I have lived in Minnesota for over 11 years. It has been home to many outdoor adventures from the North Shore, through the Boundary Waters to the rocks of Blue Mounds, to the cliffs of Taylor Falls. My passion for the outdoors has grown in this state, but this is not a story about that. This is not a pretty story. This is a true story, a story about the state in which this state as I imagine many others are in as well. This is a story about plastic.
Plastic is the norm, the added detail to the landscape. Blowing in the trees, lining the streets, filling cracks between rocks, floating down rivers. Plastic is ingrained in our daily lives. The acceptance of it in the environment is now a new shifting baseline. As the beautiful and natural parts of the nature get pushed further away, cluttered with garbage, cut and minimized by progress, they disappear piece by piece. The result is subsequent generations accepting this version of nature-loss and a landscape of plastic as their normal reality.
This became prevalent to me driving home one afternoon. Exiting off Hwy 169 North to 394 East a large dark object lay in the middle of the highway. I swerved. “Was that a turtle?” I asked. “Yes, I think so,” she replied. Compelled to save the little bugger from the on coming 70mph traffic I doubled back on the clover belt ramp and pulled over. With gloves from my trunk, I walked along the highway to the two-foot wide snarling snapping turtle.
That moment, staring into oncoming traffic, and the exploding orange sunset, and holding the massive angry reptile by its tail as it tried to bite me, I realized I had no idea what to do with it. Looking over the guardrail I saw a dried and disgusting pond littered with Styrofoam cups, plastic bottles, trash, straws, shopping bags. This is where the snapping turtle was escaping. A victim to human behavior, our habits of commodities and necessities, this turtle chose to leave its home, risk crossing traffic, not that a snapping turtle knows what a car is, to seek the greener side of the road. What lies on the other side is equally polluted. These are the conditions many animals have to survive in as urbanism spreads. Plastic is the beautiful new part of our landscape.
I continue driving home. A plastic bag hovers weightless, floating over the freeway. It dips in a wingless flutter before diving in the current of the wind. It glides across the hood of my car and skitters to the left caught on the side mirror. It travels with me rattling and screaming out the open window to be let free back to its immaculate dance. It wiggles its wings free and lets go into the centrifugal force of forward motion and hits the car behind me.
My home is in the Midway St Paul. Garbage and bottles pile up on my boulevard like the tide; A polluted beach of grass. I am tired of picking them up. I’ve accepted their place in my life. It’s the beginning of the century where garbage has become part of the natural environment. I’ve adapted to it. You will too. Landfills overflow into backyards. All our waste does not magically disappear under the lid of a garbage can. It still exists even if we don’t see it.
My lawnmower chokes on gasoline resisting to start. I pump the primer feeding fuel. They say that smell of freshly mowed lawn, it’s the grass communicating. That smell is their cry. It’s a pleasant smell, one of victory: for home ownership, for urbanization, for domestication, springtime, and fossil fuel.
I missed picking up a plastic water bottle in the front yard. Half full, the explosion erupts shrapnel from under the mower, an unforgiving kiss of the blade. Someone has left me a DQ cup. In its brilliance, oozing chocolate blizzard floats on waves of grass. It is like a stone, a hazard in my wake, I try to contain my frustration. All I can do is stare. How many pieces of trash get washed down the drains and fed into the Mississippi?
Life in a plastic adaptation of accepted reality, life of junk, we’re living in a growing landscape of trash that will not decompose. Garbage is now a part of the new landscape. A walk to Minnehaha Creek proves nothing but plastic bottles and fast food debris washed on shore. Nature integrated with freshly mowed lawns and discarded plastic items. It all has to go somewhere, floating down streams, blowing in the wind like tumble weed. As long as this generation doesn’t have to see it, or deal with it, let it be someone else’s kid’s problem, flushed down from the Twin Cities to the Gulf of Mexico.
In the local grocery store I see aisles and aisles of future landscapes of waste. Single serving products, meats, chips, cheeses, everything in plastic, sealed, double wrapped. Life in a zip lock bag. It will all be a part of the future landscape.
So sad, yet so true. It's amazing how it's just as bad here in our rural road system as it is in the nearby "city". The difference I guess is that here it's no one's job but our own to pick it up. I live, and work, in redneck central, and it's really appalling. I don't mean redneck as in the typical depiction of one; I guess I kind of fit that stereotype as well. More so, my coworkers and neighbors who constantly deliberately trash the place, and then start a fight with you if you try to call them out. A lot of people simply don't know better; our environment tries to make us monsters.
The turtle story really got me. Unfortunately it's the world we live in; it would take an unfathomable amount of time to improve our environment. Baby steps at least help to a degree. Beautifully written, @ghostfish
Thanks man. Yeah, baby steps, and hopefully the slowing of environmental destruction. People who don't know any better and people who don't give a fuck. I hate being anyone's parent, but makes me want to bitch slap an adult every time I see them toss wrappers out their vehicle along side the road. Decades of plastic filling the oceans, future getting grimmer and grimmer for all species. I think one day, the human race will feel the pinch of their self orientated behavior. "City folk don't know no better dem damn redneckers, all dem dar da same filthy spread'n trash pollutin' mo'fuk'n piss me off sons a bitches." lol Thanks for the comment dude. Peace out.
Awesome, i really appreciate it. My followers will like that too, so i resteemed it. Compliments
Awesome! Thanks.