Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(47)
What really got to me, though, was all the rubbish on the sides of the road. In London the idea is that if you put something on a wall or stuff it between the slats of a fence, it doesn’t count. Like it’s only really litter if it touches the ground, at which point it’s the wind that did it, not you. It’s frustrating, but I’d grown to expect trash in a city. In the countryside, though, and in such beautiful countryside, it’s heartbreaking, one of those things that, once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing.
Our property faces a winding, tree-lined lane that leads to Amberley, a village so picturesque and meticulously cared for that it seems almost false, like a movie set. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said the first time I saw it. Because it’s almost too much: the cozy pub, the twelfth-century church, and the two dozen or so perfect cottages, many with sloping thatched roofs. The center of life is a little food shop, and walking to it on that first December afternoon, I saw more litter than I had the entire fifteen years I spent in Normandy. I said to a woman I passed along the way, “Did a parade just come through?”
When I mentioned the trash to the neighbors, they agreed that it was a disgrace. “It wasn’t like this thirty years ago,” said the woman in the house to the right of ours. She couldn’t tell me why things had changed. It was just part of a general decline. In that regard it was like graffiti, something that had inexorably spread until people lost the will to fight against it. Then, to make themselves feel less powerless, they decided it was art. I tried looking at the trash that way: Oh, how the light plays off that vodka bottle! Look at the bright blue candy wrapper, so vivid against the fallen brown leaves. It didn’t work, though.
On my second day at the house I got on my bike and rode to the town of Pulborough. The first few miles are on narrow roads cut through a magnificent forest, the floor of which is relatively free of underbrush. This makes it easier for the deer to run, and affords a clearer view of the trash, entire bags of it sometimes. These are sacks of household garbage that people feel inclined to abandon for one reason or another. They’ll dump appliances too: microwaves, television sets, outdated sound systems released into the woods like they’d be happier there. There’s a landfill these things could be taken to, but it costs money and you’d have to go out of your way, so why not feed it all to the foxes? They like stereos, don’t they? And panini makers with frayed cords? Building supplies are another big item—cans of polyurethane, broken cinder blocks. Joint compound. Hot water heaters.
On the other side of the forest there’s a busy two-lane road. I’d been riding on it for a quarter of a mile when I came upon a man collecting garbage into a plastic bag. He looked to be in his late forties and wore a stocking cap pulled low over his forehead. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is someone paying you to do this?”
It was a wet day, and as a car barreled past, spraying me with mud, the man told me that he was acting on his own. “I live along here, and when the rubbish gets to be too much, when I just can’t stand it anymore, I come out and collect it.”
Another car sped by, and I said the queerest thing. “Well, you…,” I told him, “you are just a…really good…citizen.”
My face burned as I rode away, but later I’d reflect upon my goofy compliment and I would be glad that I’d stopped to offer it. It’s not that I changed a life or anything, but as the weeks passed and I eventually became that man by the side of the road, I’d grow to understand the value of a little encouragement.
Pick up litter, and people assume that it’s your punishment, part of your court-mandated community service. Is it him who’s been breaking into toolsheds? they wonder. Him who’s been stealing batteries from parked cars? At first I worried what passersby might think, but then my truer nature kicked in, and I became obsessed. When that happened there was no room for anyone else, except, occasionally, for Hugh, who does his part but won’t pull the car over to collect every plastic bag he comes across. He can talk about litter, but when the topic shifts to the price of heating oil or the correct way to lay a paving stone, he can shift with it. For me, though, there is no other topic.
Here’s who I’ve turned into since we moved to West Sussex: On a good day—a dry one—I don’t have any mud on my clothes, just the usual dirt from crawling under fences, this to chase down empty bottles of Lucozade, an energy drink that gives its consumers the power to throw more bottles farther. My arms are scratched from reaching into blackberry bushes for empty potato chip bags, of which there are a never-ending supply, potato chips in the U.K. being like meals in space. “Argentinean Flame Grilled Steak” a bag will read, or the new “Cajun Squirrel.”
Since cleaning roadsides has become my life, my fingertips have turned black, like spent matches, this the result of prying up bottle caps. There are almost always leaves and twigs in my hair, and because I know I’m going to get filthy, I dress for the occasion: in rags, like a hobo.
“You need to get yourself a good stick,” one of my neighbors said. “The kind with a nail on the end. That’ll save you from having to bend over.”
It’s a nice thought, but adding a harpoon to the mix would only make me more of an outcast. Then too, it might prove hard to carry. When I first started trash collecting, I did it on foot. Moving farther afield, I took to riding my bicycle, tying a bag of garbage to my rear fender and balancing a second, much larger one on my basket. On my back there’s a knapsack with moist towelettes in it. These I need after picking up dirty diapers or packs of spoiled meat that maggots are living in. I say to myself, Just leave it, but if I did, the road wouldn’t be clean, just almost clean, which is the same as fairly dirty.