, the Casselman, and the Youghiogheny.   I've even seen it in isolated spots at higher elevations.  I saw on a website about invasive species that to kill it, you have to cut it back three times per growing season.  It has hollow stems that shoot up every year.  Here's what the leaves look like:

                          Death to Japanese Knotweed!!!

Well, that's enough bad news for one week.

Sang Run Road: Trashing Paradise

My friend Shirley asked me about how I came up with the name Ginseng for Garrett County's literary magazine back in 1997, so I told her about the history of hunting for wild ginseng in these hills, how it was--and still is--worth a lot of money.  The Chinese, especially, value the bitter root as an aphrodisiac and energy booster.  It's become pretty rare in the wild.  It's been cultivated, but that kind isn't worth nearly as much as wild ginseng.  And around here it's pronounced gin-sang, sang for short; hence, Sang Run Road.  And for those of you reading this in New England or elsewhere, "run" is what people in the mid-Atlantic region sometimes call brooks, streams, or rivers. 

Much of my trash picking up so far has been along various stretches of Sang Run, including today.  It is a pristine stream, cool and shady on a hot day, with towering hemlocks and maples above and stretches of wild rhododendron here and there along the banks.  Ferns, mosses, and a wide variety of delicate wildflowers flourish along its banks and floodplain.  There are many sections of it with tiered rock outcrops along the sides, giving it the feel of a cool, damp grotto.  In the sunny spots are large, primeval-looking skunk cabbage--not nearly as large as I saw last summer in Alaska, but still lush and verdant.  There's no poison ivy at this elevation and very few strands of greenbriar to detract from its sweet nature.

In fact, the Nature Conservancy owns a stretch of it, and today I was picking up just upstream from their property.  At first I didn't see much to pick up there.  I mainly stopped because I'd seen a big tarp blown off of a pickup on the side of the road, but I started exploring further in, between the road and the stream, and then across the stream, and I found quite a bit.   I made about eight trips back to my car with my buckets full of bottles and cans and plastic bags, broken glass and shotgun shells.  I also found lots of little pieces of styrofoam in some flood debris, along with woven plastic feed bags and a piece of house siding.  One thing I'm going to have to go back with leather gloves for is a lot of plastic tangled up in barbed wire, complete with a rotten fence post!  So I was doing a lot of jumping to and from mossy stepping stones, balancing on logs, and occasionally bashing my head on rhododendron!  But it was beautiful, and I was glad to be out in the day.

Last Friday I picked up a different section of the road, across the Youghiogheny River.  It's still called Sang Run Road, but it goes up over a mountain ending at Cranesville Road, where you're almost into West Virginia.  That section of the road is remote, mostly state forest land, including a primitive camp ground.  In early spring, I'd seen a lot of trash along this road, so I wanted to go back for it.  The trouble was finding a place to park off the road.  I finally found a spot, but the road looked like someone had cleaned it up!  I was hopeful, but no such luck.  Once you get out walking, you realize that a lot of it has been thrown ten or twenty feet off the road, and plants have leafed out, hiding the mess.  Without ever moving the car, in one hour, I picked up 18 gallons of plastic bottles, 9 gallons of glass bottles, and 18 gallons of trash.

And all this was from a clean-looking, fourth mile stretch of road in the wilderness!  Among the plastic, I found four milk bottles full of animal teeth marks.  Whether they're bear or fox or what, I don't know, but as you can see, wildlife DOES interact with trash and is affected by it!  Three of the bottles are shown here:

The forests of the Appalachian Mountains are unique.  It's the oldest mountain range in the world, and with all its nooks and crannies, varying elevations and amounts of daylight, it is the most diverse forest in the world, more diverse even than rainforests.  And it seems like ever since the logging companies arrived in the 1800s, people have done nothing but rape and trash the land and the rivers through logging, mining, and dumping trash.  Now they're clear-cutting our mountain tops to erect gigantic windmills and messing up the land and water with fracking, and still the dumping of trash continues.

Well, at least Sang Run is a little cleaner today.

