Editor: “Do you get paid for doing that?”
A tow-haired Brookswood student pointed to the garbage in the ditch. I was gathering it up and shoving it into a yellow bag. The yellow vest I was wearing had the Township logo on it and “Volunteer” in bold black letters, front and back. I pointed with the picking up tool to the word on my chest.
“No,” I said.
His companions giggled.
I had volunteered for Clean-up Day (April 27) in Langley Township this year, designating myself as the guardian of 36 Avenue from 208 to 200 Streets. The procedure to register had been simple enough.
I filled in a couple of forms and promised that I would deposit the trash bags on the corner of 208 Street and 36 Avenue, sometime after 2 p.m. on the Saturday. I emerged with a sack full of large yellow garbage bags, two of those vests emblazoned with the Township logo and “Volunteer” on them and two tools that would allow me to pick up the rubbish without bending down very often. I called these “picker-upperers.”
As the weather forecast predicted rain for Saturday, I decided to work on the Thursday. There was no point in getting wet and uncomfortable while picking up other people’s trash. It would only make me feel doubly resentful towards those folk who had thrown it down in the first place.
However this change of plan also put paid to my unexecuted plan to persuade a friend to collect with me. She works throughout the week.
It all sounded simple enough though. The work shouldn’t take that long, I figured. There was a passive park as well as Noel Booth Park along 36 Avenue.
Those parks were cleared by others, I was told. Add to that, two churches are situated along the road and they always appeared to have whistle clean frontage.
Plugging myself into CBC Radio with Jian Ghomeshi for company, I set off on the first foray on the south side of 36th.
I would work from the passive park entrance to the corner of 208th, and then cross over and complete the square of roadside from there to the north side of the road as far as 207B Street.
Then I’d have a coffee break, before continuing. It was good I’d planned it that way. The corners seemed to attract a lot of discarded material.
It took me two hours to finish that small square area. My yellow bag was so full that I had to haul it home rather than carry it. Dragging it along the grass prevented the weight of it from ripping the bag open. After lunch, I returned to the south side of 36th, armed with a trolley for future filled bags.
For the most part, the litter was what you might expect, especially on the corners — candy wrappers, McDonald’s bags and cartons for French fries, an assortment of Slurpee containers and plastic straws of varying lengths, stripes and colours.
A small number of people had perhaps “rolled up the rim” of Tim Hortons beverages and had discarded the cups, disappointed. There were fewer plastic spoons than I imagined there would be.
Doubtless winter had encouraged folk to prefer hot drinks over ice cream. Healthy fruit drinks were popular. Feeding their bodies with healthful food, but damaging nature by their waste?
Pizza cartons stood in either an A frame shape or horizontal design. Cigarette butts tended to congregate in groups along the road while the white plastic cigarillos ends were evenly distributed, mostly in the Noel Booth baseball pitches area.
I wondered if this meant that cigarillo smokers were more solitary people, and didn’t share their habit? I mused that few empty cigarette packages were discarded. There were bottles — ginger ale and beer, some of them broken and a plastic water bottle. It’s what I had expected to find along such a busy road.
Far more interesting was the variety of unusual debris. I imagined various scenarios around them, as I crammed them into the rapidly-filling yellow bags. The assortment was mind-boggling.
A metal paint tray was beaten almost flat and three blocks further along, I found a full can of paint. The worn car tire, I was told by my neighbour, was one that had been available in the 1970s. There was a plastic container from a car too. I was unsure whether it had once held windshield wiper or transmission fluid.
The person who discarded the runners had feet as big as paddles. The women’s socks close by definitely hadn’t belonged to the same owner. A very rain-soaked and grass-stained grey hoodie languished close to a navy T-shirt.
How did a brand-new baseball cap end up in that very same ditch? My mind went into overload when I found a condom package and the used condom close by. There was one woman’s black pump. How did she walk home with only one shoe? Perhaps she had been carrying those deflated purple balloons after a party?
What I can only surmise was a piece of technological office equipment had been demolished into small electronic parts and scattered, perhaps by the municipal machine that had trundled along the length of the ditch the week before. Its metal framework was still rectangular and in one piece.
It was that highly efficient machine which not only cleared out the undergrowth, but had also added to the distribution of garbage bags filled with unsorted household waste.
The polystyrene packaging used around large items and campfire wrappings were evenly distributed by the wind for almost a block. The brown meat trays were harder to see but were equally shredded.
It was at this point that I realized that my “picker-upperer” was less efficient than just picking them up by hand with my gardening gloves. Collecting them in an ice cream bucket so they didn’t blow away was a good idea. I dumped them all into the yellow bag when I was through for the day.
I couldn’t help wondering what sort of person would throw their household waste in the bushes. I found it hard to imagine their rationale when the Township has such an efficient collection system.
The stench was unappealing. Two garbage bags had been in the bushes so long that a small tree had fallen down on top of them. My neighbour’s oldest son hauled the trunk into the ditch so they could be retrieved.
It took two days to finish the job — four hours the first day and six the next, to collect all the rubbish. Both days I encountered different classes of students from Brookswood Secondary out on PE excursions. A few cyclists had gone by, their tires silent on the road. One jerked me out of my reverie by calling out, thanking me for my efforts. One driver tooted in recognition too.
CBC Radio was great company as I worked. The warmth of the filtered sun, the smell of the damp earth and the spring blossoms was an unexpected bonus. A soak in a bubble bath when the day’s work was over removed all muscle aches.
The tow-haired Brookswood youth continued our conversation.
“So why are you doing it, if you’re not getting paid for it?”
Why indeed?
Ruth E. Stewart,
Langley
