So I wrote an article for the SpringHillian that was like 900 words because I thought they were having trouble filling the space they needed to fill. I ended up having to cut it down to 600 words, which means it isn't as good. So this is me posting the original version in case anyone feels like reading that one. I assure you that the extra time it will take to read will be well worth it--hopefully.
Servin' the community
by Matt Blythe
I'd
be lying if I said that I didn't seriously consider dropping my
Environmental Ethics class once I learned that I would be required to
do 20 hours of community service with some sort of environmental
organization and write a big freaking paper about my experiences
therein. And I do feel sort of bad for even considering that
possibility. I mean, I'm not one of those people who doesn't do
community service out of some fashionable sense of jadedness; I don't
believe that it's anything more than a cop-out excuse to say “the
world's already too far gone for any of us to help” and somehow
that means it's okay to not try anything at all. When I do manage to
get out there and attempt good works, I always end up having a good
time.
I am, however, extremely lazy, and
community service almost always
involves getting up really, really
early on a Saturday morning and driving somewhere you've never been
to before with directions someone who only sort of
knows the way gave you over the phone and which you scribbled onto a
napkin or something. It also often happens that you end up puttering
around feeling not very useful for like four hours and getting a
sunburn, and all you can say at the end is, “Well, I guess it's the
thought that counts.”
This
is the story of one such time.
I've
noticed that littering is one of those things that no one admits to
doing but which is obviously done all the time;
in that way it's like buying something from a telemarketer or being
polled or masturbating. Yet telemarketers still make the calls, and
news organizations still report poll numbers. Similarly, people are
obviously littering all over the freaking place but somehow this is
always done by the faceless Other. In fact, I know people who smoke
and will tell me about how they think we should sterilize
anyone convicted of littering while simultaneously flicking a
cigarette butt into the bushes, which is totally an example of irony.
So
anyways, my point is that there is a lot of litter around. And on a
Saturday morning at very-early o'clock I rode with two girls from my
Environmental Ethics class—whose names I should probably not
mention even though statistically speaking it's likely that you know
who they are already anyway—down to the Dog River to participate in
some sort of coastal clean-up event.
We
arrived at the designated place at the designated time and signed in.
One of the organizers asked us, “How do you feel about canoes?”
It took us a while to answer this question, because it's not
something you get asked very often.
Long
story short—I do
have a word limit here—the three of us ended up being towed upriver
in a canoe by a guy in a motorboat—heretofore referred to as “Boat
Guy.” For four hours we patrolled the banks of the Dog River,
picking up rancid trash with nets and plastic claw-style grabber
things.
I
would not normally have been dumb enough to take my cell phone with
me, except that I was told by more than one person that I would need
it to communicate with the Boat Guy. This turned out to be true; I
ended up calling Boat Guy several times over the course of the
morning asking him to come pick up our full trash bags and tow us to
more fertile spots upriver once we'd picked up all the trash we could
in one area. And I wouldn't have mentioned that little detail about
the phone unless it was important later on. That's called
foreshadowing.
It
was as we were being towed back to our starting point that our canoe
capsized. Boat Guy was driving too fast, and after one particularly
hard turn to starboard our canoe tipped, took on water, and that was
the end of the party. It was good that I had kept my lifejacket on,
because it would have been hard to tread water while laughing as hard
as I was. It wasn't a pretty sight once we got the canoe flipped
over again; much of its previous contents had been lost to the murky
deep.
Looking
at a Quicken spreadsheet for the morning it's hard to say that we
came out ahead. In the “plus” column would be the four bags of
garbage we picked up that we had turned over to Boat Guy before the
“incident.” We also got to spend the ride back on Boat Guy's
boat; we didn't really say a whole lot because every time anyone
tried to talk we all started laughing. So that was fun, and I'm not
even kidding.
In
the “minus” column would be two plastic-grabber things, a few
bottles of water, one additional bag of trash, and an unknown number
of vinyl gloves we had been wearing because litter is gross, plus
whatever gas we used to drive out there and back. There's also the
small matter of my cell phone; it stayed in my pocket and was not
lost, but was eventually pronounced completely dead. Replacing it
cost a sum of money that I would rather not disclose, but that sum is
also in the “minus” column.
And
since the Dog River is one seriously polluted place, it's likely that
we were all rendered sterile. I don't guess I was really ever
planning on having kids anyway.
Well, it's the thought that counts.
Bless our hearts.
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