Garrett County Roads: Repeat Offenders on Mosser, Pysell, and Sang Run

Yesterday I finally finished (for now) picking up the litter down below the guard rail at the bottom of Mosser Road!  It was a huge job, taking four separate trips.  My bins hold 18 gallons, so I figure I collected a total of 102 gallons of trash and about 18 gallons of recyclables from that area alone.  I finished by fishing some cups, cans, and plastic bags out of the lake there, and as I left I saw three fish.  Perhaps they'd come to thank me.  The trash at this location included a lot of packaging material: cardboard boxes, tape, styrofoam chunks, and sheets of plastic bubble wrap in amongst the usual cups, straws, bottles, and cans.  Here's a typical array:

There is a repeat offender here, too.  It's someone who throws styrofoam coffee cups with a napkin neatly tucked down in each one from the right hand lane, waiting for the light at the bottom of Mosser Road.  If you know this person, please ask him or her to stop.

Then I finished up at the intersection of Sang Run and  Hoyes-Sang Run Roads.  In the bushes along the right side of Sang Run Road, upstream from the intersection, there were eight cans of Reddi-Wip!  Strange addiction!  I also found there two 4-inch PVC pipes, about a foot long each, filled with concrete.  And down in Sang Run itself, I fished out one of those woven plastic feed bags, caught on a stick, all ready to go with the flow down to the Youghiogheny, the Monongahela, the Ohio, the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico.

Leaving that area, turning the corner towards the Yough, I passed a Garrett County road crew truck with clean-up implements sticking up out of the back.  I felt like waving to comrades but was pretty sure they had no idea about who I was or what I was doing.  Then, BAM.  Not 20 feet from the turn, right under the 25 mph sign, was a paper bag with a full six-pack carton sticking out of it.  Now how could the road crew drive right by that???  Why don't our road crews ever pick up obvious, large trash like that?

So I pulled into the pull-off opposite the bag and collected it.  It was clean, recently placed there, and there was a generic styrofoam fast food container beside it.  This made me wonder if the Garrett County road crew could be the perpetrators themselves!  Years ago, road crews would leave their lunch trash at a pull-off on our road, so I wouldn't put it past them.  But in this case, I certainly hope it wasn't they who were drinking the two Michelob Ultras and five Bud Lights and then driving a multi-ton dump truck!

Don't worry, guys, whoever you were!  I got your backs!  I recyled them for you.

So now we have four repeat offenders:  The Keystone Light perp on lower Pysell Road, the styrofoam coffee cup with a napkin perp on lower Mosser Road, the Reddi-Wip perp at the Sang Run intersection, and the 20 oz. milk perp along Sang Run near the whitewater put-in.  If you know any of these perpetrators, please remind them of the law:  a $1,500 fine and possible jail time for each offense.  Of course, there are other reasons to not throw trash, but apparently these people don't care about the rest of the world.

How the Trash in Appalachia Affects the Oceans

Perhaps you've heard of the "gyre" of plastic floating around in the Pacific Ocean.  I'd heard of it, and I envisioned a sort of solid-looking mass of water bottles and milk jugs, and I thought, "Why don't people with big boats go out there and start picking it all up?"  I even thought of suggesting that to the Sea Shepherd Society, now that they finally managed to stop Japanese whaling (Yay!!!). 

The very night I mentioned that to my husband, he called me in to see a show on TV about just that.  It was a documentary called Bag It.  It explained that there is not just one gyre, but five, where ocean currents come together: one in the North Pacific, one in the South Pacific, one in the North Atlantic, one in the South Atlantic, and I think the other one was in the Indian Ocean.   The one in the North Pacific is estimated to be somewhere between the size of Texas and the whole United States.  And--here's the even worse part--the plastic breaks down from the sunlight into little tiny bits that float beneath the surface. 

Bag It also showed how whole colonies of sea birds are dying from eating plastic, not to mention endangered sea turtles.  They showed the contents of the stomachs of dead ones--full of plastic.  Think about how the ocean is supposed to be to these animals.  Everything in sight is edible, if you can catch it.  Sea turtles love eating jelly fish, and often mistake plastic bags floating in the water for them.  I've got to see Bag It again, but I think they said something like 90% of marine animals have died!!!  It's horrible!

So how does all that plastic get into the ocean?  Down our rivers and along our shores.  So we here in the headwaters of the Potomac River, the Casselman River, the Youghiogheny River, the Cheat River, the Monongahela River, the Ohio River, the Chesapeake Bay, part of it starts with us. 

