Among all the other hats I wear, I’m also a volunteer and board member for the Blair County Chapter of PA Cleanways (www.pacleanways.org). PA Cleanways is an organization whose mission is to clean up illegal dump sites throughout the state, and empower individuals, businesses and organizations to clean their neighborhoods, footpaths, highways and other places that are prone to litter. We also are involved with recycling projects and educating people about the importance of keeping their environment clean. I’ve been a member of Cleanways for close to a decade.
My duties in Cleanways include participating in illegal dump site clean-ups. The clean-ups are organized in advance; involving gaining permission from property owners, municipalities and appropriate government agencies, enlisting volunteers, obtaining equipment and supplies necessary for performing the clean-up, and finally, doing the clean-up. Each clean-up is different, from the type of setting being cleaned up (roadside, river or stream side, bike path, other public lands, etc.) to the items being cleaned up, to the terrain of the land, weather conditions and more. It’s ultimately rewarding to arrive at a place that has been trashed out, pick up and remove the trash, and return that land to its natural beauty.
I just participated in our latest clean-up this morning. We were cleaning up an area just off Sugar Run Road between Altoona and Gallitzin, the dirt road that runs from Sugar Run Road to the Norfolk Southern main line railroad tracks. The road runs through Altoona Water Authority property heading up the hillside to the tracks, and the Water Authority partnered with the Blair County Chapter of PA Cleanways to clean up several areas where ignorant people dumped tires, trash, deer carcasses and other debris.
The deer carcasses were right at the foot of the road, near where it connects with Sugar Run Road. And the carcasses were still “ripe,” too. It made us eager to step away from our parked cars and walk up the road to where the bulk of the dump sites were!
The main dump area was about 500 yards up the road and around the bend, where a large amount of tires, old appliances and other trash had been dumped over a steep hillside. I’m not good with steep hillsides, so I wasn’t directly involved in this section of the clean-up. But since I also do photography for the Blair County Chapter’s website, I observed and photographed other volunteers using ATV’s to drag bundles of tires and large appliances up the steep hillside to the road, where the items could be loaded into pick-up trucks and trailers and transported to roll-offs located at the base of the road. Getting the tires cleaned up is especially important, since each tire can be a potential mosquito breeding ground whenever it collects rainwater.
I headed further up the road to a less steep hillside area, where several smaller dump sites were located. I picked my way through the brush, thorns and other greenery to pick up an assortment of items; including the usual suspects you find at these things – discarded plastic water and soda bottles, soda and beer cans, beer bottles, Styrofoam cups and containers (Styrofoam, by the way, pretty much can last forever, so once it’s tossed from a car window, it can be a permanent fixture on a roadside unless somebody picks it up), roof shingles, rusty aerosol cans and other household junk. I had to push and pull and few larger items and maneuver them up to the road, including a deteriorating mattress, a metal tabletop, an old laundry hamper halfway submerged in mud and leaves, and some large pieces of disposed carpeting. There are always the surprise things you find discarded in these dump sites as well…I found a mostly full bag of Mardi-gras-styled masks, mostly unused; also a near full bag of mostly unused plastic cups and sauce containers; and a find that actually angered me some – a rain-soaked box of children’s clothing, still left on the hangers, in good usable shape. The folks who unloaded this stuff must have been too lazy or ignorant to donate this clothing to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, they preferred to just drive it up this dirt road and dump it off in the woods. What a bunch of slobs, and what a waste!
Besides picking up trash and cleaning up an area, though, there are little pleasures that go with these clean-ups. It gets me into the wilderness to enjoy nature, especially doing clean-ups in mostly wooded areas like this one. At one point, while hoisting a discarded plastic motor oil bottle out of a bunch of wet leaves, I uncovered a small orange salamander. I thought at first this was a toy lizard, until I saw it move. I gently lifted the salamander with my hand and moved it out of the way of my clean-up. (Two boy scouts who were taking part in the clean-up found spotted black salamanders at other dump spots nearby.) I also observed some interesting deep woods songbirds I usually don’t see at my home bird feeder.
At the end of it, I was again satisfied that the other volunteers and I had successfully cleaned up a natural area and returned it to its former state. Usually after one of these clean-ups, safeguards are put into place to deter or prevent future dumping, plus these sites are monitored more frequently to watch for future problems. The disgust of pigs who dump their trash on roadsides and public lands is replaced with the satisfaction that one of these dump sites has been removed. It’s worth the sore muscles, scrapes and bruises I encounter during such a clean-up.