Trash

Ever since I can remember, there has been trash on the side of the road.  On the side of freeways.  "Litter" is another name for it.  No one is supposed to litter, but millions of people do, and when I was young I would sit in the back of my parents mini-van, on our way to LA on the 91 or some other freeway, and look out the window.  On the banks beside the freeway there was usually some landscaping, maybe some sprinklers sprinkling reclaimed water. And peppered throughout the oleander and the iceplant was litter.  As a child it seemed natural to me.  And over the years it has become a symbol of Southern California.  I myself have never littered, I swear.  But the litter spread around the out-of-doors seems right to me.  Good even.

As a girl scout we would have to pick up trash after a camping trip or an all day event.  It was always a nuisance to do that.  But I took it to heart that: one should not leave thy trash strewn around.  My mother instilled the idea in my head that people who threw trash outside their car windows were, "Low-life scum.  Losers.  Idiots."  They didn't care about the planet, anything or anybody.  Why did people just toss a cup out of the window?  Because they were driving through Lake Elsinore?  Because they think Ontario is ugly anyway, what's another bag of old hamburgers?  With our church we would have whole Saturdays where we went to public places and picked up trash for community service hours.  It was brutal.  We would each fill up a couple of trash bags full of wrappers, soda cans, soda bottles, chip bags.  Those were the days we dreaded. But like with girl scouts, I took my job seriously, and I felt pride in cleaning up. Cleaning is very satisfying.  

When I moved to Washington state for a few years, right away when I drove in I noticed that there was very little, if any, trash on the side of the road.  It was beautiful!  That state is amazingly clean.  Of course, it rains all the time, so the trash is probably washed into the storm drains or something.  But actually, Washingtonians care about their surroundings.  We walked around Bellevue, a city where I lived, a lot, and there wasn't any trash on the side of the road. Everything was spic and span.  And there was actual foliage everywhere, not just dirt with a few oleander and iceplant watered with reclaimed water.  And in between the trees were small ferns and moss. No fast food refuse.

Every time I would return home for a visit, I would thrill at the smog, open skies, trashy strip malls.  Sigh.  How I've missed California, I would think.  When I would fly out of LAX, I would tear up at the decaying fast food bags, crumpled up next to Marlborough Light boxes and Coke cans next to the freeway off-ramp.  Goodbye for now.  I'll see you when I get back.  

I did come back, and re-assimilated myself to the garbage culture.  And it wasn't until my visit to Madison, WI, that I remembered how a place could actually be clean.  I walked all over that town and saw two pieces of trash total!  What a clean place!  People care!  They listened to their mothers here!  Amazing!  It is a really great place, I was completely smitten with it after my brief visit.  What a clean place.

But when I got off the plane at LAX and stepped out of the airport, I smelled the thick smoggy air, saw some litter on the side of the freeway and rejoiced!  I am home at last.  For no matter how much I can admire such clean, pristine places where people have pride in their environment, I am, at heart, a Southern California native.  And I have pride in, yes, the strip malls, the freeways, the traffic, and the trash.  I don't condone littering, but it's a fact of our lives, and somehow, it's a part of me.  I couldn't live anywhere else.  Just me, Shaun and the highway litter.  We'll drive off, into the gorgeous sunset, on the freeway, and speed by the trash on the side of the road.