The Cleanup in the Bayou

by John Hicks-Courant

johnhc@TheWorld.com


The cleanup on July 19th at Costello Park in Lawrence proved a welcome shift from last year’s procedures at the same place. Last year we were after tires and nothing but tires. We occasionally saw other trash in the river, but for the most part, we left it alone. The presence of dumped tires was just too hard to ignore. This year, at this first cleanup, we extracted only 42 automobile tires and one truck tire: progress.

We had seven boats in the water, and we filled each one at least twice during the morning’s efforts. At one point, I had a refrigerator resting on the front seat and bow of my canoe while I had a double-well kitchen sink resting on the gunnels in the middle. The rest of that load, other than some pipes and a few tires, were dozens of bottles, all pulled from fifteen square feet of river bottom.

This cleanup felt just like the ones we conducted on a regular basis a decade ago. There was trash and other debris of “civilization” everywhere we turned, and the boat filled up fast. As much time was spent ferrying the garbage to the take-out and unloading the canoe as was spent pulling the trash out of the bottom and storing it in the boat. We don’t think of those times as the “good old days” at all. Rather, we’re proud to have them behind us, and we look forward to the day when the Bayou is as clean as the rest of the river.

In the end, miscellaneous debris filled something like ten 40-gallon contractor’s trash bags in addition to the large metal pieces handled separately. With luck and some cleansing hard flows brought on by rainstorms, we’ll have just as successful an August cleanup.