Yesterday, my email box filled with trash. Well, that’s not unusual, but these were messages about trash and the local collection thereof, rather than that dreary array of penis enlargement, drug access, Rolex watches, and fake Louis Vuitton handbag scams. Here on the Point, it appears, trash is a really emotional issue.
Who knew? It’s sometimes an irritating issue, certainly. Anyone who has ever lived in a resort community in the vacationing season will know what I mean. Take a walk and take note of not only the beer cans and fast food containers, but also the entire bags of garbage that fill the byways of your little community. I’ve never actually seen anyone pitch stuff out the door of their moving car, but it must be happening, because there are the roads, there are the cars, there are the tourists, and there are the trash bags. Hard to think of any other explanation. And, since we live in two different resort communities and we have experienced this detritus-by-the-road in both, that seals the case for me.
Right now, down the street, there is a painfully unusable 4-burnerless electric stove sitting by the side of the road where someone has kindly offered it to his neighbors as “Free!” I guess so, since garbage has such a low value. Some irritated local has crafted an additional sign on the hapless stove, pointing out that some ‘loser’ is hoping others will take his “free” garbage to the dump for him.
At least, the tourists can’t be blamed for this unless they are now vacationing with their old appliances. I can’t think of any way that the high price of gas would account for such activity (“What with the price of gas, we had to dump our old stove by the side of the road when we were vacationing down in Point Roberts”?), so I must assume it is one of my less-than-thoughtful fellow community members who has decided he’d like to share the view of his old stove with the rest of us. Years ago, when I used to attend rural auctions in New England, whenever some obviously useless bit of crap was being put up for auction, the auctioneer--facing no bids--would eventually point out to us that object could be used for a planter. So maybe a stove planter is in somebody’s future—you could put a geranium pot in each of those burner holes. Actually, I hope someone picks it up for that purpose. Otherwise it’s going to be a long summer, fall, winter, spring and summer again before that stove goes back to the metallic dust from whence it came.
Some years ago, up on the Sunshine Coast, we came upon a tourist bag of garbage that had been slung by the side of the road. Good sports that we were, we carried it home to dispose of in our own trash barrel. When we got home, though, we found that there was an interior bag entirely filled with junk mail addressed to a fellow in North Vancouver. So we mailed that part back to him, with an enclosed letter pointing out that his junk mail was even more useless by the side of the road in Roberts Creek, so could he please attend better to it and, if he couldn’t master the skill of properly disposing of personal goods, could he try vacationing somewhere else in the future. He didn’t write back. It is possible we did not include a return address, of course.
So, those of you who are driving and walking about, throwing garbage and trash out on the roadsides where other people live and walk: Cut it Out! If you think somebody else should be taking care of your garbage, you are either a full-fledged loser, as the sign says, or an immature teenager. In either case, time to grow up.
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