On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 1/1/2006
Every Litter Bit
I think it would be safe to say that full-time recreational cyclists spend more hours cruising up and down our rural roads than just about anybody else. Maybe mail carriers or linemen for the power company are out there more, but they’re busier than the cyclists. Their attention is elsewhere and they’re inside the cocoons of their trucks. The cyclists are out in the open, traveling slowly, exposed to whatever the roads have to offer.
And sadly, what the roads have to offer is often litter. Garbage. Not just your garden variety litter. Not just candy wrappers and cigarette cartons: I’m talking about mattresses and refrigerators, sofas and tires and bulging, bursting bags of I-don’t-want-to-know-what.
At the risk of sounding like an old fuddy duddy, I am going to spill some ink on the subject of litter on our lovely backroads and I’m going to wax wroth about the low life scum who do the littering. First however, before you brand me as a hypocrite, I will make the disclaimer that there is probably not a cyclist in the world--including this cyclist--who has not fired a banana peel off into the bushes from time to time. I do try to dispose of mine in out-of-the-way spots in the deepest cover, where they may decompose in peaceful seclusion. And if my chosen banana-munching spot offers no such deep cover, I will put the peel back in my pocket for later disposal.
But frankly, I don’t much care about the occasional banana peel or apple core. They will soon biodegrade. I care more about bottles and cans and other durable goods tossed from cars. And I especially care about those great heaps of household trash that are purposely hauled to some lonely byway and dumped...the furniture and appliances and dead cars and Hefty bags of midden. This intentional, deliberate dumping strikes me as a failure of the human contract...the supposedly agreed-upon notion of what constitutes a civilized society: that we’re all in this together. To me it’s a form of theft. Not only does it smite one in the eye with its ugliness, it also costs us all money. I’ve heard that our little county of Sonoma spends over a million dollars a year sending crews out to clean up these piles of pustulant poop along the shoulders of the roads. Tax dollars that could have been spent on something better. I find the myopic selfishness of it almost as ugly to contemplate as the messes themselves.
Perhaps those who do it justify their actions by some twisted thinking that makes them out to be rebels against a monolithic governmental machine, assuming they think about it all. I am reminded of “Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie’s ballad about large-scale, illegal trash dumping, wherein Arlo and his counterculture cohorts come off as somewhat whimsical rebels, while Officer Obie, the local sheriff, has to play the role of the bad guy, or at least the hapless straight man in the comic drama. At the time, we thought it was pretty cute, and the fact that the littering was really just a vehicle for protesting the Viet Nam war and the draft made it all the more amusing. But somehow--here’s the fuddy duddy in me coming out--it doesn’t seem all that funny anymore.
Nor does casual, out-the-window littering seem amusing or in any way excusable. We cyclists are sometimes scolded for not riding as far to the right as we can, but what the scolding motorists fail to see is the obstacle course of crud we have to dance around along the shoulders of the roads. And I can pretty much guarantee you that 99% of that crud was tossed out of passing vehicles. Consider the broken glass, that ubiqitous bane of bike tires: where does it originate? Most of it starts life as alcoholic beverage containers, primarily beer bottles. If you’re not a cyclist, you’ll just have to trust me on this. The beer labels are still there, among the shards of glass. It’s all Bud Lite and Miller and Coors, with the occasional wine cooler or Smirnoff sort of tipple. You just don’t see Snapple or Hansens or Pepsi bottles in the mix. It’s almost all booze.
So what you have here is, first of all, drinking and driving; second, littering; and finally--by tossing out the empties--concealing evidence of a crime. Three crimes in one. Then you have the burning butts, flicked out into the tinder-dry grasses bordering the country roads. In adddition to the million spent on litter removal, factor in whatever the various fire departments spend on putting out grass fires started in this way. More of our tax dollars that might have been put to better use elsewhere.
And for what it’s worth, it isn’t like this everywhere. Many parts of the world have litter problems at least as bad as what we see here, but other places I have traveled are much better. Much of Europe is better, and some places, like Switzerland, are spotless. How those tidy Swiss can keep their landscape so immaculate is a matter of some sociological conjecture, well beyond the scope of this essay. I merely mention it to note that it is at least theoretically possible to live in a world without roadside effluvia.
So anyway...we cyclists see the trash up close and personal, from broken beer bottles to gutted jalopies. Sometimes we even have to dodge around it. Being the good, observant, responsible citizens that we are, at least some of us think about the trash and wonder if there isn’t something we can do about it. It turns out there are things we can do about it.
An article ran in our local paper recently telling the story of one such endeavor. Ario Bigattini, an engineer with Cisco Systems--and a cyclist on the Soulcraft racing team--got a bunch of his biking buddies together to scout out trash on the county’s backroads. REI, the outdoor equipment store, loaned them GPS units, and with these in hand, they fanned out along the country lanes, noting the bigger piles of litter along the roads with GPS coordinates. The coordinates were turned over to the county works department, which will use the data for following up and collecting the trash. Ario and his pals are committed to doing more rides in the future to pinpoint more dump sites, and the county is committed to picking up the litter.
