Some thoughts on Trash

This was an essay I was composing in my head. They are never as good on paper...

The sun is hot and I am picking through grass and scrub oak for trash. I use a trash-grabber, a claw that is as delightful to use as it was when I was small and stole my brother’s extendo-arm and never got to play with it as much as I’d like and now am playing for hours with the sun warm on my neck and it’s early enough spring still that there are no bugs droning.

How long does it take before refuse is no longer trash? I find tin cans smashed and rusted, barbed wire that was once a fence tangled in the brush, broken glass rubbed rough and smooth as a pebble. These pebbles were refuse once. Some glacier brought them from far away and set them here and laid them down into the soil deep like the wind and snow and sun have these cans. These pebbles are not the granite of our mountains, they are transplants, they are foreign but not trash. I dig a flattened can up and out of the dust and wonder if I’m preserving or disturbing.

Beer bottles, whole and broken. Beer cans, smashed, shot, rusting, full of rain and whatever else. Was it prohibition that drove men to the outskirts to do their drinking? Moonshiners, gunrunners, hiding their stills, speakeasies, swigging flasks from the law? Or did this all start much earlier? Start with ceremony, with altars on mountaintops and wine? With oak groves? On moors with ale and meat and fire? Have we always sought oblivion where it spreads like wings from the moon?

Styrofoam. Whenever I find a piece of Styrofoam I think of two things: one, the egg carton I decorated with nail polish and kept painting as it melted and warped and shriveled. This is when I learned what fumes were and about the hole in the ozone. Two, where on earth did this come from? Literally, as light as leaves and almost as plentiful, I wonder where it traveled from and where it will go before it never returns to dust.

In the early nineties Utah’s handful of environmentalists prevailed on the state to begin an anti-litter campaign. Don’t Waste Utah, yellow stickers were stuck and there were commercials: a leather-clad, 5 o’clock shadowed, motor-cycle rider was the star. The commercials were filmed in the expanse of Utah deserts and the hero took personal offense to trash thrown from cars and he looked soulfully into the camera and I swore never to litter ever, or maybe I would to bump into this nameless do-gooder. A regular Aragorn of environmentalism.