Normal Pig Roast activity: Lodges
Abnormal Pig Roast activity: Picking up trash at Belle Isle
Early Saturday
morning, Erin, Celeste, and I spent a few hours down at Belle Isle picking up
trash. There were lots of reasons to be cranky. The biggest reason was that I
was awake already. I spent the night before watching Hunger Games (if only the
red-headed girl had been in earth lodge, she’d have known which berries not to
eat) I hadn’t had enough sleep. But as the day wore on I shook of my crankiness
and began to enjoy the world around me. The day had less structure than last
time we did service. There was only one task: Pick up lots of trash anywhere we
see it. We started right as we got out of the car. I was surprised to find the
most common piece of litter to be cigarette butts. Since Saturday I’ve started
noticing them all around campus, especially near my favorite bench by the
lake. It makes me kind of sad to think
that cigarettes are so bad for the environment in so many ways, but people
still consume them. They are harmful to people who use them, put their smoke
into the rest of the world for other people and the ozone to absorb, their
crops require that fields be left unused for long periods of time in order to
recover from being depleted of their nutrients, and the filters of these
disgustingly addictive & dangerous toys are left scattered all over the
ground. It’s as if they were somehow expected to magically disappear. I thought
a little about what we had discussed at dinner the other night, how people play
a natural part of the environment even when we disrupt natures normal patterns.
Distraction from
life ponderings came in the form of the HUGE cicada grub (aka larvae) that I
practically tripped over while picking up stray pieces of plastic bags in a
huge, empty field. It was really gross. It was so gross we made a Steve Irwin
tribute video that you can find posted on our time-lines (FACEBOOK!). It’s
called “Crikey, what a beaut”. I hope we can watch it in class. Anyways, Erin
and I are becoming experts in identifying unknown species so we decided that,
based on its size and disgusting body shape, it was probably an enormous
cicada. We googled it (yes that’s a verb now) and found out we were right.
The work was
made a lot easier by the interactions with people around us. We met endless
cyclists, two couples walking their dog, that one sketchy guy…, and a flock of
confused young men about to go white water rafting. They all had matching
helmets. J
But something lovely about working around all these people was that many of
them said thank you. The whole point of working in the community is to serve
and connect to the community, I felt like it was much easier to see and
participate in this goal than last time.
Special Thanks to:
Erin
for driving and coming up with this whole idea
Celeste
for getting us up in the morning
Lucy
for bringing plastic gloves… oh wait
Google
for making it easy to identify grubs
God
for creating weird things like cicadas whose purpose we may never understand