Paper cups, plastic cups, Styrofoam cups.
Plastic water bottles, glass beer bottles.
Beer cans, soft drink cans.
Cardboard fast food containers, Styrofoam fast food containers.
Paper bags, plastic bags, empty garbage bags, full garbage bags.
Bundled yellow commercial telephone directories.
Automobile tires, wheels, bumpers, grills.
Child safety seats.
Plastic tricycles, plastic basketball hoop stands, plastic sandboxes.
Plastic storage boxes, wooden boxes.
Chairs, sofas, televisions, toilets, shower stalls.
Plates.
Half-butchered deer carcasses.
These are a few of the things I hate. I don’t hate them for what they are, I hate them for where they are.
All of these things are strewn along Fouche Gap Road on both sides of the mountain, and both sides of the road, although mostly on the downhill side. I played a game today when I walked the dogs. I tried to see whether I could find a place where I couldn’t see some kind of trash or garbage. It couldn’t really be done, not fairly anyway, even with freshly-fallen leaves covering a lot of sins. I was always within sight of some kind of trash. Maybe something big, maybe something little, like a piece of paper or a broken piece of a cooler.
And if you think that’s bad, you should see what ends up on the dead ends of Lavender Trail. Sometimes it’s construction or demolition debris, and sometimes it’s objects of a more personal nature.
I haven’t walked on any other country roads nearly as much as I have on Fouche Gap Road. I don’t know whether there is this much trash along Texas Valley Road, or whether it’s a function of the elevation of the road, like some kind of orographic trash precipitation.
I blame this at least partly on Floyd County. There is a garbage transfer station about three miles from our house just off Huffaker Road. They accept household garbage and some kinds of recyclable materials, but they don’t allow other types of trash. For that you have to drive about 14 miles across the county to the landfill, and they charge you to dump there. When I was building our house, I made lots of trips to the landfill to dump construction debris, and I made the trip to dispose of the old, falling-down greenhouse my father built behind my parents’ house. But it seems to be too much trouble for some people.
Once I was dumping our garbage at the transfer station when someone came up and tried to dump an old picnic table. The attendant told him that he had to take it to the landfill. So he left. When I went back home, the picnic table was just off the side of Fouche Gap Road.
The county ought to provide free disposal of all types of trash and garbage, including things like picnic tables and toilets, at least for private citizens. But instead they send prison crews once a year out to all the county roads to pick up the trash they didn’t allow to be dumped at transfer stations. Some more civilized communities allow all kinds of trash to be dumped at transfer stations. But not my own community. I guess that would cost money, and no one wants to pay not to have a trashy county.
It’s not all the county’s fault, of course. It’s the people who make up the county, all the people who prefer to dump their garbage near us. My opinion of human nature, at least Floyd County human nature, is not high. Are people in other parts of the country as trashy as they are here?
I was about to say how amazing it is that there are still people who will just dump their trash, and then realized my own instances of observing this same thing just in the last month. Just on my route to work: a dozen dead tires dumped at the intersection of two roads in southeast Clarke County; not a mile away, a discarded stove or washer tossed on the side of the road, followed a week later by three full bags; an open bed truck doing 80 down Wolfskin Road without a cover over the trash blowing out the back end.
I also find occasional trash caught in downed tree branches on Goulding Creek – light bulbs are a common feature here. Following one heavy rainy period a few years ago, a neighbor traced a big trash appearance to a gully upstream where someone had been dumping trash for years, unbeknownst to anyone.
Good thing: every January I take a bag for trash on my first hike post deer hunting season on the hunting club property (which uses 20 of our acres to the west Oct-Jan). About the only thing I ever find are the half dozen or so balloons that drifted down during that 3-month period (well, that’s not a good thing). The hunters do not leave so much as a candy bar wrapper behind.
Interesting about the deer hunters. The fellow who used to (still does?) gather his friends to go 4-wheeling in the woods down at the bottom of Wildlife Trail required his friends not to throw anything at all out of their Jeeps/trucks. One day I found him and his friends on Fouche Gap Road winching large dumped stuff out of the woods to haul away. It’s not what I would have expected.
The balloons ought to be a cautionary tale for people who think it’s wonderful to release hundreds of balloons. They have to come down somewhere.
I do see trash sometimes on the county roads, but not as much as I did when we were up in Port Townsend, WA. There was one place where people just discarded anything that they didn’t want anymore. A huge heap of crap everywhere. Here in Nevada County we have a large landfill area with a free recycling center. They even take electronics. I can’t imagine what kind of mentality it takes to feel okay about taking your own garbage and tossing it along the roadside. How is that ever okay?
Robin — I see this kind of behavior as convincing evidence that we are closely related to chimps, some maybe more closely related than others.
I’ve found a number of spent balloons my my Ozark woods, and there have been occasionally other bits of trash, though the land had different uses before I came along. But your description of the roadside would be perfect for parts of the Ozarks as well. And then there are the side streets in Kansas City . . .
A couple of years ago I posted a calculation of 400,000 balloons released per year in the northern half of Georgia.
Pablo — Somehow I think I would prefer that people dump their garbage on city streets rather than along otherwise nice country roads.
Wayne — I think I remember that calculation. It’s amazing, isn’t it?
Amazingly, trash deposited on the roads surrounding my preserve in one of the most densely developed parts of Pennsylvania is pretty rare. If we find it, I send my crew out to clean it up immediately lest it entice other people to do the same. Our municipalities will pick up most any trash, but they do charge an extra fee for large items like appliances, so I’m surprised we don’t have more white-ware discards. Perhaps it’s just the mentality that develops in an area.
When Kali and I visited Costa Rica about a decade ago, the stream valleys and ravines in the developed/urbanized parts of the county were just filled with trash. How can people living in “paradise” just trash their environs? Doesn’t make sense to me.