The Sportsman's Corner

"Rich, you need to a column about littering. There's more trash around in the outdoors than I have seen in years," Donna told me during a recent walk with her dog on the rail trail.

"Yes, dear. But, you know my writing about it doesn't do any good. The pigs who throw their junk out along roads or in obscure places probably aren't the ones who read my column."

The most recent event that had Donna fired up was that a local man who is nearly our age was cleaning up a mess along the local rail trail that day. He had a garbage bag full of cans, plastic bottles, Styrofoam containers, and even pizza boxes that he had just picked up. "I try to keep the section I walk cleaned up," he noted. "But, people are constantly throwing stuff out along the trail. I have trouble keeping up."

He even pointed down over an embankment to show us a road-type sign that someone had tossed into the river. "What's the point of that?" he wondered.

"There's no logical reason for someone to do that. Some people are just slobs," Donna replied. "They have no respect for nice places that other people enjoy."

This is not just a local phenomenon: Badly trashed wild places exist elsewhere, too.

For instance, the Little Juniata River is one of the most scenic waterways in Pennsylvania. It flows along a lovely wooded corridor, and the river's water is cold and clean enough to support a robust population of wild brown trout. However, the Little Juniata River Association (LJRA), which is a conservation organization that monitors the river in an effort to protect its health and to promote public-fishing access to the water, must conduct a litter clean-up every spring to remove the trash that hogs throw out along the river and even into the stream itself. The LJRA fills a number of triaxles with the garbage it cleans up along the river each spring.

The streams I most like to fish were often trashed during my younger years. I religiously toted cans and other garbage home nearly every time I fished. Today, most of the places I fish are litter free, though the roadways nearby are still trashed. I used to pick up trash along back roads, but I twice contracted bacterial infections after doing this. Littering is the number one reason fishing spots get posted, according to one of my old WCO friends.

Anyhow, it looks as though we will have to continue cleaning up places that slobs have trashed.