The Santa Rosa Cycling Club has taken another approach to the problem. Beginning in 2000, the club created an “Adopt-a-Backroad” program in conjunction with the county. West Dry Creek Road was chosen as the road for adoption because it is such a popular cycling road. Some residents along this pretty road have become fed up with the almost constant presence of riders in large groups and small pedaling along their meandering lane, so the club’s project was seen as a way of showing the locals that cyclists are not just a nuisance on their road, but can be a force for good as well.
The idea was that volunteers from the club would meet at the road twice a year--once in the fall and once in the spring--and scour the road clean of litter all along its ten-mile length. After a morning of litter lifting, all the volunteers would repair to a nice bistro in Healdsburg for a hearty lunch paid for by the club. I confess that when the idea was first proposed by one of our members, I was a little leery about it. I wasn’t sure the club would be able to maintain the level of volunteer energy required to put 40 or so workers out there twice a year, year after year. So far, I am happy to say I have been proven wrong. For six years now, the volunteers have shown up on the appointed days, ready to rid the road of every little bit of litter.
In fact, so many workers have been turning out for this worthy project that we are now cleaning not only the ten miles of West Dry Creek, but also the next two roads over: Yoakim Bridge and Canyon Road. What’s more, the workers have been so efficient at removing the trash, there really isn’t that much stuff to pick up on West Dry Creek anymore. So instead of doing that road twice a year, it is now being done once, in the fall, and in the spring, the crew turns its attention to another popular cycling road across the county: Chalk Hill, also exactly ten miles long. There is now talk of expanding the project to even more roads.
The county put up signs on West Dry Creek announcing that the club had adopted the road for litter clean-up. This is similar to the Apopt-a-Highway signs one sees along freeways. For the most part, the response from local residents has been very favorable. Many people have taken the time to thank us for what we’re doing. Unfortunately, there are still a few curmudgeons out there who refuse to concede that cyclists can do anything positive in their world. At least once, the signs have been ripped down, and one local asked, “If the cycling club is doing this out of the goodness of its heart, then why does it have to advertise the fact with signs on the road?”
On the face of it, it seems a rather petty, churlish response to folks taking the time to come out and clean up years of accumulated litter--to make your neighborhood cleaner and prettier--but for the sake of discussion, I’m willing to treat it as a fair question.
Why would we put up the signs? (Or why would the county put up the signs on our behalf?) First of all and obviously, we do want the good PR. We do want the locals to know who those folks are out there on weekend mornings removing the beer bottles from their front yards. We do hope we will make some friends for cycling in general and for the Santa Rosa Cycling Club in particular...that it will perhaps make motorists just a bit more forgiving and patient the next time they find themselves momentarily stymied behind some cyclists. I don’t think we need to apologize for that. The Adopt-a-Highway signs along the freeways sport the names of all sorts of businesses and individuals and organizations who are proud to be doing their little bit in the war on litter. We’re no different.
But I also like to think of those signs as a sort of priming of the pump: an example to others of what is possible. Perhaps some of the legions of cyclists using that road will see the signs and wonder if it might be possible to do something similar on a backroad in another county. Perhaps someone in a car will consider the possibility of having their organization--the Rotary or the Elks or whoever--set up a similar project on another road, here or elsewhere. If one bicycle club can do it, why can’t others?
It puts me in mind of an incident that happened many years ago in San Francisco. When my wife and I were first married and raising our children, we lived in the Potrero Hill neighborhood. At that time, parts of the neighborhood were still a bit rough and scruffy. We lived about a block from one of those little Mom-&-Pop grocery stores, and it seemed as if almost everyone who bought stuff at the store dropped a little litter along the block as they walked home. The sidewalks and gutters were thick with refuse. One sunny Saturday morning, my wife and I decided we were fed up with living in a world like this, so, with our two little toddlers tagging along, we took our brooms and dustpans and, starting at one end of the block, we began sweeping the sidewalks clean.
This is the city, so there’s lots of street life. Many folks out on their front stoops saw what we were doing. At first it seemed they thought we were fools, but then a neat thing happened: one by one, other people came out carrying brooms and started helping. Pretty soon, a good number of people were pitching in, and by the time we’d worked our way down to the grocery on the corner, it had almost taken on the trappings of a block party. From that modest beginning, a sense of community grew in our neighborhood, and it wasn’t long before we had the city working with us to put in street trees. One way or another, folks began to take pride in their homes and in their neighborhood.
It would be way too simplistic to attribute the betterment of that neighborhood entirely to our one little broom brigade. Other factors were at work too, and our ad hoc street clean-up was more a tale of the times than a true tipping point. But it did illustrate how one can make a difference, and how by doing something good, one can inspire others to do good as well. I would like to think the litter clean-up projects taken on by various cycling groups in Sonoma County might have a similar impact: leading by example and inspiration. It may seem as if there is too much mess out there in the world for any of us to ever get on top of it, but as we have seen, good things can be made to happen, one litter bit at a time.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net