Policing Butts

 

by Pa Rock

Domestic Crank

I am not the world's best housekeeper, nor probably even in the top ninety percent, but I do tend to get damned persnickety about my yard.   I like to see the grass freshly cut, something I did for myself until the last year or two, and I am death on trash being tossed in the yard.  With several hundred feet of road frontage, trash is a continual problem, and I have suspicions that more than a few motorists drive across town for the express purpose of pitching trash out of their car windows as they drive by my place.   Occasionally I will find the odd aluminum can which I crush and save, but most of the trash people gift to me is paper, or half-eaten food from the local fast food establishments - things of no resale value.

The litterbugs clean their vehicles while driving, it's called multi-tasking, and Pa Rock, the chump, picks it up and pays someone to haul it off.  That's a sweet deal for everyone except for the old man trying to get the Walmart bag out of the tree.

But the trash that really gets me rolling are cigarette butts.  Most smokers I encounter seem oblivious to the fact that cigarette butts are trash - and they deface a yard.  The smokers just drop their butts wherever they happen to be standing and ground then out (sometimes), or flip them out the car window instead of dirtying their car's ashtray.  On more than one occasion I have retreived a cigarette butt from the ground and handed it back to my "guest" who left it there.  (Are you beginning to see why I don't have many friends?)

Some of that primal urge to have a yard that is butt-free goes back to my days in the military when we were given sticks with nails on the end and coffee cans each morning and ordered out along roads after  PT to "police" for cigarette butts.  The US Army regarded cigarette butts as unsightly trash, and they had plenty of captive labor to pick them up.

Last week there were county tree trimmers working along the road that I live on.  One particular young member of the crew stood in my front yard an entire day conducting the flow of traffic.  Traffic was light, which gave him plenty of opportunities to take a drag or three off of a cigarette, and from my typing perch in front of the living room window, I observed as he threw several butts into the grass near where he was standing.   Those guys were doing a community service which was also of direct benefit to me, so I didn't fuss, but the next morning I took a can out to the road where he had been standing and prepared to police some butts - but when I reached that spot, there were no butts!

What the hell happened?  Had that barely-out-of-high-school kid picked up his own cigarette butts, or had some nefarious butt-inski strolled by during the night, flashlight in hand, and stolen those butts?

I'll probably never know for sure.

Nothing is safe in the country.