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.
[B]esides the mighty changes going on in the country now that keep some of us tuned in as never before to the inpouring of the daily news, I can testify to a small change on our road in Marshfield. Yesterday, my wife and I went out on our quiet unpaved road in observance of Green Up Day, carrying each an empty green plastic bag and a stick with a nail, point out, at its end, our usual equipment when we go a-scavenging on that one day of the year.
We’ve made that brief annual trek along the same road for most of the last 50 years, beginning, in 1969 or ’70, and I can happily testify that the pickings of the roadside litter were slimmer this year than ever before. As usual, bottles and cans predominated in the litter we picked up. We’re a thirsty race, and don’t mind shelling out money to quench our thirst when our drink is laced with alcohol or sugar. But they — bottles and cans — were much fewer this year than usual … than ever before in my experience, in fact. The same with fast-food wrappings. Patrolling the same distance we’ve covered in past years, about a mile and a half, we netted both of us much smaller amounts of roadside trash than we’ve done in past years.
And — puritans and health advocates, take heart! — our “haul” held fewer beer cans and cigarette packaging than ever before.
Of course, given the Statistics of Small Numbers, the casual conclusions we drew Saturday from that once-a-year foray we make with our green bags, that the times they are a’changing, could be caused by a change in the habits of just one person travelling that stretch of road just a few times a week through the year: that one smoker-and-drinker, perhaps, who traveled our road on his way home from work and looked for solace for life’s hardships in the contemplative half hour of the drive home, with beer-and-a snack handy, to tone down Life’s Large Hungers. Might it be that this year our hypothetical traveler turned over a new leaf, or moved to another place, and no longer takes out his griefs, if that’s what they are, by delivering a couple of tosses on our peaceful roadside?
Who knows?
There are two established farms, incidentally, on our stretch of road. While doing my annual Green Up stint a couple of days ago I saw one farmer neighbor, too distant to greet, cutting up firewood on his “free” Saturday morning. The second of those two farmers came out of his barn to greet me and say a few words when I hove into sight, working his stretch of the road … came out of his barn where he had been working — I could see that on his shirtfront — on the selfsame morning when I was sporting with my green bag and nail-pointed stick.
“Sporting?” Me? Well, kind of. The job I was doing was merely decorative, you might say, with no cash value, even, to mark its small importance.
Maybe in a very large perspective, the health of the planet, say, and the bequest of a visible form of decency to our posterity, my green bag and pointed stick routine was “necessary,” as the work my two neighbors were doing was necessary, too. But not with the immediacy of the pressing work they were doing right then on that same Saturday morning: they the farmers of the neighborhood.
Why, without them …
