2006 Walk of Fame contest
by Advertising Week. More
importantly, it has worked. Even
factoring in the increases in popula-
tion and roads, the stats are impres-
sive: In 1986 TxDOT was spending
$2.33 per person picking up road-
side litter. Twenty-five years later, the
agency spends $1.90.”
I’ve no idea if the campaign succeed-
ed as much as they say it did. Trash
spending did go down in the interven-
ing years. But a “favorite slogan” title
does not equal clean roadways and
lands. Although the campaign is still
going, in my observa-
tion, in the year 2019,
there’s more trash than
ever.
When my daughter
was young, we road-
tripped all over the
United States because I
wanted to take her to all
lower 48 states before her
18th birthday. We didn’t
reach the goal, but we
did get to the halfway
mark, mostly by car. Up
to Minnesota and the
Boundary Waters Canoe
Area, over to the north
side of Grand Canyon,
and other points east and
south. I can’t say I used
to notice trash in Texas –
I grew up here – but dur-
ing these road trips I
began to notice how
much trash there wasn’t
in other places, along
other roadways. I real-
ized this on a conscious
level one day when I
came across a lone fast
food bag in the middle
of a remote state road
somewhere in the north,
standing up, a lonely sentinel, a
reminder that littering was out of place.
This trashy little “billboard” screamed
silently in its red and white attire: “Look
what’s missing here – trash.” That’s
when I began to notice trash in Texas
was more pervasive than some of the
other states.
Much later, when my parents moved
to the tri-county area and I began driv-
ing out to visit, once I hit Balmorhea –
despite driving through one of the, shall
we say, most industrial and inelegant
areas in Texas – I was amazed that no
trash littered the roadways. Once you hit
the little town off I-10, all the unsightli-
ness, along with the trash, disappeared.
From Balmorhea to Fort Davis; from
Fort Davis to Alpine; from Alpine to
Marfa and points south…. it all seemed
so clean. I was amazed. It was like a
dream…. Is this really Texas?
Now, however, a decade later, I see
evidence of people messing with Texas
on a regular basis. I drive to work from
the outskirts of Alpine and pick up crap
on the side of the road along the way, if
not every day, every week. Plastic bags,
plastic wrapping and half-empty chip
bags. Water bottles. Styrofoam dinner chewed their –hopefully real – cud not
far from them. (Maybe the little ones
thought they were sharing a snack, a
snack that would fill their bellies now
and kill them later.) We couldn’t take it,
so we turned around at the road to
Mitre Peak drive and went back. We
pulled off on the side of the road and got
out. I held the barbed wire fence open
for her while she trudged through the
brush and took the plastic away from
the unsuspecting cows, hoping neither
the adult cattle nor the rancher would be
upset about our trespassing and “mess-
ing” with their young.
containers with just a pickle or two
remaining. Natty Light cans every few
hundred yards or so like breadcrumbs
from Hansel and Gretel. (I assume this is
a chug one, throw the empty can out,
chug one, throw it out, type of drinking
game. You know who you are – leave
that shit in your truck!) I drive to Fort
Davis and the Observatory and see
trash, the amount of which creeps ever
upward.
One day, driving with a friend from
Alpine to Fort Davis, we spotted two
calves playing tug of war with a long
sheet of plastic as their cow mothers Suffice it to say, the landscape in this
region is becoming trashy, plain and
simple. A lot of the litter is plastic bags,
which disintegrate in the harsh weather
out here and turn into hundreds of little,
tiny pieces that animals mistake for
food. Yes, those damn bags fly out of
your hand in the wind. Maybe they
blow in from unsecured, overfull dump-
sters and landfills – who knows how far
they can travel before they get hung up
on a Cholla or Catclaw. I imagine that
some trash, especially the bags, blows in
from jobsites maybe even as far away as
the Midland/Odessa/oil-field area on
the high, dusty winds. The amount of
trash in that area is appalling. But I
digress.
Studies have shown that the profile of
the highest litterers is as follows:
• Age - 24 and younger (this
number reduces by age bracket)
• Smoking cigarettes
• Going to bars or other nighttime
entertainment at least twice a
week
• Being single (unmarried)
• Eating fast food at least two times
a week
I think now we can add “works in the
oil field” to that list, simply
because they are a transient
group with a smaller sense
of ownership and pride in
their surroundings.
According
to
the
dontmesswithtexas.org site
(circa 2017), approximate-
ly 435,000,000 pieces of
visible litter accumulate on
Texas roadways every year.
The site claims that if every
person in Texas picked up 2
pieces of trash per month,
Texas would be litter free in
one year. I don’t know if
that’s an accurate estimate
on either the amount of lit-
ter or the picking up. Texas
has a population of 28.3
million, so I assume that
means all of the citizens
would need to pick up
trash, and one would also
assume that during that
year, there would be no lit-
ter at the end only IF peo-
ple didn’t litter at all during
that time period. There are
a couple of obvious issues
with this estimate: Tiny
humans can’t pick up trash,
for one. Also, have any of
the surveyors been to Midland / Odessa
and surrounding environs recently?
There are probably 435,000,000 pieces
of trash in those two counties alone. So
you know what that means, folks…. You
must get out there and pick up five or 10
a month, maybe per week, to make up
for slackers like babies and the elderly.
Have you littered in your past lives?
Have you driven down the road chuck-
ing beer cans and soft drinks out the
window along with that hamburger
continued on page 27
Cenizo
First Quarter 2019
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