Niagara-on-the-Lake Local received the following letter to the editor from reader Lou-Anne Cairns in response to the article Local woman takes responsibility for patch of road.
It was wonderful to read your recent article about Debbie Redekop and her mission to keep her stretch of Concession 2 litter free.
I am a fellow “garbage picker” who was inspired by the author David Sedaris, who routinely puts 20,000 to 30,000 steps on his Fitbit in a single day picking up litter in his own rural neighbourhood.
While definitely not as committed as him, I do my small bit and find it satisfying, baffling and depressing in equal measure.
Long gone are the days we would find computer monitors and La-Z-Boy chairs in our ditches, thanks I’m sure to the Region’s free large item pick-up program, and we haven’t had any neatly stacked piles of old tires lately, either.
Nowadays it is beer cans…lots and lots of beer cans (the depressing part), cigarette butts and packs, Timmy’s cups of course and a surprising number of Happy Meal boxes (very depressing).
Some of the items that fall into the baffling category would be the discarded crate of rotten pineapples (I kid you not), the pile of fuse boxes and other assorted electrical components (hello…scrap metal!) and just recently a rain swollen copy of “The Bravest Boy” which I picture some disgruntled third grader chucking out the school bus window.
During the COVID lockdown in the summer of 2020, a beer keg appeared floating in the deep ditch on the south side of our road. As the water level rose and fell with the weather, the keg very slowly over the next year or so made its way along the ditch until it reached the culvert where it ducked under the road, only to pop out again on the north side several months later.
Now it remains lodged there against a discarded railroad tie. If the town ever decides to clean the drainage ditch, they will hopefully deal with it as it’s definitely too big for me to handle.
The satisfaction I spoke of comes from logging those Fitbit steps and knowing the local Air Cadets are benefiting from all those empty beer cans I donate to their periodic bottle drives.
So kudos to Debbie Redekop and all those many others I am sure are out there keeping their little corners of NOTL litter free. Keep up the good work!
Lou-Anne Cairns
