My good deed for the year: saving sea turtles at the LA River

The other day I did probably one of the most goody-two-shoes things I’ve ever done: pick up litter. Voluntarily. Not to serve a community service sentence. Not with a volunteer group. Of my own volition, I grabbed a pair of gardening gloves and went out to the LA River near my house, where I knew that every branch of every tree on the banks would be flying our new national flag, the plastic bag.

Why? Why would I do such a ridiculous thing? I’d actually thought of doing so before just because it’s such a disgusting sight, but never did because it’d be like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. But as with most volunteer efforts, this one was inspired by a good ol’ tugging of the heart-strings. It wasn’t enough just to hear about the Pacific Garbage Patch, in spite of its being twice the size of Texas. It wasn’t enough to hear a blogger mourn over so many dead sea animals. No, it was the plight of one sea turtle that did it—of course, as human emotions are more attuned to the specific than swaths of statistics—the far too mockingly dubbed “Mae West” turtle, who had grown up with a plastic ring around its middle, and thus grew up accordingly contorted. And so a certain line of thinking kicked in—the one like that story about two people who come upon a shore covered in hundreds of beached starfish, and one of the guys tosses one of the starfish back into the water, and the other guy goes, well, that’s hardly making a difference; there are still hundreds of starfish that are gonna die, and the other guy goes, it made a difference to that starfish.

So down to the LA River I went.

The LA River is widely mocked as a concrete, mostly empty canal that epitomizes modern urban blight, particularly that of LA—like, it’s such a fake city that even its river is manmade and not even really a river BLAH BLAH BLAH. As with everything LA, I will defend its river as well—but that’s another blog entry. The part of the river that's close to my house actually looks like a real river: it’s wide and deep and its banks are covered in bushy trees—I suppose because it runs through the Balboa Lake (i.e. city park) area. It’s actually quite beautiful (if you don’t look closely at the water, which, yes, looks like brackish sludge). My favorite place along its course is under the bridge that Balboa Blvd. runs over. It has a cozy, child’s secret place feel to it. So that's where I went to start cleaning up the world.

Even along the way, I couldn’t help but stop and pick up some crap I spotted along the way, just dumped over the fence of the Balboa Lake area. And as I picked all this crap up—soda cups, ripped up Christian literature (interesting story behind that, I’d wager, but even that doesn’t justify its being littered), and, of course, plastic bags—I couldn’t help but become steadily more and more enraged. Did people seriously just chuck this stuff here? Or was it all from honest mistakes? Someone forgot to take their soda with them, someone dropped their papers, someone’s plastic bag blew away from their trashcan… This is the only explanation I can understand, because I seriously cannot fathom people just not giving a shit. Why would they wreck their own neighborhood? Do they figure “someone” will pick it up? How can they think that if there’s clearly old litter all over the place? As I was picking it up, several people passed by, and I wondered, if any of them were chronic litterers and if any of them even noticed, which reaction they had: a twinge of guilt over how they’ve contributed to such filth or a reinforcement of their belief that “someone” would pick their shit up. God, please tell me it was the former.

When I made it to ground zero, there were, indeed, plastic bags stuck in every branch. When it rains, anything and everything from the streets (that assholes have chucked there) flows into the river, the river swells, and when it stops raining, the water subsides and leaves all that crap all over the trees. Amazingly, however, I didn’t even make it to the trees. There was enough shit just on the ground. In fact, there were plastic bags EMBEDDED in the dirt. I’d see a scrap of plastic peeking out of the moist dirt, pull on it, then keep pulling and pulling until I had an entire plastic bag—one time even a whole sign like from Taco Bell or something.

There’s actually another reason I didn’t go near the trees, however: as I approached them, I noticed a tarp tied to a tree: clearly not the work of the rising or falling tide. Some homeless guy had set up camp in a little thicket, and I clearly wasn’t gonna go near that. And actually, as I pulled plastic bags out of the mud, I got mad at him: talk about not giving a shit about your own neighborhood; this guy lives here and he doesn’t bother picking up anything. I suppose that’s kind of a stupid thing to think about a guy who lives on a mudbank, but still. I actually think I passed him as I went home: I was carrying four filled mud-plastered bags down the sidewalk and this pretty grungy looking guy coming the other way clearly figured out what I’d been doing and said something like, “Good work, babe!” I was like, yeah, you’re welcome. Some of what I was carrying was probably his own trash.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I filled FOUR bags worth of crap. I’d actually only brought one plastic bag to fill, but I was able to fill it so quickly and I found so many intact plastic bags that I figured I’d just use them for more gathering.

As I did so, a couple people were working out on the bike path that runs under the bridge—seemed like a personal trainer and her trainee—and they were running back and forth in different ways, and I couldn’t help but think about my malaise about working out: if you think about it, it’s completely ridiculous to spend money on a gym membership to burn calories, where the gym expends god knows how much energy on electricity, A/C, etc., when you could save the earth that energy and use your own energy doing something actually productive. In a way, it’s completely bizarre that someone would hire someone else to clean their house or tend to their garden, and then go and work out in a gym. Is the gym really that much more fun??? I doubt it, with so many people always whining about how they either don’t want to go to the gym or how they never do. So I reflected (smugly, of course) on my secret reason for picking up shit at the river: I wanted to put my calories towards a worthwhile cause rather than running around in circles like the people on the bike path. My shoulders certainly got a workout as I trudged back home with the four muddy bags stuffed with at least a hundred pieces of trash: I had to stop like ten times from fatigue.

Even so, I bet if you'd taken before and after pictures, you'd barely notice a difference.

But as far as I’m concerned, I just saved a sea turtle.