The Long Arm of the Moment

On the second Saturday each month, I go out for an hour in our Hillsdale commercial center to pick up litter. I carry a trash bag and a “grabber,” one of those arm extender devices that allow me to pick up cigarette butts, candy wrappers and beer cans without ever having to stoop over.

The physical labor is easy, thanks largely to the grabber, a magnificent invention (whose inventor is worthy, perhaps, of a Nobel Peace Prize).

The problem with litter collecting is the mental part — the thoughts that crowd my brain as I confront the debris of bus stops, gullies and road shoulders. It’s pretty easy to get bummed out by the slobs who throw trash in the right-of-way. Equally depressing is thinking about just how much trash there is.

Picking it up is a task similar to that of Sisyphus trying to roll his proverbial boulder to the summit, only to lose it at the top and to have to start over.

In short, my trash pick-up experience isn’t helped by my fixating on the causes of littering and the unending consequences of human neglect. In the extreme, such thoughts become downright misanthropic.

So I’ve taken to turning trash grabbing into a kind of Zen meditation.

Detachment is the order of the hour. I absorb myself in the moment’s object of collection.

This MOMENT. NOW!

This cigarette butt has no past for me. I give no thought to who smoked it and dropped it. I give no thought to others who have smoked the innumerable butts I will encounter on my rounds.

I am utterly focused on aiming my grabber’s tongs so that when I squeeze the handle they will grasp this butt. Still in the now, I lift it and deposit it in my bag.

Now. Now. Now. Fritos bag, Starbuck’s cup, McDonald’s wrapper.

One at a time; moment by moment.

Soon the moments add up to an hour. My bag is full. I dump it in a dumpster that the local food co-op has given me permission to use. The manager rewards me with a free toasted, buttered, poppy-seed bagel and a steaming cup of coffee.

That’s it.

As I sip the coffee and sink my teeth into the soft, buttery bagel, I stay with the moment. I am simply eating to sustain two arms and hands of humanity’s billions. Some drop trash; others pick it up. Some build houses and roads, some drive buses and trains, some tie sutures, some flip burgers, some fire rifles, some cradle infants.

All of this is what the human organism does. I think of the arms and hands I call “mine” as helping define this small moment of existence in this small place.

Barbur litter returns a week after clean-up

Since last Saturday, when we picked up litter along Barbur Boulevard, I’ve been enjoying our handiwork driving home from downtown. Barbur has looked like a parkway.

Until this evening.

A big bag of overflowing trash is dumped alongside the road. Someone else had thrown out a hamburger wrapper. A cardboard box was another 50 feet up the shoulder.

Less than a week after our SOLV clean-up, the litter is back with a vengeance.

Oh, and then there’s the corporate litter of the illegal 1-800-GOT-JUNK signs in the right of way. I’ve removed six of these miniature billboards in the last few days.

I know, I know, Saturday night I wrote a consoling thought in this blog about the malaise of trash along our boulevards. “Joy is whatever is in the present moment minus our opinions about it.”

I’m having a problem expunging my opinions about the new litter and the slobs responsible for it.

Tonight, driving home, I found no joy.

Oh, and I will call the local 1-800-GOT-JUNK franchisee, Tom Maryschak (believe me, he knows me), to tell him that his signs are still not appreciated and that I got HIS junk. Six signs now reside in my garage. Since the backs are blank, they come in handy for garage sale signs and peace placards or to cover work surfaces. I once made a bird feeder out of one.

Someone should write a book titled: “101 things to do with 1-800-GOT-JUNK signs.”

Any ideas?

Actually, I do feel an odd twinge of promise, if not joy, when I see 1-800-GOT-JUNK signs. I always pull over and yank them out. I know that, with a little imagination, they can be put to good use.

As long as Tom plants them along the roadside, I’ll happily and productively harvest them.

Judgment and Joy: Confessions of a litter gatherer

The mind goes to strange places on a SOLV litter-collection patrol as I was this morning.

Our stretch of road was Capitol Highway downhill from Terwilliger and then along busy Barbur Boulevard.

It can be treacherous in places, with cars whisking by just inches from you and your bulging litter bag. So treacherous, in fact, that the mind of a fellow litter-picker-upper wandered to his obituary and what it might say if a errant, speeding car instantly turned him into so much human litter.

Occasionally I assumed the motorists perspective. I thought of myself as a kind of strange roadside attraction. I even imagined motorists wanting to thank us. Then I thanked them for not thanking us. A well-meaning honk would simply startle and distract.

I confess that I spent much of my time warding off anger. Each piece of litter represented a fellow human being’s neglect and irresponsibility. As strange as it seems, a few hundred pieces of litter can lead to a real snit.

