Our daughter had a covid birthday. She lives in California between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. To get to her house, which is a former barn, you have to go up a big hill on a dirt road, and open and close a farm fence or two. It’s not a short drive. This April, a few days before she was to turn 36 she decided to ride down the hill and head for Santa Cruz. She rides her bike on Rt. 1 (The One), the coastal highway, which is arguably the most beautiful road in America. As her Mom, I try not to think about this, but I have convinced her she must wear a helmet.
She got as far as Davenport and discovered she had lost her phone. Actually, her whole panier. including her favorite puffy jacket and bank card. She turned around and rode home, looking for it as she went. No luck. Panic. To be sequestered without a phone. ON HER BIRTHDAY. We all felt her pain.
Next day she asked anybody she saw (from a safe distance) if they had seen it. No luck. She has three roommates, lives next door to her landlord and family, and there are two working farms on the drive up, so she encountered farm folks. No luck.
That afternoon, she set out on her bike to re-trace the route, slowly. Again, no luck, not even a run-over remnant. She stopped many times and poked in the ditch adjacent to the the highway—not a trace.
Finally, the day before her birthday, it turned up at Pie Ranch, a near-by farm. Turns out, someone she knew picked it up, didn’t look inside, and turned it in. Phone and belongings were intact and welcomed home with relief.
On her birthday, she opened gifts and told us the whole story on Face Time, including her birthday plan. She urged, via social media, that in her honor, friends and relatives could pick up trash along a local highway. Then she herself set out for The One–again. She knew how much trash there was because of the phone hunt. Her yield: many, many plastic gloves, bottles and cans.
Her brother and family picked trash in Vermont. I picked in Florida. The Vermont crew found a six- pack of beer with only one can empty plenty of beer bottles. And an American Flag.
I found a street sign, many empty cans of cheap beer, and three little bottles labeled “Cinnamon Whiskey.” Plus big trash, which I’m going back for.
50 years ago, on the first Earth Day, I wrote a piece for the newspaper I worked for encouraging people to pick up trash. Thinking back, and looking at the photos I took, I remember the trash strewn along the roads, and in the fields—rusty old equipment, tires, junk, and cans, bottles and paper chucked out car windows.
Maybe humans have changed a little, but we still need work.
But our best contribution, my husband’s and mine, are our children. And the love and respect they give The Earth.
Floridawoman 