By: Susan Hess. July 6, 2017. I wish I had saved the bra.
Dalles Mountain Road heads north off Washington Highway 14 just before the south road to She Who Watches. Winter traffic going too fast for the gravel road pounded potholes and left it corrugated. By spring, a car at speed could bounce right off the road. Husband Jurgen and I drove it in March at twenty-five miles per hour, and because the rain, slower on the sharp bends.
We were coming to learn about the one hundred and eighty acres of Columbia Hills State Park being restored to prairie grasses and wildflowers. At 2.9 miles from the highway we parked and waited for citizen scientist Bob Hansen.
At 9:15 a.m. Bob pulled his Prius beside us and rolled down the window.
“Today is not the kind of day,” he said pointing to the gray skies, “that I would want you to see the project.”
“Okay. How about telling us about it over for lunch in The Dalles. Noon?”
By the time we finished lunch, the day had turned sunny. So we headed across the Columbia back to the 2.9 mile-site, and spent several happy hours following Bob and fellow volunteer Stuart up and down the slopes they were helping revitalize.
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For the trip home, I readied a plastic bag. We keep a dozen or so in the car, plastic bags I’ve found and cleaned and stocked. Years ago, Jurgen and I decided that every time we went hiking or were out in the hills and mountains on a story like this, we would stop somewhere on the return trip and pick up trash. Hence the bags. Two years ago we stopped along this same road at a spot where a rancher had set up a small corral. Broadcast over the packed earth beside the gate we found dozens of brass bullet casings. Last summer Jurgen climbed over a barbed wire fence to pull out of a hackberry-like tree, a vinyl Happy Birthday balloon.
That’s the thing about roadside litter: it’s spread unevenly, a pop can here, a Styrofoam coffee cup several yards farther, up the slope across the road a plastic juice bottle, down in the ditch a brown beer bottle. And let me say here that the beer cans and bottles littering the Columbia Gorge roadsides are the cheap brews: Keystone, Budweiser, Coors, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Bud Light, Busch, Coors Light, Hamms, Miller High Life, Tecate, Rainier, Corona Extra, Busch Light, Olympia, Keystone Light.
Close by and weather-crushed we find the twelve-pack cardboard cartons. Remember these people are driving.
On this trip a plastic clothes basket lay in the ditch on the east side of the road. Thrown out? Fallen out? Nearby sprinkled along among the empty cigarette packs and drink cups are plastic water bottles, some half full. Plastic bags shredded by the wind flap on dried weed-stems and barbed wire.
The bra lay in a pullout across the road from the pond created by Bretz floods’ whirling boulders. A flesh-color-almost-new bra. A bra with five narrow straps to circle the chest. Related to the clothes basket? Midnight lovers tryst?
We stopped just before we reached Highway 14 to take a picture of Dalles Mountain Road trash collected in two miles. The bags filled our Forester’s 34.4 cubic feet (I found that in the manual) cargo space. The car atmosphere reeked with the remains in the found-beer cans yesterdays-bar smell.
We earned $5.65 returning the cans and bottles. The ones missing labels or too crushed to straighten out went in the recycle bin. I plan to make a photo album of the odd things we find. Gosh, I wish I’d taken a photograph of that bra.
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Bravo to you and Jurgen! What a great story and sad commentary on our throw-away culture. Inspired by you two, I pick up a lot more trash when I walk or hike than I used to.
Thank you, Darryl. And in turn, you inspire me.
Thank you, Darryl.