Trash Formidable: Why We Litter

The Mount Airy trash team stood there, rhapsodized by the contractor buckets stacked in fury and thus, practically glued together. That’s the first challenge of picking up trash – you need the right gear. Charlotte and Cathy, both gray-locked retirees with definitive salon haircuts, were unable to separate the fat stack of buckets. At the end of a tiny parking lot bordered by a small strip-mall of stores, they worked to twist the dirty containers back and forth, Cathy telling Charlotte to pull and Charlotte obliging, her eyebrows knitted.

“I don’t think we can get this apart. Can you do it?” Cathy looked over at me.

“Sure, I’ll try” I said. I walked over to our team captain, Brad. He wasn’t the biggest guy in the world, but he seemed scrawny-strong.

“Hey Brad, do you mind at all helping me to get these buckets apart for Charlotte and Cathy?” I asked. He looked up from his squat, parsing out some of our trash bags.

“Oh yeah, no problem. Let’s do this.”

I took my arm and coiled it around the metal handle of the giant bucket while Brad leaned his weight on his back left foot. He looked up at me:

“Ok. 1. 2. 3!” and we both tried to pull apart the buckets. No dice.

I sighed and clutched at my arm, a little sore from the handle digging into my inner elbow.

“Let’s try once more. This time, we twist and pull.” I said, grabbing my gloves.

Brad nodded and we both squared up against the bucket stack.

Brad’s wife Nora stepped back, eyeing us and pulling her Eagles cap down a little bit.

“Watch if the one bucket has any mud or water in it. Sometimes we just end up with a little extra.” She said.

I pulled. He pulled. The metal snaked into the crevice of my elbow as I twisted counterclockwise. POP!

The bucket separated, as a bit of dank water splashed from the bottom of the bucket across my chest. Fetid rank smell. Ugh.

“Yikes! You good?” Brad asked. Cathy and Charlotte thanked us, both picking up their respective buckets and lining them with trash bags.

“Yeah. I think I’ll be fine.” I said to Brad. Brad smiled, went over to Nora, and they began chatting about the route.

Charlotte and Cathy, meanwhile, gathered their respective weapons from Nora and Brad’s tiny VW hatchback. Some people opt for the suction cup edition trash grabbers, me myself, I ended up with a premium one from Home Depot, etched with steel teeth at the grabber and tipped with pert rubber to aid in picking up any and all refuse. While not as formidable nor strong as my grabber, I don’t blame the ladies for their choices; when you’re looking at the various types of trash grabber, one must consider their role within the squad. For me, a larger man who can still totally do lots of pushups, the correct choice is the equivalent of an M60 machine gun strapped with frisky bullet belts. Heavy duty. That’s just how I roll. Cathy and Charlotte were our skirmishers, front-line scouts with light M4s, maybe clad in pink camo from Walmart. Who knows?

Nora turned from Brad and spoke to the group.

“Hey guys, thanks for coming out. So, we were thinking about going around the block, from Hortter to Greene and just around this block behind us. I guess one group can go one direction and another group can just go the other way. Sound cool?”

I gathered up my gloves, also from Home Depot. Gear, like I said, is needed. Proper work shoes. Pants you don’t mind getting dirty. Time you don’t mind spending. Trash pickup – why had I never done this before? Even though I’d never littered consciously in my life, it still felt like I owed some great debt to this city, this state, this planet. I never felt much akin to joining anything. Never a fan, nor follower. But I didn’t feel that way about nature. Nature was nothing and everything. Nature didn’t stand for anything because nothing could stand apart from it and point to it.

We stood in our huddle on the asphalt of just another parking lot, SUVs ambling out and about around us. Cathy looked over at me.

“Do you want to take the route with me?” she asked. I nodded and agreed.

And we ambled down the street, staring intently at the ground as cars passed. The early sun glimmered and it wasn’t long until we started coming up with some cheeky finds.

In the bushes by a preschool: empty yogurt containers, spoons, plastic balls, chip bags.

On the street, under an overpass: errant pottery shards, druggie needles, beer bottles, and a lone pair of muddy panties wrapped around an empty Heineken bottle.

“Someone had a good night.” I said to Cathy as I shoved the bottle and panties into my bucket. She laughed and bent forward to pick up a curved piece of metal and some Pop Corners chip bag.

I’m not sure what makes people throw out things so wantonly, to populate the streets and country with blotches of matter so foreign they thwart degradation itself. I build and destroy bridges with my neighbors every time I go to pick up more trash with the Mount Airy crew, simultaneously feeling connected and alone. You look down at a half-finished open cup of Dannon yogurt in a bunch of bushes and wonder who the fuck would just finish a yogurt and chuck it into the bushes? Did they have a good reason? Were they being chased by the cops and needed to ditch the evidence? Why? Did it get blown out of their hands in hurricane-force winds? Did they fruitlessly search for it, only to give up because they were enroute to a job interview?

