Trash Picking Treasures

On Saturday, October 13, 2012, it rained. Thirty-five volunteers gathered under tents at the Merecroft Village parking lot in Campbell River, sipping on hot Tim Hortons’ coffee and stuffing luxuriously sweet Tim Bits into their mouths. I joined the crew at ten o’clock, gulped down a black coffee and headed off with my new friend, Robin, on our 2600 metre trek.

The Greenways Land Trust volunteers had provided us with a set of garbage tongs, a garbage bag, a pair of work gloves and a reflective Visi-Vest.

We found all kinds of discarded things under bushes, floating in water, stuffed between rocks, fluttering from tree branches and sitting on the sidewalk. Our most numerous trash items were cigarette butts and our one-off item was a large wet cardboard box. Three of our greatest finds were a precious herb plant that poked up from a crack in the sidewalk, a tree covered in what looked to be grapes, and a spectacular pink-leaved tree on the grounds of a church.

Two hours later, back at the parking lot, we were rewarded with more coffee and donuts, a Tim Horton’s T-shirt and a warm thank you from the organizers. One of the trash picking volunteers, and a new member of the Adopt-A-Block team, Ms. Tia, shared with me that she had been cleaning rubbish in the nearby forest and came upon a fawn curled up in the bushes. The precious thing didn’t move and so she continued a bit further and found the mother also lying down, out of the rain. She looked at the mother deer and said, “I’m here to clean up your home.”

Trash Picking Treasures

courtesy of www.buckmanager.com