Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
[F]irst the glad news: This year, the mess is less — fewer cans and bottles, fewer fast-food wrappings, fewer cigarette packages. Less of everything that typically and chronically contributes to the annual accumulation around here of roadside mess.
Less, but still a lot.
Beer bottles and beer cans still predominated in our plastic collection bags today. Iced tea containers, I note, are surging. Who, the thought drifts into me, are the big spenders around here who can afford to pay a dollar or more for 2-3 cents worth of ingredients in a flashy can — a trace of cheap tea, tap water from somewhere or other, and a wallop of sugar to go with it? The can alone, together with the text and exuberant art boosting the product, costing more than what it contains.
There were fewer empty cigarette packages by the roadside on my tour today — oncologists and cardiologists take note. And, mysteriously, fewer take-out food containers. That last observation is one that doctors treating diabetic patients could take note of, as well as cardiologists, since sugar figures prominently and inevitably in every kind of fast food produced and purveyed in our endlessly besugared and befatted land.
We found altogether, my wife and I, by the side of the road, just one piece of automotive junk that you might call an innocent — because involuntary — piece of litter: a heavy rusted-out mudflap installation that fell from someone’s car, used up and worn out. Nobody’s fault or bad intention there.
But bottles, cans and food wrappings — it’s they that account for most of the annual roadside mess, those are the eyesores that travelers are bound to encounter every day of the year until the next Green Up Day comes along and carts them away. We are a guzzling, chewing and perennially unfulfilled bunch, filling our stomachs when it’s our souls that are the needy organs. And the welter of wrappings and containers that support that endless snacking! There they are, sticking their tongues out at us on the public roads everywhere.
Who, I wonder, as I walk the road on Green Up Day, my eyes peeled for the next piece of commercial trash — who are the “they” who anonymously toss their private stuff out their car window and onto the public roadway? I have my own view of what belongs at and on the roadside around here: nature, generally speaking, interrupted by agriculture, and the occasional house. What constituted the landscape of 19th century Vermont that we moderns like to idealize, a time when Vermont’s active barns, big and small, far and away outnumbered today’s fast-food outlets of nibble, guzzle and slurp. I, born and bred in the city, but developing my citizenship here for the last 50 years, want that rural idyll back again.
We all sense and understand the reverse civics that impel littering: that my convenience and preserving the innocence of my car’s interior count for more than the wince in the other guy’s eye that my heedless act of littering will inflict, repeating for months to come.
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Here follow, for the fun of it and the education in it, descriptions of a very few of the things — wrappings and containers — I picked up by the roadside today … every one of them the product of some ambitious syndicate or corporation yelling, “ME-ME-ME! BUY ME! … the food, drink, smokes — that we love to punctuate our day with. With each product bound to shout out as loud and seductively as it can its name and splendors on the package it comes in.
We all sense and understand the reverse civics that impel littering: that my convenience and preserving the innocence of my car’s interior count for more than the wince in the other guy’s eye that my heedless act of littering will inflict, repeating for months to come.
Archeologists of the year 2517 take note:
• My series of choice roadside finds begins with “Natty-Daddy,” a beverage, subtitled “The Big One.” And BIG that one is: a foot-tall can containing 26 ounces, more than twice as much as the regular 12-ounce beer bottle or can. And BIG, too, is its alcoholic wallop, at 8 percent, compared with 5 percent in conventional beers.
Here follows a user’s review of the product (or a counterfeit planted by the manufacturer?) in plain English, that I found on the Natty-Daddy website:
“it is wat it is…cheapo beer…at first it was [expletive] this …now its like not bad maybe it got brewed a lil better….i like it….my cheap go to beer…its like drinkin 4 beers in 1 … drink it cold….drinkem slow….drunkness creeps up on u”
Having got us certifiably tipsy to begin with, and conscious of what they have wrought with their “4 beers in 1,” the Natty-Daddy people urge on their label that we should “Enjoy Responsibly.”
And then, rounding off its civic duty, the official label adds, “Please recycle.”
Yes indeedy, I think to myself, as I tuck this one more big can into my plastic sack.
— A hundred feet from where I began cleaning up my stretch of the road, I reach the gate of the tiny Rich-Hollister Cemetery with its array of tilting slate headstones, their inscriptions aging into illegibility. At the side of the road, within whispering distance of the cemetery gate, lies a plastic Arizona Iced Tea container, supersize at 23 ounces, a ghostly toast to the dead lying close by.
I think to myself that “To hell with everything” might have been the mental accompaniment of that toss of the Arizona Iced Tea can by the cemetery, and most of the other tosses as well, for that matter. I don’t think that toss of the tea can was meant as an injury to the cemetery. I would guess that the tosser, lost in himself, was oblivious of the cemetery, his mind in a dream, the action habitual. And the thought the same as went with the other specimens of tossed trash: To hell with everything … TOSS!
An observation to myself as I proceeded on my way: It’s been a rainy morning, and before it, a rainy week. Most everything I pick up is wet, begrimed and begraveled. I wear a glove on the hand I pick up with.
I find a single Advil bottle, and think of the crashing headaches that some people of misfortune live with, obliterating thought of everything and everyone else. Pity the litterer?
Champion for its headlong prose is another pickup: the wrapping of an ambitious candy I never heard of before, called “Road/!\Crew Lunch.” There is the simulation of a roadside warning sign in the middle of the product’s name, a triangle enclosing an exclamation point /!\, encouraging the idea that we’re having to do with the real thing, hard-working guys on the go, grabbing a quick bite before pitching into the heavy vital work ahead. The next line of text on the wrapping, still urgent, reads, “A Collision of Creamy Peanut Butter, RicePuffs, pretzels, and milk chocolate chunks.”
“A Collision,” I think, “of Creamy Peanut Butter, and all the rest? There’s poetry by the wayside for you!” A word-rush that matches the sugar-rush the product is designed to render.
