Cleaning spree
In this post from August we shared some vistas from “our back yard”, which is actually a mountain that happens to be right above our house. In that mountain, there’s a path that leads into the forest before ending at a tarmac road, which, in turn, goes all the way up to the guest house that is the only sort of accommodation for tourists around here.
The path is quite picturesque or rather it would be were it not for one thing: garbage.
Many of us take pride in being the smartest species in the world because our big brains have helped us evolve so much that we’ve become the dominant species in said world.
Unfortunately, there are still people passed by some of the advantages of evolution such as using the turn signal and throwing their garbage in a bin, to be later transferred to a bigger container, from which it gets picked up by the garbage collectors and disposed of.
Some of these people happen to live around here, which is why the sides of the forest path are littered with plastic bottles, energy drink cans, cigarette boxes and, for some reason, clothing articles.
After a particularly busy and tiring week, Cat felt the urge to do something productive over the weekend and her first idea was to go clean up the path. Irina joined her while Cris was otherwise occupied in town. We thought it would to be a quick job because clearly neither of the women of the house have very good volume perception.
We armed ourselves with one midsized garbage bag and two shopping bags because we couldn’t find the big bags and set off.
A but further down the path from this place we started encountering the first signs of garbage. A plastic bottle here, a can there and soon one bag was full. Cat was particularly meticulous.
Irina meanwhile wondered who could have built a wall in the middle of nowhere and when they had built it. Then she wondered — between stomping on plastic bottles — if it could be a natural formation that just looked like a wall. Cat disagreed. Indeed, it looks manmade.
We filled one bag by the wall and continued up to, well, a dump. Somebody had taken the trouble to drive all the way up this path over rough terrain only to throw away a certain amount of more plastic bottles, toiletry containers, a flawless porcelain coffee cup Cat decided to keep and assorted trash including a couple of diapers. And we live in a village that is rather well supplied with garbage bins. Must be human nature.
This is where we realised we had been overly optimistic. Three bags would not suffice. We needed more. So we grabbed our full bags and took them down to the village — and the nearest bin — disposed of them and returned to the dump with two more bags because that was all that was left at home. Side note, it was a particularly hot day.
We took no pictures of the dump because all dumps are pretty much the same except perhaps for the smells, of which the dominant one here was brandy, possibly contained in some of the plastic bottles we emptied before collecting for disposal. We also left the diapers. Those would need a shovel to remove.
At the end we had this:
We took it down to the village and we daresay few things are as satisfying as throwing garbage in the bin in the knowledge that at least for a couple of days the path in our back yard will be nice and clean.
Irina considered putting up signs along the lines of “You dump — we shoot” or “You dump, you die”. Cat said she’d had a wonderful day. We suspect children are born with the instinctive knowledge that if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life.