And if the marine animals are eating the little bits of plastic, no doubt the land animals are too.  I've already written about how styrofoam breaks down into little bits.  I've also noticed that the lids of soda cups become brittle very quickly and fall apart when I try to pick them up.

This past Saturday, my husband and I paddled down the Upper Casselman River for nine miles, from Jennings to a mile or so above the Pennsylvania line.  It started as a small creek, only runnable because we'd recently had 5 1/2 inches of rain.  We went behind a brick factory, still in operation, and there were a lot of old yellow bricks tumbled into the stream.  I don't think they're toxic or anything, though.  The main pollution we saw were plastic bags, both floating in the stream and among the debris from the recent flooding.  Plastic shopping bags.  I didn't have any way to collect trash at the time, being in a little kayak.  Fortunately, they became fewer and fewer as we went along, and then there were none from south of Grantsville and for most of the remainder of the trip.  Two exceptions were along the drainage ditch from Rt. 68, where the trash just came tumbling down, and in an eddy near the southwestern base of the old Casselman River Bridge.

If you're reading this and you live near there, please see what you can do about collecting these.

At our take-out spot in Pennsylvania, there was a sign posted on a tree of the litter law!  I was glad to see it, until I realized I was standing on a huge mound of gray sludge, probably illegally dumped by some fracking operation!  And right behind the sign were about 20 bald tires, in amongst the plants and trees.

Note to Garrett Countians:  We need to outlaw plastic shopping bags!  And if you want to help pick up trash, let me know.

Trash and the Law

My county government doesn't quite know what to make of what I'm doing.  The issue came up when I requested to be able to dump roadside trash without buying an annual sticker.  I got a copy of an e-mail where various levels were discussing me.  Some were concerned that this not get out, as it might make for bad publicity. They finally decided I was a civic group of one!  So they made me a laminated pass with my name, picture, and vehicle tag number on it.  It identifies me as a Garrett County Volunteer, and I have permit #001 for Roadside Litter Disposal.  

In the nick of time, too.  I picked up 72 gallons of trash today, plus about 18 gallons of recyclables, just at the very bottom of Pysell Road and a bit on 219, and then most of it was down below the guard rail at the bottom of Mosser Road.  It was wet, muddy going after our 5 1/2 inches of rain!  It seems like someone "dropped" (wink, wink) a lot of old scraped-off caulking at the bottom of Pysell Road.  And I'll still need to go finish up at the bottom of Mosser.

BUT...now here's the big news...this morning I was researching Maryland's litter laws.  Just yesterday I called the DNR about the disposal of deer remains from hunting, and they said on private property it's up to the land owner, but on public property is okay to leave the remains where the deer is "harvested," so long as it's not visible from the road.  However, the Maryland litter law includes animal remains, and it is illegal to leave them on any public or private land!  Now, why would the DNR police not know that???

AND...it's illegal to dump on your own land!  That means that the big concrete slabs that appeared in our stream valley behind my house one day about three weeks ago were illegally dumped, even if the perpetrator gave permission or (hush, hush!) did it himself on his own property!  And the penalties are quite hefty!  If those slabs weigh more than 500 pounds, the person could be sent to jail for five years or be fined $30,000 or both.  Now I certainly wouldn't want a neighbor to have to go through all that.  But I sure would appreciate it if he'd remove those slabs and put them in the landfill where they belong.

I think Maryland residents need to be reminded of the litter laws.  Even someone throwing a cup or can out a car window is subject to 30 days in jail and/or a $1,500. fine.  And it would behoove a county like Garrett that relies on tourist dollars to spruce itself up, even if no one cares about how it's affecting all the animals.

I'm thinking of starting a national movement called the Anti-Litter League.  It's something we ALL should be doing!  If you drive around complaining about all the litter but wait for others to pick it up...guess what?  I've learned that it usually doesn't happen.  You've got to MAKE it happen, yourself! 

So I googled Anti-Litter League, and there is an organization by this name in Ireland, and it's very active!  It seems like the whole country is involved in contests to see which areas are the cleanest, and they have different categories, like school areas, cities, neighborhoods, businesses, etc.  They get funding from the equivalent of the EPA, and the county governments and businesses are very active in promoting this effort.  What they're shooting for is European standards of cleanliness!  So apparently, we're WAY behind Europe in this effort.