October 10, 2014
The Goodness Baked In
This morning, after a particularly productive photography session, I spent 20 minutes picking up trash strewn aside a pull out on the upper east side of Zion National Park. I assembled the items together on a my truck bed, took the photo here, then a detailed inventory. Here's what was discernible:
- Two Bud Light Bottles (fairly fresh)
- The top third of a broken 7-Up bottle (not so fresh)
- A bottle cap for a Sprite
- A bottle cap for a Beck's Special Dark
- A Motts Medleys wrapper
- Three Trident chewing gum wrappers
- Zig Zag paper packaging
- A Welch's Fruit Chews wrapper
- A Regions bank receipt for a $40 withdrawal with a remaining balance of $318.00
- A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sticker (intact)
- A Planters Peanuts wrapper (not so intact)
- Toast Chee Crackers wrapper with the tagline "Goodness Baked In"
- An empty sheet of what looked to be children's stickers
- A DumDums sucker wrapper
- A 9/13/14 receipt for $100 to Whitney Cowan to rent Apt #1 w/o storage from Aug 1-31 with a $810 balance due
- A dryer sheet (thinking this was Whitney's too but that's just a guess)
- A burger wrapper from Iceberg Drive-in which I've never heard of, but apparently has been in business since 1960
- The wrapper for Nice! Purified Water. It was Nice! of them to keep the plastic bottle (to be recycled, no doubt)
- The "non-tare" tare strip off a PowerBar goo pack
- 13 cigarette butts, mostly Marlboro but I did note one Chinese labeled brand
- Non-discernible items were numerous clear wrappers for candy, straws, something that cost $1.59 and a number of pieces of broken glass
And what I didn't pick up was a minimum of 20 separate droppings of toilet paper in varying degrees of stickiness and decay. Ironically, the evening before, I'd met a back country ranger whose duties include cleaning up human waste (i.e. shit) out of the Narrows. Even deadly flash-flooding apparently isn't enough to flush out people's creative pooping places within the Narrows. Hint. They like to get very high. And, no, that's not a Zion pun.
I went to the perversely entertaining trouble to itemize all that trash so I could write this post with a simple conclusion.
Fuck you litter bugs!
Try taking a class on human decency and get some goodness baked into you.