Ok, ok, ok. I realize that it says "April 22" and it's now May 4th, I'm a little behind lately...so sue me! What did you do for Earth Day, huh? Did you even think about it? I don't know why they don't just make Earth Day the Saturday closest to April 22nd every year - it's kind of hard for us working people to do much on a weekday - it's hard enough just to get through work! The Saturday after Earth Day I noticed a man and his two daughters out cleaning up along the road for much of the day - they bagged an impressive 20 some-odd bags of trash! For whatever reason my town's official Earth Day clean up wasn't until this past Saturday, May 2nd. Bethany and I trekked into town to register and get town-supplied gloves and trash bags before heading close to home. We had decided some time ago to clean up this area off the side of a back road, next to a bridge. Many people park here throughout the day to go fishing off the bridge - when I say bridge, it just looks like the road with water on either side, but it is raised and low boats can go under it. Anyway, if you remember my photo of the swan a little while back? When we stopped to take photos of the swan, there were ducks walking around, and they were so cute, but they were walking amongst a bunch of trash. Bethany decided that was where she wanted to clean this year. After completing the cleaning, my guess is that the trash is not left by the people fishing, but by people that I'm assuming are stopping there at night for a little partying. There were many, many alcohol nips ( I realize I'm letting the fishermen off easy here) along with beer bottles, fast food bags, coffee cups, as well as some curtains that apparently disgusted their owners so much they were thrown from the car? The worst thing we found, and didn't touch, were the remains where someone obviously couldn't wait to get to a bathroom....and it wasn't a bear. We did get a few people slowing down to give us a thumbs up, and a fisherman thanked us. And we get to drive by every morning knowing we made a difference. Queue the sweet harp music in the background....
Hopefully I'm teaching Bethany something out of all of this - truth be told, after about an hour she was skipping rocks and just pointing out where I missed the $%&*@ pieces of trash...after 2 hours I pulled something in my back lugging some big metal things from the grass to the trash pile and we called it a day. Oh well...we tried!
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