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.

Walking Among The Beach Combers of Chicago

What makes a person wander along a beach fingering along through the flotsam in search of treasures that have washed in with the waves?  Are these people born this way? Has something happened to them to make them seek the solitude of the morning surf?
Though the beaches along the southern shores of Lake Michigan do not have the majesty of sea coasts, they nevertheless draw out the beachcomber in the Midwesterner. On my walks along the beaches from Chicago to the Indiana Dunes, I often come across this peculiar breed. They are of all colors and sizes, of every class and physical condition. Once, I saw a woman dragging her tank of oxygen through the rocks, as she sifted through the sands looking for glass. They are often older, but among children you can see the same instinct to marvel and collect, finding in a spent balloon or odd bit of driftwood or colorful stone something to decorate a sand sculpture.

The beach comber apparently has its origins among British sailers, who, exhausted, banished, or simply  intrigued, stayed in ports and islands in the South Seas and in other distant shores far from home. There, they learned to live off what they could find on the beach, fishing, collecting, making a hut, co-mingling among the native people, and returning on the next crew or deciding that this life and the ways of these people were far superior than the harsh life of a sailor. I suspect that the beachcomber is part of a world wide tribe of people.  And I’m not so sure that a beach comber even needs a beach to do his wandering and sifting through the debris of man and nature. The found art folk, the alley wanderers, dumpster divers, etc. My mother, who suffers from Alzheimers, walks around her yard and garden every day and picks up sticks that have fallen. Is that not a form of beachcombing?  We come from a long line of hunters and gatherers, and some of the earliest archeological sites are along the shores of lakes in Africa.

But as I walk, I’m always looking for the beachcombers, to see what they’re doing, what they’re collecting, what they’ve got in that special bag by their side. Often they are simply picking up trash, the good Samaritans of the beach. (There are many of these in Chicago, men mostly, for some reason.) I met a man who'd been picking up trash for over 25 years on Hollywood Beach. He told me: "My daughter cut her foot out here once on a piece of glass, so I just think maybe I can do some good." On the Chicago lake front there are no real shells but there is glass, shards polished by the surf, and this occupies many of us beach combers.


“I’ve got pounds and pounds of them,” a woman told me last week, as I was about to go for a swim. She was dragging a stick through piles of tiny tumbled lake stones by Pratt Pier on Chicago’s northern most  beach. “I pray while I do it,” she said. “It keeps me sane,” she smiled, showing me her finds. “I make things with them. Prayer glasses, you know, for candles.” She showed me her legs, scared with little dots up and down her ankles. “I got titanium bones, got rear-ended three times. Blessing in disguise, though. I pray for these rage road people, cause I was like them once.” She leans on her stick, then bends back down and picks up a thumbnail shard of green glass.

“You’ll think this is crazy,” I confessed to her, “but I collect brick and concrete stones.” I picked up  a piece of concrete that had been tumbled into a polished stone of conglomerate pebbles.  “Water is a powerful thing,” she said. “I’ll look for some for you. I’m collecting Warsaw granite, see,” she showed me a garnet colored stone, wet and gleaming in her black fingers. “I know this guy who picks up the trash here. His mother’s gravestone is made of the same granite. I give him all I got.”

I walked on down the beach, thinking of her, ambling there in the surf, picking through the rocks, as the waves came and retreated.