Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Rural Living Roadside mess

We have a field along the road which I decided to trim down using the garden tractor.
Grass was a little over a foot high, so I put the deck at the highest notch and waded in. You’d be surprised how much damn stuff was hid there!
Plastic shopping bags, plastic bottles and other such crap. Till I got done, it looked like a football stadium after a big game.
I got a 48” lawn sweeper, set on high and gathered the mess up with the grass, then went back over it on the lower setting, so it cleaned up pretty good.
My rant. The only damn thing I toss out a window in a car is a cigarette butt, if it’s not too dry. I keep a shopping bag in the truck for trash, and when it’s full, I burn it in the burn barrel. We recycle plastic and aluminum, cardboard and newspapers. Food wrappers and such end up in the burn barrel while I drink a beer and watch it. Other than that, we don’t generate much trash.
I can’t fathom what possesses people to drive past a field or a patch of woods and toss crap out the damn window. I won’t even drop a candy wrapper if I’m hunting. The only thing I leave behind is an outtened butt and footprints.
If we’re in a park like Gettysburg, I field strip the butts!
7mm

i know how you feel.dam woman that lives past me is waitress she trows her cup with her name on it out the car window before she gets home.a little bit of help from a cop buddy she got a 500.00 fine and had to clean up the 1 mile road for community service for 20 hours .you should have seen her face when they put the cuffs on her.

I sure hear ya on the litter!

Guess I inherited that from my grandfather...

I remember us driving around the ranch when I was a boy. He found a bunch of beer cans out in the pasture that only the deer hunters had access to. He cussed the whole half hour to his house, after we picked up the mess... He went in the house, called the guys that had the lease and told them to come get their stuff. (Took him about a day to find a better group to lease the hunting.)


I live at the end of a road. Past my ranch is another ranch, but mine is where the county road dead ends at a cattle guard.

Whenever I find trash between my gate and that cattle guard, I know it's coming from only one place... The ranch past the cattle guard...

So I gather it all up and toss it over the cattle guard into their road. Last week, a couple of beer bottles (which broke when I tossed them back ), a couple of cans and a big water bottle.

Funny how they pick it up on their side, but have no qualms about tossing it out on my side. That little game has been going on for years.

The county went down our rural dead end road a few weeks ago with their big hydraulic boom mower and cut back the blackberry canes on the back side of the drainage ditch. While the operator was kind enough to leave the big old ferns and volunteer trees, there were lots of vintage and modern beer cans and soda bottles revealed. Nearly filled a 5-gallon bucket with them along our property alone. Get the usual bag of food packaging and bottles dumped near our driveway when the tourists turn around after getting lost and pitch for the ditch but that was nothing compared to the a-hole that dumped an old tube big screen cabinet TV that weighed about 200# and old rusty gym equipment in our driveway last fall. There will be a trail cam in our near future so I can return to sender....

People now days have no respect or decency for other's property. They throw out trash going down the road all the time.

People are pigs !

Different time and place, littering wasn't a big deal.
I was a young kid, riding around with a bunch of drunk adults.
They threw everything out the window.
Especially Genesee bottles.
But, being farmers and landowners, they never threw anything
in fields or yards. They waited for woods, especially crappy
hollows. Their version of ethics. Pretty common then.

Times change, sometimes for the better.

That said, I live about 4 miles from town and Burger King.
Amazing how much crap I get in my yard. Even the 1 am
[bleep] breaking a beer bottle on the roadsign. That's a
bitch to clean up. But at least I know as soon as it happens.
Wakes you right up!

priceless...........

littering pigs..........

Interesting, we're in nearly the same situation. 2 houses past us, then the ranch at the end of the road 1/4 mile or so away.

Had a young guy, wife and kids move into it a year or so ago, trying to buy the place or some such. We walk the dogs along our road often. Coors cans, cigarette butts, a kids slipper, crappy tool or two, an arrow, and other assorted junk started showing up along the road shortly after they moved in. Young guy, rancher from a ranching family, wife was too. Nice enough folks, but he should learn better what flies off a flatbed ranch truck at 55 MPH. I suspect the Coors cans went out the window before he reached his place so his wife didn't have direct evidence. I stopped him once to talk to him, and sure as schiedt, there was a Coors can open in the console. While he smoked a cigarette.

I wanted to package the crap up and put it by his gate, but it wasn't horrible bad.

