The Trash Man of Hollywood Beach

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."  
Edward Abbey

Hollywood Beach, Chicago

Perhaps you’ve seen them in a park or along a shore near where you live—the ones   stooping down and picking up trash, a plastic bag or two or three hanging from an arm or attached to a belt loop. Maybe they have an old dog tagging along behind them, but usually they’re alone, and older. Almost always men. (Though I’ve seen women, too.)



Montrose Harbor Dunes

You wonder at first, are they with some group doing community service of some kind? But no, they’re there almost every day.  They’re not to be confused with the beachcombers—the ladies who salvage bits of lake-polished glass. Or the men in their infernal metal-detectors with earphones, hoping to turn someone's loss into treasure.  No, these are of another eccentric tribe that beaches and city parks create--the people who pick up trash, the trash men, as I call them.



Whiting, Indiana Beach (British Petreleum in Distance

I’d met one man a few years ago on a walk I took to Indiana. I’d seen him often, watching him from afar, a short stocky man, with weather worn clothes and hat, old tennis shoes, glasses, energetic for an older man (maybe late 70’s or early 80’s). He seemed almost in a hurry as he tottered Chaplin-like, balancing two plastic bags on each sun-tanned arm, as he went about his daily chore. I’d kind of felt sorry for him as I have others like him I’ve seen, eccentrics, I imagined, lonely, widowed, no doubt suffering from mild obsessive-compulsive disorder, having, needing to make their morning rounds. Or so this is how I explained these types of aging men I've seen.

It was an extraordinary beautiful summer morning along Chicago’s lake front and I was in an expansive mood, under the spell we put ourselves into when we are on a purposeful journey. Walkers and hikers know what I mean. We set ourselves a goal and define it as something of value, and suddenly we see the world anew.   So when he appeared as I thought he would, I went right up to him and introduced myself and told him (almost as a kind of confession). I had a camera around my neck. I told him I’d seen him so many times gathering trash and wanted to thank him for it. “You inspire us out here,” I said, gesturing to the Polish ladies getting ready to take their morning swim.

He stammered. And I realized I’d scared him. He was older than I thought, but as he talked, his body seemed to become younger and more animated. “Please don’t take my picture, I don’t’ want any publicity, I’m nobody important. I just come and do this because I like to help. Keep the beach clean. Make it safe.”

“How long have you been doing this,” I asked as he waved at some older couple he knew who passed.

“I’ve been coming . . . a long time. Over twenty five years. I can’t remember.”

He went on to tell me the story of how he’d begun his cleaning up of the beach. His daughter apparently cut herself badly on a piece of glass and with the help from the lifeguard’s bandages he got her to a hospital. “It was terrible," he said as if still seeing her foot, shaking his head, "so much pain and blood.”

After that, he told me he felt it was his duty to clean things up. "You know, it could happen to some other children, stepping on the glass, they can’t see it in the sand. They're children. I just thought I should do it.”

But he obviously cleans up more than glass, and now he hits two beaches, Hollywood and Foster, a good half mile or more of beach and lakefront.

And then he was off down the beach, heading for another plastic bag, a solitary Starbucks cup rolling in the surf.

Chidago Lakefront, between Hollywood and Foster Beaches 

It’s Earth Day, and as usual school kids everywhere will be dragging plastic bags around on beaches and parks, neighbor groups tidying up neglected lots and planting trees, and the Sierra Club will be out somewhere battling invasive species for the day. On Hollywood Beach, my hunch is a man will be out there feeling somewhat more at home with so many following his lead.

The other week I was walking along the lake shore, a bit overwhelmed with the world and "the cruelist month" as Elliot called April, and I saw some trash and naturally picked it up, then a few more yards down, a black plastic gently swayed as the waves flowed over it a foot below the water.  I looked around to see if anyone was watching me (why I have no idea), and I took off my shoes and waded into the freezing surf and retrieved it. I walked on, picking up this and that, scattered on the surf.  I was glad to have something to do to eclipse my manufactured melancholy. 

Montrose Harbor Beach, Chicago

I could become a "trash man" like the man at Hollywood Beach. I’d have to practice, but I could do it.

EARTH DAY REVISITED

 “It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.”   Rachel Carson      

I’d just wanted to get outside, walk, and feel the promise of spring.  For those urban apartment dwellers, spring comes in other people’s yards and in little corners of wilderness like the miracle of Montrose Beach.  And that’s where I headed that April day last year.  Pulling into the park, I could see teams of adults in green t-shirts in the wooded bird sanctuary, and further out on the beach, kids were dragging trash bags through the sand.  And then it dawned as on me, I’d stumbled into Earth Day. 

It was an awkward moment. If anyplace in Chicago deserved a hand, it was the marvel of Montrose Beach’s bird sanctuary and its reemerging dunes and rare wetlands habitat. Where else in the city could you spot piping plovers and red fox while listening to the rustle of the dune grasses, then in this monument to the will of nature and the passion of people to preserve it?  I considered sifting through the junk in my car for a plastic bag and joining in, but I let it go.

I walked around, trying to spot some of the spring migrating birds, but invariably I’d see these school kids, gleaning what they could after the fastidious Sierra Club folks. They reminded me of my friends and I picking up bottles and trash on that first Earth Day forty years ago in 1970.  Within an hour or so, our sacks were filled. We had no idea how much trash there was embedded in the grass and soil along the highway outside of our central Indiana factory town. They were too heavy to drag home, the bags, so we just left them there.  And that’s where they stayed, for months. 

I got back in my car, a bit guilty but inspired by those kids and the idea of Earth Day as embodied there at Montrose. And instead of going about my usual Saturday routines, I decided I’d make a pilgrimage of sorts a bit further down the shore of Lake Michigan, to another miracle of urban wilderness, another emblem of the spirit of Earth Day, the Indiana Dunes.

For a long time, if I had a desire to get away or enjoy the natural world, I’d get on a plane or drive far from the smokestacks and concrete of Chicago’s Lakefront. But economic times have been tough, so I have been exploring by foot places I’d driven by for years in and around Chicago.

I drove through South Chicago and the industrial cities of Indiana where I could stop and walk along beaches or abandoned railroad beds to see birds and the budding of spring, but it seemed fitting to revisit Cowles Bog in the National Lakeshore on the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day.  This section of the park is named after the pioneering work of botanist Henry Chandler Cowles of the University of Chicago, who spent years studying the dynamics of the dunes and how the climatic forces affected the plants and animals which inhabited them.  From Cowles’ work and others we can’t ignore the fact that all life forms—including us—are dependent on the health of the web of life around us.  A field of science emerged from the sand dunes of Indiana: it’s called ecology.

Cowles Bog with Steel Mill and NIPSCO in backgound

But the places where Dr. Cowles and his students made their discoveries are now gone, bulldozed, and turned to industrial use.  A loss, for sure, but in the battle for the dunes and in other places around the globe a voice emerged, a voice from local people who understood in their own way how their health and that of their children’s depended upon the health of their environment. And it’s for them, on Earth Day, that you want to thank for laws that give us cleaner air and water and parks like the Indiana Dunes.  

The trail to the beach at Cowles Bog took me along railroad tracks with a long line of coal cars ready to be burned into digital joy or used to form ore and stone into steel. Underneath crackling electrical lines, I marched on, noticing the mallards in the marshes oblivious to me and the steam billowing from the stacks. I climbed up the old dunes now covered in an oak forest and then made it down into the foredunes, where I walked to the shore through the same grasses now emerging on the beach at Montrose.