As a young boy in the 1970s I was very moved whenever I saw the “Keep America Beautiful” commercials starring actor Iron Eyes Cody. Yes, I know he wasn’t really Native American, but how could anyone watch him paddling that canoe through all that pollution and NOT be moved to clean up their act?
Today I took my two younger sons to the Morgan/Monroe State Forest just south of Indianapolis. I packed a picnic lunch for us and we had a great time watching dragon flies buzzing around Cherry Lake while we ate.
After we were finished eating, we decided to do some hiking on the Tecumseh trail. (I’ll do a full write up on the trail after I finish hiking all of it.) Today though, we were just exploring, and I was especially interested in hiking through the designated “Back Country” section of the forest. I’ve been wanting to check out this area for a number of years, but for one reason or another it has never happened. So today, we crossed the bridge and entered the back country.
We hiked along for a short time and came across the first back country campsite. I had made an assumption that only backpackers would be on this trail, so I was absolutely floored when I saw the amount of trash at this site. There were a half-dozen or more broken beer bottles, two lighters, at least a dozen soft drink cans, and odds and ends of other types of trash. We shook our heads and kept on hiking. After another 100 yards or so, we came to a 2nd site and it was just as bad, if not worse. There were 4 large Styrofoam cups, a broken lawn chair, an old tarp, more lighters, an empty margarita mix bottle, and odds and ends of other things. I started to realize that because of the parking lot at the trail head, backpackers were probably not the people using these camp sites, but car campers were, and they were “trashing the joint”.
We hiked in for a mile before we came to a clean campsite. When we eventually got back to the car, I got the closest thing I could find to a trash bag, and we went back to clean up as much of the trash as we could.
My son pointed out that it took us all of 15 minutes to clean up those two sites. The people who made those messes could have cleaned them up in even less time.
“People Start Pollution. People can stop it”, “give a hoot – don’t pollute”, “leave no trace”, “pack in in – pack it out”. Pick your favorite slogan and just do it people! There is just no excuse for this kind of behavior. You’re in the outdoors because you supposedly love them. Stop trashing the joint!