I could feel that happening, particularly when a cigarette butt or a Styrofoam peanut would slip from the tentative grasp of my extension arm grabber. So much of the litter represented addiction. A beer can, a filter tipped butt, even a candy wrapper.

I couldn’t get too huffy because I share some of this addictions; it’s just that I don’t leave a trail of evidence behind for all to see.

I also imagined humanoid archeologists, centuries from now, sifting through some Barbur Boulevard detritus for artifacts. This very litter I was jamming into my white SOLV bag would be signs of our times. What would those scientific scavengers of the 25th Century conclude about us?

It would depend a lot on them and where our future, and their past, had delivered them. Digging along four-lane highways and striking a battered Mercedes grill (yes, I found one) or a hubcap (I snagged two), they might think we traveled too fast or too slow. Or too much or too extravagantly. Or carelessly or dangerously.

Just as I did this morning, eons from now they would find mounds of litter (garbage really) near the trailheads leading to the homeless camps tucked in the woods between Barbur and Terwilliger. What is litter to the homeless, many of them hounded by demons of one sort or another? How angry could I be with them? I thought that I could be among them — especially if I continued for days gathering wrappers and bottles and hubcaps along the roadside. Ultimately a maddening task. Their daily search for survival (warmth, food, love) is likely as maddening.

As I felt my anger building I thought of something my wife shared with me last week as we were stuck on a shuttle bus in Las Vegas traffic (don’t ask). She had heard it from her yoga instructor. “Remember,” she said, “joy is whatever is in the present moment minus our opinions about it.”

I decided to take the advice. I decided to just pick up the litter. Never mind why it was there, who left it or what 25th Century archeologists would think of it or of us.

Just — pick — it — up — and — put — it — in — the — bag.

Just — pick — it — up — and — put — it — in — the — bag.

Just — pick — it — up — and — put — it — in — the — bag.

Ah, the joy of it all!

Sex, SOLV and civic pride

Combing Barbur Boulevard’s shoulders for litter this morning as a SOLV volunteer (Quick, what does SOLV stand for?) was a not an unpleasant experience.

Note the inescapable nuancing.

Sure, I find it annoying that motorists still use the Great Outdoors as a trash receptacle. I mean, who are these people?

Well, smokers for one. At times my litter picking was a kind of cigarette butt-a-thon.

A certain litter-collecting detachment is called for at times like this. Trying to think well of these smoking litter-bugs, the best I could come up with was, “Good luck with the chemo.”

The other major littering group are fast food and soft drink patrons. Smashed cans and wrappings from McDonald’s and Subway are their tossed leavings.

Reaching for the scraps with my arm extending litter “grabber,” stuffing the waste into my SOLV bag, I also reached for more detachment, warding off junk-food thoughts of diabetes and clogged arteries,

(Still working on SOLV? Frankly I can’t think of it myself. Something to do with Volunteers, Oregon, Litter and … what?….Super? Solution? Staunchly? Stamp-out? AHHH. Stamp-out Oregon Litter, Volunteers? Oh, never mind….Back to the trash….)

Sometimes the clean-up uncovers trash of distinction, but nothing interesting surfaced this time.

Instead I retrieved:

The inevitable walnut-sized chunks of Styrofoam. Trust me, the last human creation on the planet, eons from now, will be such a moldering chunk.

Shredded plastic bags, a few mossy bottles, creased and discolored candy wrappers, most notably from Reese’s Pieces (ET go home!) and Snickers.

Some worn and discolored sheet metal and strands of banding. Ugly but probably valuable.

Cast-off hub caps, but plastic, cheap and shattered. Ah, for one of those shiny '50s VW disks.

Nothing to seize the imagination.

Once on one of these litter-gathering outings I found a pristine pair of stiletto high-heels along the much littered Multnomah Boulevard I-5 off ramp.

“Whoa!” I thought as I gripped my grabber more tightly and launched into a sex-filled fantasy laced with booze, flirtatious taunts and even noir-ish homocide.

Could such imaginings be the reason I volunteer for SOLV (Still working on it?). Or is it the nose-to-the-ground concentration, the vague reflections on chance and trash. The finicky sordidness of it all as the traffic whooshes past.

It could be simpler than that. After a couple hours’ work with two or three friends, Barbur Boulevard or Capitol Highway or the Multnomah I-5 off-ramp does look measurably better to us and to thousands of motorists.

The reward is civic satisfaction.

Anything beyond that is just so much Styrofoam frosting — or stilettos shoes.

Oh, and looking up what SOLV stands for on the SOLV web site, I find….absolutely NOTHING! They don’t know what it means either! Or, if they know, they aren’t telling, like some kind of secret handshake.

For the rest of us, SOLV is a contrivance or a state of mind (see above).

If you want to pursue the SOLV name business, fine. Let me know what your find out. I’m going to take a well-deserved nap.