You’re left with these artifacts of idiocy, these strange and visible gravitations towards a destination even lower than dirt. Dirt doesn’t need a post-grad from Columbia to dream up a purpose for it – you can’t say the same for a crumbled up Famous Amos chocolate chip cookie bag, aged past usefulness. You’re left with nothing but assumptions to be made about the litterers and a healthy dash of cynicism to be either cast off or lived under, eventually making you less likely to hold that judging thought more than a few seconds, as it roils your brain on just another Tuesday. 

Once Cathy and I had made it to the overpass, our goose was cooked. We couldn’t get out from under there for around 30 minutes, as the other team weaved their way around the entirety of a whole block at the same time. The little stretch of street was replete with trash, and more of it clotted up the grassy embankments leading up to the train tracks leering above.

-Chip bags.
-An Herdez salsa jar
-Three dirty limes
-Candy wrappers.
-Three used diapers.
-An aerosol can of Lysol
-A bottle full of piss (thankfully, capped).
-A full liter of Fiji water.
-Innumerable plastic bags.
-Two Gatorade bottles.
-A dented coffee can.

And every one of these items seemed to be a challenge to the psyche – what to make of this collation of humanity? Because the more you pick this stuff up, the more you start to inevitably wonder – where did we go so wrong? And if I continue picking up enough of this refuse, will I become one of those wack-jobs who throws soup on paintings? Some sordid hippie who bathes in patchouli?

Somewhere between the Lysol canister and the full-liter of Fiji, I discovered the wild jazz of existence. Blissful/blithe. Free. Life ran not to time because it didn’t need to keep it. We polluted not because we stood apart from nature, but because we were nature. The neon colors clad on the silver-flecked chip bags were telling a story; I heard it in their delicate crunch as they crumpled into my bucket. There’s this non-knowing in the crunch of a piece of litter being laid to rest in your bag, destined to become litter on another scale. We just kept going; unable to meet the bequest of being anything other than a blight, we alighted. Ground-zero, all the time, forever. I picked this bit up and threw it out to become part of a bigger part of litter. Holy fuck. There’s no escaping the fact that everything contains everything.

It was around 20 minutes in when I stepped in dogshit while trying to grab another errant bottle off an embankment, just inches below the brambles that masked the tracks above. The smell took a few minutes to hit my nostrils, as if I had uncorked a fine musk of shit from a trash-strewn side-street, a buried vintage of irresponsibility.

I looked over at Cathy and watched as she and Charlotte worked to empty their buckets into our respective contractor trash-bag. It bulged with the weight and sagged in discordant geometry.

Cathy looked over at me as I was scraping off the edges of my boot with a stick.

“Don’t tell me you stepped in something!” She called across the street.  I just looked over and shook my head. Charlotte ambled over to me.

“You can wipe it in the grass here” she said, pointing to an overgrown patch that looked hardy enough to withstand the shit-stained massage of my boot.

I went over and wiped it off before coming back to the stick and finishing the job.

“I think people litter under here so much because its such a…. hidden space. Nobody can see them do it.” I said to Cathy and Charlotte as I dumped out my bucket.  Charlotte agreed and Cathy worked to seal up the first big bag of trash.

I think it was after the shit came off my boot that I began to again feel like I was a child, a teenager. I hadn’t stepped into dogshit in years, it was like I had just been stung by childhood again through the nostrils.

Maybe that’s the problem. The stability or instability of a home defines childhood. If you’re lucky enough to come from somewhere stable, you can’t imagine what instability is like. You need to go out there and look for it. See it. Seek it. Suck on it at the end of a bottle or between the legs of someone. You need to smoke too much weed and miss your test the next day. You need to skip that job interview and fall behind on rent. You need to allow your girlfriend to move back in, after she’s thrown shot glasses at you. You need to throw out that yogurt cup into the bushes, even though you know better. You’re learning now. Let’s dance to it. Because you’ve never had instability. You can’t know how much it wrecks everything until you’ve already invited it to the party.

Or worse, maybe you can only live in a state of instability, because you’ve never seen the opposite, never known the world, the future you’re denying yourself. You’ve grown like a rose between the cracks of concrete, dismayed perpetual and thus, born to reenact the trauma of life to a T.

Worlds only open slowly, because we don’t know what is too much until we’ve already had it. Blake was right.

And there will never be “too much” instability on our home here, on our earth because by the time we find out “too much” has been crossed, it will be far too late. And we can’t imagine anything inhuman, can’t imagine a world outside of this one because to do so would be to imagine a rollicking sky more azure than this.  

We can only take all of this planet for granted, just as we trust the next step won’t land us in dogshit. So, we foolishly, carelessly lob beer bottles into the rivers or pretend we didn’t see that wrapper drop from our pocket. We can no more imagine what it is to live on mars than we can to think inhuman thoughts because the Martian expedition hasn’t happened yet.

But the trash is already here. It’s growing. Sprouting. Learning. Earning. Withstanding. And we can’t imagine not having the bare minimum because we’ve always had that. It’s here, until it isn’t.

Cathy ambled over to me again, telling me that she was a bit tired and was going to head back to Brad and Nora’s car, drop off her stuff and head home.

“Don’t worry if you can’t get everything from under here.” She said as she walked away, her sweatpants blowing in the breeze.

I wondered how much of everything was already here.