My wife and I volunteered for Adopt a Highway in the mountains of SW Virginia. About a 3 mile stretch. There's a lot of white N______ that live up there. Mostly nice country folks, but it only takes a few. McDonalds boxes, beer cans, water bottles, and the one guy that puts his trash out on the roadside for the coyotes and bears. Turned him in to the sheriff's dept and that got straightened out. Based on number of bags and estimating items per bag, we pick up 800 -1000 pieces of trash 4 times a year. take about 3 hrs. I don't mind doing it, but I do get pissed off seeing the same trash on the same stretch of road everytime. I can just about tell you who drinks what kind of beer.

Sad state of affairs in rural places.

I always figured if I wanted to see trash and just general "litter near where I lived, I'd just move to a city.

Gonna pick on you cattle guys with flatbeds now. This area is a real hotbed of cattle raising in NorCal. Probably more cattle than people in our county. Saddest thing is all the dang hanks of the "plastic" bailer twine all over the sides of the road. Just about any road in the area, sometimes even in town, there's a twisted up hank of red, blue, or white twine laying in the ditch. A few roads I can count on seeing some every few hundred yards it seems. I doubt anyone tosses the crap out on purpose, and judging from having seen the guys driving by after feeding, I'm wagering it blew off the flatbed once it got up to speed (55 MPH limit on our county roads, not always adhered to)

One fellow has a pile of it 4' tall and maybe 6' around the base outside his gate where he tosses his. I don't worry about his stuff, as it's generally caught in a weed on his property if it blows off his pile. That thing has been there for the nearly 4 years we've been here, so I have no idea when he started. I'd be willing to bed the stuff in the middle is still in good shape as there's no way the UV light can get to it.

I do wish they'd go back to some sort of natural twine that would rot back into the ground if it got away. Kinda like paper bags versus the plastic ones that end up forty feet up in a tree when the dust devil sucks 'em out of the ditch. paper one would just rot right down in a few rains.

We get empty beer cans and Mountain Dew bottles with chew juice in them strewn around town by hasholes.

We had a guy that threw a empty 8 pack of bud bottles by our mail box every night when he came home, put a trail camera on a tree and got his picture, we have a ranch hand that lives off the ranch, I asked him to pick up the bottles and bring them to work in the morning each day, we put them in an old pickup trailer, for a about 5 - 6 months till the trailer was piled real high. the next Monday evening, I waited until he drove by and threw out his beer bottles, then followed him home, guy lived in a house trailer with old cars and tires piled around it, I drove up to right if front of his front porch , got out an said howdy, and tripped the latch on the dump trailer. got in my pick up and drove out to the county road flipped my trailer up and came home. No more problems.

Geno, we feed quite a few bales every day Dec-May and I always throw the balls of removed net wrap in the cab of the pickup. Might end up with a dozen balls of it and yes it's a little messy in the cab but I HATE to see that chit laying on the ground.

But there are a few guys around here that are pigs and are always losing it off their flatbed. If I see it anywhere in our neck of the woods(in the ditch) I stop and pick it up.


Sad story on used wrap. Couple days ago I see a dead robin hanging upside down in a tree. Birds love to use little pieces of wrap/twine for making nests but this robin had managed to wrap it around both feet and then got hung up in a tree. I've seen calves pick up small pieces and chew on it, that and plastic grocery bags.... Drives me nuts.



I HATE litter of any kind!

You and I have a lot in common!

Although I probably would have broken them first.

Yikes!

I wonder how many of the ones RIO dropped off broke though.

Be a real mess on a gravel drive trying to "sweep" up broken bottles.

Thanks Sam, for doing your part.

The wrap is a different issue for sure. I quit using bird netting around my tomatoes and stuff up in WA. Kept finding gopher snakes caught up in it, a couple of live ones that were a real pain to cut out. Even had one climb up a roll I had in the shed, leaning in the corner.

As good an idea as plastic is, and I wouldn't want to live without some plastic goodies, it sure can create a mess.

If you guys want to see litter/trash, come to the rez.

A friend lives east of Browning and his kids are over in kalispell area so he would travel back and forth through Browning regularly.

For those that don't know, Browning is a windy son-of-a-gun and on the blackfoot rez. Driving into town there is a fence that is absolutely plastered with trash. My buddy says he always thinks of that old public service commercial of the native american "chief" shedding a tear when he saw some litter trying to guilt us into not throwing our trash out when he would drive through there.