This doesn’t feel Pit-Worthy, but if a Mod feels it’s too rant-ish, feel free to move it.
We went apple picking today. We’re fond of Masker’s Orchards. Pretty big orchard resting on a hill that gives a completely soothing view of Warwick, New York. Judging from the license plate plastic frames, we had the usual huge crop of leafpeepers from The City as well as locals.
Here and there in the rows of trees, families/ groups of pals had settled down for picnics. The orchard encourages this, and I think it’s a gorgeous place to do this- if not overly private. After all, anyone can walk down any row of trees in search of the pluperfect Empire or Winesap. ( They don’t have Winesaps any more, which just slays me. But I digress. )
Time after time, we’d come upon the trashy remnants of someones picnic. C’mon people. Show a modicum of manners and pick up after yourself. Here and there along the dirt-road aisled that cars used to move up and down and sideways on the hill were large metal trash cans.
This is not unique to this place, of course. Why is it that folks assume that they can walk away from a mess that they made? It’s appalling. In more organized settings such as pavillions at town parks, there may well be folks who clean up the pavillion area- but every time I’ve participated in an event at one of those places, it’s been made very clear that the citizen who signed out the pavillion is to clean up REALLY well. And, we do.
This is a private orchard and they extend the courtesy of letting folks use their apple tree areas for the pleasure of a picnic. Why can’t folks return the kindness by taking out everything they brought in with them ?
I hear you. The first rant I ever posted to our local Craigslist was about a group of pigs at China Beach who could carry all their beer and food down to the beach, but gee, it must have been too heavy to carry the empties and containers back up.
Preach it, brother.
I’ve got a co-worker who, every day, empties the dregs of his coffee cup into the sink. And every day, he misses and dribbles across the countertop. Every single day. For someone who doesn’t drink coffee, I clean up a heck of a lot of spilled coffee. Bleck.
I have a plot in a community garden. The garden is on the back of the property of a community center, but is not walled off and is visible to two streets as well as the center. We have a shed and have been keeping plastic grocery bags on the outside door handle for gardeners to take home their harvest in.
We had to take down the bags, since persons unknown have–more than once, mind you–availed themselves of these bags instead of troubling themselves to find a toilet. And of course left the treasures for us to discover. Truly, truly sickening. I guess I should consider myself lucky they had the good manners to avoid crapping directly on my strawberries.
Are there trash receptacles in this area? The take-in take-out thing seems to be beyond the understanding of many people.
What kills me around here is the park picnickers. There are trash receptacles every yard or so in the two parks near my apartment, yet every Saturday and Sunday cups and bottles and napkins and other assorted garbage is strewn about. It gets windy sometimes (ya think?) and then the garbage piles up in large clumps against the fences.
You want to despair? Help out with a beach cleanup day. The beach I helped at was bordered by two creeks which were fishing spots. You could tell where people liked to stand while fishing because there was a pile of beer cans in the weeds and mangroves behind each spot just out of easy sight. In a way, it was better, because it was pre-sorted recyclables. But the mental image of some guy chain drinking while standing in one spot and throwing the cans over his shoulder fills me with loathing and disgust.
I used to clean up public land in the middle of nowhere. The seldom used trails still were covered with litter in a years time. I would see garbage two miles down the trail the day after I hiked all the garbage out.
In a little more used area, I had picked up and removed three grocery bags of garbage. An obnoxious man, wife and kid started to fish. He was abusive to the other two. Physical violence was something he probably dished out regularly too. They had finished a McDonalds lunch at the fishing place I had just cleaned up. He threw the bag, the cups, and the wrappers into the river. I was walking to my car to leave and he was about five feet from me. I almost pushed him into the water at that point as a reaction on the emotional level the instant the trash was thrown in. He had my hackles up already, because of his mistreatment of the other two for the last ten minutes.
In spring at a parking lot I could end up with a dumpsters worth of bagged trash I piled up next to bigger things dumped there. Where I have cleaned up, I have found dumped as far into the wooded public lands as people could drive a vehicle, the following.
A twelve foot boat broken in half.
Refrigerators
Air Conditioners
Many matresses
Truck Loads of horses shit.
A pile of aggressive non native plants dumped and rerooted and spreading.
A floating refrigerator dumped in a roadside marsh where a heron had come every year for at least five years to nest. I guess it was easy access and they thought it would be hid by the water. The county or DNR took two years to remove that, and the bird never used the spot since the incident.
Tires
Living room furniture sets.
I’ve seen land along trails where a motel dumped all it’s plumbing fixtures and cabinets in the woods next to the motel. The pile is at leasts 15 feet tall.
I also had a trail go through a maze of couches appliances and rusted junk residents had hauled there. It wasn’t the official town dump. It was just out of sight from the road.
If a town or city permits an activity that generates trash, why don’t they have an obligation to PROVIDE TRASH RECEPTICLES? Take a fast food stand-why don’t ehy have to have a trash pail that you can deposit your wrappers into?
I was in Rocky Mountain National Park last week and not only did this one family climb out on the rocks in clear defiance of the signs, but they took their garbage wrappers with them to let loose across the landscape.
I was recently hiking off trail in the forest up in Banff, and had to carry out a 14 year old empty bag of potato chips. It had sat there that long, and the expiration date was still legible. The bag itself probably would have been there for a 100 years before it disappeared!
It really gives you insight into why we still find pottery shards and baskets from hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Some software company burried a huge pile of video games a while back. I think they built over it , but don’t remember. I wonder what the person putting up a new building there in a hundred years will do with semi loads of unopened packaged games. I was long enough ago that they may be cartridges with eproms.
Yes. While it is, as I said, a completely private family-owned apple orchard, since they make it clear they’re happy to have picnickers ( sp? ), they do have the large heavy steel green metal trash cans here and there. Are there tons? No. However, it seems to me that the first-time visitor wouldn’t be bringing a picnic lunch. Therefore, returning folks who wish to picnic should know that they will bring in, carry to car, dump in metals cans here and there throughout the property, and drive off-site with no trash in their car.
It is not asking too much.
As far as the encounter with Mr. Abusive Litterbug, you showed a lot of restraint. If I was there cleaning up, I’d have had a hard time suppressing something like, " If you’re not a part of the solution ( wave half-filled trash bag ), you’re part of the problem. "
Jesus, reading this thread… I think I literally felt my blood pressure spike. A physical reaction to the anecdotes posted. Then the heron story made me cry.
Bless you, picker-uppers of trash. F— you, litterers. I hope some day you choke on your own garbage.
I was very ticked off when our state parks said they would not provide trash recepticles for day users of the park. They still have a dumpster for the camp ground. I was even more anoyed to find they removed the recepticles from the frick’n restrooms. You know the places where nasties you don’t ever want to deal with again can be left. The womens section must have been even better if you consider it a moment. The result is trash on the batroom floors. Who’d have thought it. :dubious:
