Last week I tried figuring out why so many otherwise well-adjusted adults experience pure joy watching their pint-sized offspring chase a soccer ball around, yet somehow morph into raving lunatics a decade later when their now-larger spawn get involved in games that, like the ones ten years earlier, have little to no long-term influence on the lives of the participants or the spectators.
Last Sunday was gorgeous, so I took a bike ride to Gray to run a couple of errands.
Unfortunately, the store I pedaled nine miles to get to didn’t have the specific item I was looking for. However, what was far more vexing involved something I see far too much of these days: trash, primarily bottles and cans, along the roads I was biking on.
I’ve never understood littering, an act requiring laziness, selfishness, and utter disregard for the planet inhabited by me, my family, my friends and the litterers themselves, among others. I’ve never met anyone who brags about what a great spreader of debris they are, or that their child is. No one I know boasts about how much garbage they toss out their car windows or deposit along hiking trails in the woods.
There are, to my knowledge, no litterer’s rights organizations, no littering clubs that take weekend outings to dispose of waste in and around state and national parks, and no National Trash-Strewers Association that lobbies Congress for less Draconian anti-littering laws, not that the ones currently on the books are having much effect.
I started counting the number of recently tossed soft-drink containers I passed on my bike ride, but lost track after hitting five dozen. Even more distressing: there’s every reason to believe there’s at least as much garbage on the side of the road I wasn’t biking on as well.
Had I stopped to pick up every deposit bottle or can I saw on my ride, I probably would have had at a nickel per container better than $3 worth of rubbish.
Full disclosure: shamefully, I did nothing to alleviate the mess along Route 115. I didn’t pick up even one piece of litter myself because: A) I’d have been stopping every 50 feet or so in order to grab every offending object I saw, plus I wanted to get home before dark, and: B) I’d have looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame with all those cans and bottles in my backpack.
Actually, my backpack would have been stuffed to capacity long before I hit the Windham town line. In fact, had I been driving and stopping to pick up all the refuse I saw, I’d have easily filled my car’s trunk, and maybe the back seat as well.
It’s reasonable to assume that litter along roadways has been tossed there by drivers rather than pedestrians. Few people take nature walks along the roads I was traveling, where the posted speed limit along the sidewalkless part of the route is 50 mph. This is where my inability to understand gets even deeper.
What is so tough about keeping one’s trash inside their car until arriving someplace where there’s a receptacle specifically designed to receive rubbish? Trash cans can often be found outside places of business, or in public parks. Some crazy neat freaks like me even keep trash cans inside our homes!
But enough venting. I suppose I should stop complaining and count my many blessings. At least there aren’t any youth littering competitions with corporate sponsorships being televised on ESPN.
Yet. <
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