Nonfiction by Marcia Yudkin
This year the litter is blue – a bright, metallic hue found nowhere in nature. Not even our lake sparkling in the reflection of a cloudless sky matches that color. Nestled among stalks of ragweed or heaps of dried-up leaves along the roads near me, blue cans glint in sunlight.
In the past I spotted much more variety in the tossed-out containers: amber Michelob bottles, fruit-colored hard-seltzer cans, translucent one-shot nips of brandy or vodka, red pop-tops sporting the distinctive Coca-Cola script and white Budweisers speckled with red and blue swirls. But this summer and fall, it’s overwhelmingly blue Bud Lights blighting the roadsides.
For years I’ve waged a secret campaign against such aluminum discards. During my daily five-mile walks from home, if a can catches my eye in the quarter-mile or half-mile stretches without any houses I’ll gingerly pick it up and drop it off in the brush beside the next driveway. The cans normally disappear within a week rather than start to form a junkyard. In this way, I spread responsibility for restoring nature’s harmonious palette of greens, grays and browns, so restful to experience.
Why don’t I instead blitz through my walking routes once in a while, adding all the tossed-away cans to a trash bag like a reverse Santa Claus? Humorist David Sedaris did this obsessively in West Sussex, where he lives, his hauls becoming legendary to the point that his district named a garbage truck “Pigpen Sedaris” to honor him.
For me, though, the idea of getting known in my neighborhood as a trash vigilante makes me uneasy. While some would applaud my public service, others might kick dirt in my face over it, like the gun-loving guy one town over who taunted his opposite-politics neighbor by plunking a ratty old portable toilet at the outlet of their shared driveway. It feels safer not to be conspicuous, to carefully stick to the path of peaceful co-existence.
Until this summer and fall, I assumed from the variety of roadside trash that it came from random passers-through, drivers from other towns who had no reason to care if they littered here. “Why do people do this?” I once asked a hiking buddy who grew up in our area. In Massachusetts, Anne told me, it’s illegal to have an open container of anything alcoholic in a moving truck or car. For some reason I didn’t know this.
People who chug a beer on the way home from work therefore toss the can when it’s almost empty, Anne said, so as to not get in trouble if a cop stopped them. Yet never once in 20 years have I seen anyone pulled over by police on our back roads – not for speeding, for having an out-of-date inspection sticker or for anything else. Or maybe they didn’t want folks at home to know how many beers they were drinking.
And now because almost all the cans matched one another and because new empties would show up like overnight tin mushrooms right after I cleared a stretch of road, I began to suspect that this was from just one Bud Light fan who lived nearby. If I tracked where the blue discards appeared and which roads never had them, mightn’t that indicate the culprit’s homeward route – and maybe lead like breadcrumbs to his location? Perhaps he (yes, in my mind it was a man) would nod nicely when I told him the impact of his tosses onto seemingly neglected yet actually cherished verges.
After all, soon after my husband and I first moved to the country, a guy who often canoed in the marsh behind our house came by and complained that the regulation-blue tarp we’d hung up to shelter our back deck from rain spoiled his view. Couldn’t we put up something brown instead? Surprised, we replaced the tarp – almost exactly the vivid hue of the Bud Lights bothering me now – with something matching our dark wood shingles. Since then, the natural colorscape I live amongst has grown on me.
But most likely the litterer would respond with “Who do you think you are, lady?” Right. Who do I think I am? Am I being righteous or self-righteous? Asked in my imagination, the questions echoed and echoed.
As a cleanup fairy, I’m not doing any harm, I finally decided, especially if I move the litter to unobtrusive staging areas instead of next to driveways. One Saturday I hauled seventeen half-smashed blue beasties to the town dump along with my own week’s trash. Soon a blanket of white, growing higher and higher, began to cover any cans I missed. And when the winter sun twinkled, winking at me as I walked were Bud Light-colored reflectors, waist-high on long metal stems, telling the snowplows where not to go.
Marcia Yudkin lives in the woods of Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960). The author of 17 books, she publishes a Substack newsletter called Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com) in which she critiques society’s myths and misunderstandings about introverts.
