Spring cleaning is an urge that runs deep: some people clean the blinds, wash the floor, throw out clothes. Some dig weeds, rake winter debris in the garden, and some, like me, want to clean the earth. April 30 & 31 was officially garbage weekend.

Lucky for me, the town of Red Hook holds an annual clean up day. On Saturday, fifty people took to the local roads with gloves and large black plastic bags to collect bottles and whatever else people enjoy tossing by the side of the road. Through the winter, all of this debris is hidden. When the snow melts, all of our carelessness is revealed. 

My road to clean was Sengstack Lane, at the north end of my home in the village Tivoli. I cleaned this section of road last year and ended up with two tires and six bags of junk. This year, I only needed but two bags. Is it possible that less litter was left behind? Or was it simply that last year’s effort took in several years of debris? (This clean up has been in place since 2009 so this is possible.)

Sengstack is part of my morning walk. When I reach this stretch of road, the sky opens up with a large, empty horse farm to the north and the Catskills on the western horizon. A harrier often works the field, and I watch him as he cruises just above the tall grass line scanning for prey. On this day I was serenaded by a flicker’s call, a field sparrow in the phragmites patch, and an insistent cardinal. I wore a wide-brimmed hat in the afternoon sun, and carried my garbage pick up stick to reach into the bushes, grab bottles and cans.

Picking up garbage can be a social event, or when alone, deeply meditative. It was quiet along the road; a few cyclist out for a ride in the warm spring air waved as they passed. Other than that it was me, my bag of garbage (that started to stink), and the wide sky. I thought of nothing and everything. I solved no world problems or personal problems. I just enjoyed the small but real satisfaction of making these few miles of road tidy.

The next day, one of my students in my nature writing class at Bard College, Gleb Mikhalev organized a few students to clean up the Tivoli Bays.  The Bays are my paddling ground, two wide scoops of shallow water rich in birds and snapping turtles and beavers. The bays are separated from the Hudson River by the train tracks. For each bay, two underpasses allow the water to come and go with the tides, depositing trash but rarely taking it away with the outgoing current. So the bays are often rich in garbage as well.

Cleaning up the bays is something I’ve done for four years and it’s always an event, a great treasure hunt in the high tide line. Six students showed up, looking like they’d tumbled out of bed fifteen minutes earlier. We organized canoes, and all headed off, the students in a line to the south end of the bay. I didn’t see them again for the rest of the day.

In my canoe at the rudder was Max Kenner, a Bard graduate now running our successful prison program. He was the perfect, optimistic companion. As we scooted under the train trestle and onto the wide river, he glowed with the fun of it under a perfect, sunny sky. He reminded me that this was less about garbage and more about being on this beautiful river in the spring.

 In the distance, the Catskills loomed brown from the winter, with a ruff of green at the base. We curved around the end of Cruger Island and followed the choppy water’s north to land at a cove on the north end. This cove is the perfect spot to picnic, or camp (though that is not legal). There’s a log ideal for sitting and eating sandwiches (which we did). Then we picked up two bags of stuff left by campers.

I picked up a pull tab—the tabs that used to seal soda cans. As a kid, I remember hooking my index finger through the tab and pulling it off. I would then slip the tab into the can where it would float around as I drank my soda. This is the sort of thing you think about cleaning up garbage: when was this invented and by whom? (1956 by Mikola Kondakow invented them for bottles and then later in1962, Ermal Cleon Fraze invented the tab with the ring that would come off completely.) And why did we stop using these pull tabs? (in the 80s the stay on tab was invented to REDUCE ROADSIDE GARBAGE! And to reduce injuries—some people swallowed the floating tabs). (All answers are from Wikipedia, of course)

Satisfied with our clean up, we continued north, where we gathered up an enormous Styrofoam block that straddled the canoe, as well as a long metal rod, a cooler and a plastic chair. Once in the Tivoli north bay, we slowed our pace, grabbing a bottle here and there as we discussed life, relationships and how great it was that the swamp sparrow and the marsh wren were singing amidst the noisier red-winged blackbirds.

My former student Aaron Ahlstrom met us at the dock in the north bay and I swapped out companions. Aaron is tall and lanky, a runner now launched into a career in historic preservation. Max departed with the load of garbage we had collected, and Aaron joined me, infusing me with new energy. Spotting garbage—the glint of glass or plastic tucked into the dry stalks of cattails or phragmites—is an art that requires patience and a keen eye.  Finding a hunk of garbage is satisfying, even though I did not want to see that bottle lying in the muck. I felt a surge at each find. This drive—the hunt one of our most essential drives—is often sated with a gun. But binoculars or a garbage pick up stick work just as well.

As we clambered out of the canoe to gather bottles, tromping into mud and into the reeds, I flushed two Virginia rail and one Least Bittern. The birds took off, their secretive lives momentarily disturbed.

 By six in the evening we were back in the tranquil south bay with an impressive load of stuff headed for the Bard College dump (thank you Bard B&G for hauling everything away). I was dirty and tired and completely satisfied. I saw the load of trash collected by the students, their boats already secured.  “It’s your duty to keep American beautiful,” an advertisement from the 70s, echoed in my head. These students are given other environmental messages (drive a Prius! Recycle! Eat local! Despair over global warming!), but for this one long sunny day they were learning this message of local stewardship. They had helped to make what is beautiful that much more lovely. And it brought them all into coves and through reeds, giving them an intimacy with a place that for four years they call home. I called Gleb to see how their day had unfolded. “We had a great time,” he said. A great time gathering garbage. That gives me hope.