Working on the Chain Gang

Wayne, the gang boss started out by giving us "The Rules".

"Watch out for traffic. Make sure you have your orange vest on at all times. And you don’t have to go down steep bankings unless you want to."

OK so far, but then he went on.

"If you come across any bags containing pipes or bottles, don’t touch them. Apparently, because the polis can trace stuff from dumpsters, the meth producers are now driving out into the country to dump their old equipment. However, if you open those bags, the fumes can kill you. Also, if you come across anything like a human body or a weapon, simply mark the spot and leave it alone."

Melissa and I both perked up at the thought of finding a gun or maybe a bazooka or rocket launcher by the side of the road. Who knew highway cleanup would be this big of an adventure?

A bunch of us had volunteered to give up our Sunday afternoon by doing our bit for the neighborhood as part of the "Adopt-A-Highway" trash collection program where concerned citizens wishing to help clean up littered thoroughfares can "adopt" a 1-mile stretch of road. The local government provides trash bags and reflective vest and twice a year, the volunteers go out and tidy "their" stretch of highway. The program was founded in Texas in 1985 and since then, thousands of groups have volunteered their time and effort picking up litter on highways all over the country. Forty-nine of the 50 states in the U.S. now have a program like Adopt a Highway.

One of my favorite web sites (Pinecam.com) has assumed responsibility for not one, not two, but two and a half miles of SR285 (there was an administrative mix-up, apparently) on either side of Pine Junction and a different crew had already spent a couple of hours the day before, cleaning up one stretch of road. It was our turn today. Suitably kitted out in our orange vests ("Mine doesn’t fit." "This clashes with my T-shirt." "What other colors you got?" etc.) and carrying our heavy-duty orange garbage bags and pointy sticks, we split into two groups and each took a side of the road.

I soon became a connoisseur of the different qualities of garbage. Beer cans were the easiest to collect as a swift stab with the pointy stick speared them easily on the nail. Bottles meant bending over to pick up by hand. Paper was straightforward enough too but the very worst was the plastic bags. Usually, these were tangled amongst the weeds but any attempt to extricate them invariably saw the plastic disintegrate. It didn’t take long to establish that unless the bag was easily accessible, it was best to simply leave it where it was.

It was also a learning experience to discover just how many beer cans and bottles 285’s drivers throw out of their windows. They aren’t beer snobs by any stretch of the imagination - with the exception of a few Corona bottles they were all domestic brews and let’s face it; you’d have to drink a lot of Coors Lite before you got any kind of benefit from its pitiful alcohol content. Even so, it does go a long way to explain some of the displays of reckless driving we routinely see.

The first dead body we came across turned out to have once belonged to a cat. We never did find any human ones but there were plenty more corpses by the side of the road. It was really rather tragic just how many. A couple of them were complete, such as the raccoon and one of the deer. However, most were in a state of disrepair and the majority were nothing more than partial skeletons. (Although you have to wonder; what kind of person would throw a deer skeleton out of a car window while driving.) Here’s a tip kids, write this down. If you’re ever in need of deer bones, skulls, ribs, vertebrae or teeth, just take a walk along any stretch of Colorado highway. They’re everywhere.

With the amount of meat lying around, it was inevitable the conversation would turn to the suitability of road-kill when it comes to making dinner plans.

"Oh yeah, I can just see the look on my daughter’s face if I told her I was cooking up road-kill." said Mary.

"You should go to Safeway" I told her. "Buy a ham bone and drop it in the pot. Then when she gets home, tell her you aren’t sure what it is but you found it this afternoon."

Nobody ever takes me up on my bright ideas.

We also came across the remains of that morning’s serious car accident. Judging from the skid marks it would appear the driver came around the corner too fast, apparently unaware that in Colorado the tradition is that whenever the road goes from two lanes to one, all drivers slam on the brakes and drop to 10 miles an hour below the speed limit. Nobody’s quite sure why; it’s just the way things are done around here. From the fast food wrappers we found at the site, it also suggests the driver didn’t have his full attention on the road but by the damage to the trees, I suspect he got pretty banged up.

On and on we trudged, under the blazing September sun. As each bag was filled we tied them in a knot and left them by the roadside from where they would magically disappear sometime the next day. We also added the tires, lumps of wood and larger car parts such as the bumper Ed found. Ed was particularly attentive when it came to recovering the old tires but we suspected that was because he was checking to see if they were better than the ones currently on his Jeep.

Finally, we made it down to the end of our designated mile where, grubby and tired but feeling pretty darn good about ourselves, we waited for the mini-van ride back to the start. 33 orange bags in total, which wasn’t a bad haul for such a short stretch. And it wasn’t just paper, beer cans, plastic bags and dead animal parts either; we came across some real treasure. A fire extinguisher, a thermos flask, an intact beer glass, lots of socks and several car parts among other things. However, Wayne won first prize with his trophy.

An empty can of "Karma Sutra Honey Dust."

You have to wonder just how much attention that driver was paying to the road.