There Should Be No Trash Left Behind!

This past summer I have tried to commit to walking to the City Park every day except Sunday and I have done pretty well except for a couple of weeks when I had some back trouble and another time when I fell and hurt my hand and knee and was laid up for a little while.  

It's about a half hour walk and on my way there is a large visitor's center parking lot.   High School kids cruise up and down Main St. and use it as a meetup place.  It is strewn with litter every morning so I pick up the junk and put it in the nearby dumpster.  I usually take along a plastic grocery bag as there is often enough to fill it up.  This is often the first place tourists visit in town and it's certainly giving them a bad impression unless cleaned up a bit so I have taken it on as a little service project to do on my way. 

It surprises me what one can find left behind from these nightly carousers!  Of course, there is the usual debris, fast food containers, and cans every morning so I pick up the junk and put it in the nearby dumpster.    But then there are items that I find especially disturbing to find on a parking lot in the middle of town.   Large unexploded fireworks, a sports bra,  eight packages of Coricidin Cough and Cold pills, cards advertizing for "girls $45," etc.  I talked to the police about over-the-counter Coricidin and they say it is being used as a recreational drug gives a high without being detectable later.  It's so sad that kids in this small town are engaging in such risky behavior!  

A couple of times I have seen that someone has changed the tire on their car and left the old tire there for someone else to deal with and have left oil containers from when someone changed their oil.  Somehow, this littering is due to a failure of parents to teach basic responsibility.  I know it was instilled into me when I was growing up that it was wrong to throw even a gum wrapper on the ground as only slobs did so because it makes work for others to pick it up.  And even when the dumpster is only ten feet away, apparently some are too lazy to use it!

But, while picking up litter, sometimes a person can find useful things and I fear I am beginning to become somewhat of a scavenger.  Some of it has been in that parking lot and some of it in or along the way to the park.  

So far this summer I have found $4.18.  In one place there was about $2 worth of pennies on the ground!  I scraped them together with my foot and filled up my jacket pocket. I have found such things as a leather cell phone holder, several good pens, two metal water bottles, a retractable dog leash, small stuffed toy dog, a 25 ft. extension cord, a remote control, metal coffee thermos, and two nice copper-bottomed saucepans with lids.  People often put things out on the boulevard for trash day and one day I found a bedside-type table with drawers in pretty good condition.  I came back and got it with the car.

At the City Park I have found some disgusting things which I have disposed of by handling them with a plastic bag--a large fish with the head on lying on a grill by a picnic shelter, dirty disposable diapers on the playground, a smashed watermelon, etc.  Someone dumped a pile of charcoal from a grill on the grass.  I told a park worker who said he would clean it up as I couldn't.

Twice I have found kids' shoes by the playground but left them on a park bench as perhaps someone may retrieve them.  They were gone the next day so they must have.  

And today, of all things, I found an empty bottle of Ensure at the visitor's center parking lot.  So  are the senior citizens partying up there too now?   Soon I'll be finding cast off Denture Creme packages, lost hearing aids, and canes!