Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(48)

Pedaling home through the forest, I’ll peer over my full, teetering trash bag and review my efforts: not so much as a cigarette butt to spoil the view. Enjoy it while you can, I think, for by the next morning it will be defiled. Once, I found a stroller with the seat burned out, this as if the child had spontaneously combusted. Weeks later I came upon a sex magazine, but for the most part it’s the same crap over and over, the crisp bags, the empty cans of beer and Red Bull, the endless Cadbury and Twix and Mars bars wrappers. The soda and candy point a finger toward kids, but according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, one-quarter of the population readily admits to throwing trash out the window. That’s thirteen million people I’m picking up after, and not one of them seems to appreciate it.





One afternoon while driving back from the beach, Hugh pointed out a McDonald’s bag vomiting its contents onto the pavement. “I say that any company whose products are found on the ground automatically has to go out of business,” he said. This is how we talk nowadays, as if our pronouncements hold actual weight and can be implemented at our discretion, like we’re kings or warlocks. “That means no more McDonald’s, no more Coke—none of it.”

“That wouldn’t affect you any,” I told him. Hugh doesn’t drink soda or eat Big Macs. “But what if it was something you needed, like paint? I find buckets of it in the woods all the time.”

“Fine,” he said. “Get rid of it. I’ll make my own.”

If anyone could make his own paint, it would be Hugh.

“What about brushes?”

“Please,” he said, and he shifted into a higher gear. “I could make those in my sleep.”

A few days later, returning from the butcher in Pulborough, he presented me with his goatskin-sack idea. “Everyone gets one, see. Then, if you want a soft drink or a takeaway coffee or whatever, that would be your mandatory container.” He seemed so pleased with himself. “It could even have a strap on it,” he said. “Like a canteen but soft.”

“Well, wouldn’t people just throw those out the window?”

“Too bad if they do, because they’re only allowed one of them,” he said.

“And how would you clean it?” I asked. “What if you wanted milk in the morning and wine at lunch? Wouldn’t the flavors run into each other?”

“Just…shut up,” he told me.





At night I lie in bed and map out the territory I’ll cover the following day. The thing that holds me back is maintenance, retracing my steps and spot-cleaning the stretches of road I’d covered the previous afternoon and the afternoon before that. What did my life consist of before this? I wonder. Surely there was something I was devoted to?

With the arrival of warm weather, it became a bit easier to live in the stable. Three old friends visited from the United States, one in July and two more in August. “Want to pick up rubbish on the sides of the road?” I asked.

And all of them answered, “Sure. That sounds fun!”

I felt like the Horsham District Council should have given them something, a free tour of the Arundel Castle, maybe. It’s the local government’s responsibility to clear away the trash, but in order to maintain all the roads, they’d need a crew of hundreds. And until people change their behavior, how much can they actually accomplish?

“I’m not judging, but do you ever throw litter from your cars?” I asked the men working on our house. They all told me no, and I said, “Really, you can be honest with me.”

I asked the cashier at the local shop, the owner of the tearoom, the butcher. “No,” they all told me. “Never.”





I find a half-empty box of doughnuts and imagine it flung from the dimpled hand of a dieter, wailing, “Get this away from me.” Perhaps the jumbo beer cans and empty bottles of booze are tossed for a similar reason. It’s about denial, I tell myself, or, no, it’s about anger, for isn’t every piece of litter a way of saying “f*ck you”?

In trying to make sense of it all, I create a weak-willed weight watcher, an alcoholic, an antisocial teenager, but the biggest litterer I ever knew was my Greek grandmother, who died in 1976. That woman would throw anything out a car window. Her only criteria was that it fit.

“What the hell are you doing?” my father used to shout, and it would take her a moment to figure out what he was referring to. Farting? No. Throwing a paper grocery bag out onto the highway? What was wrong with that? The important thing to Yiayiá wasn’t a clean outside but a clean inside. A tidy station wagon reflected upon you personally, while a tidy landscape, what was that? Look at the sky, littered with clouds, or the beach trashed with shells. How was that mess any different from a hundred cans in a ditch?

My grandmother didn’t drive, but if she had, there’d be no end to the garbage trail she might have left. It doesn’t take many people to muck up a roadside. A devoted handful can do the trick. One of the things I find repeatedly is a plastic Diet Coke bottle containing a meticulously folded Mars bar wrapper. I imagine this is someone’s after-work snack and that by putting the wrapper inside the empty bottle, the person feels he’s done his bit. And though he has turned two pieces of trash into one, until he learns to keep it in his car, I don’t think he’s entitled to pat himself on the back. Who are you? I wondered the first and third and fifth time I came across one of these stuffed bottles. Do you think about the four hundred years it will take for this to decompose, or is this as inconsequential to you as flushing a toilet?