Trash Town

I cannot comprehend this one. This town that presents itself as being the perfect example of Small Town America.... this town that begs you to love it for its vibrancy and tiny little individual homes... this town that has seen better days but knows there's something better in store for it soon... This Town Has A Problem!

It's trash. It's litter, litter everywhere! It's scads of bottles and cans and garbage strewn around its streets. I don't mean the occasional tossed item. There are streets where it looks like garbage cans were dumped out. There's broken glass from bottles just about everywhere. I'd be afraid to have my grandsons walk alongside the road, there's that much glass around.

Why? How could any community allow this to happen? Do you suppose it's "A Cultural Thing"? That something like this has been going on for so many generations that people just don't bother to notice anymore? That's it's sort of expected to toss your soft drink cup when you come home from a fast food joint? If that's so, the folks that live in this town must have really clean car interiors.

Bill and I have embarked on a mission. We're going to clean up our town. One street at a time. Hey, Superior isn't a very big town. There can't be THAT many streets here with a population hovering around three thousand. We should be able to get it cleaned up in what remains of our lifetimes, don't you think?

It's a simple proposition. Our garbage is picked up twice a week. Rarely, do we have a full trash can. So at least once a week on the night before a pick-up, we each take a really big Hefty garbage bag and head for the street. We pick up until our bags are about two-thirds full, then go home and stuff them in our garbage can. We started on our own street, just that block. Then, on the next week, we turned the corner and did the block on the connecting street. There was one lot that looked like it might have substituted for the town dump and we mostly just picked up our two bags of stuff on that lot alone. Then, this week, we did the next block up, still on our street. It's on a hill and I guess it's a thrill when you charge down the hill to lob your garbage out on the hillside. It had cacti and Salt Cedars festooned with plastic bags and bottles and cans, and glass, of course. The ubitiquitous glass.

The glass, I think, must be leftover from the Heydays of the saloon. This town has been a haven for booze loving men for a hundred and twenty years. I don't know how many saloons there were here in the "old days" but there's still about five or six here now and that's a fair number for three thousand souls, wouldn't you say? And thinking back to the Wild West days, I bet it was sort of a sign of prestige to be able to lob a bottle out a door or window and watch it splinter into the desert sand. Maybe it sounded good. Maybe it felt good too, if you were really wound up and wanted to make your point. Maybe all of that turned into "A Cultural Thing" so that five generations later, people are still lobbing their beer bottles out their truck windows and watching them splinter into the desert sands.

Well, can I suggest something? Let's change this "Cultural Thing" and instead start picking up the crud that's littering our town. Let's enjoy the landscape that the town deserves so we don't have to pick our way amongst litter and broken glass when we walk the streets of Superior. If we started doing this now, maybe I won't still have to be hefting Hefty bags when I'm eighty and still trying to pick up the town. And maybe I won't have to still be blogging about Trash Town thirty years from now.