Carnes: Exploding Styrofoam and sturdy beer bottles
I never fully appreciated how busy “Grand Army of the Republic Highway” can be on a Saturday morning.
Walking precariously alongside the almost non-stop traffic while picking up discarded items tossed out vehicle windows by local idiots constantly reminded me of the two tragic hit-and-runs we’ve had so far in 2024.
It was sketchy there for a few hours.
I have no problems referring to anyone carelessly tossing trash as an idiot, because it matters not where they live, but in this case, the garbage had accumulated along a local road, not our intrusive yet necessary evil interstate.
My admittedly unscientific analysis (aka uneducated guess) finds at least 95% of the traffic, and thus this rubbish, is flung out the window by disrespectful Eagle 久久热精品视频app taxpayers.
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For those of you wondering what in the world is the “Grand Army of the Republic Highway,” most know it as U.S. Highway 6, the transcontinental roadway extending from California to Massachusetts. Hard to believe, but it’s , about 50% longer than Interstate 70.
And we trash the hell out of it.
Once again this 64-year-old with an extra appendage was honored last Saturday to join the Vail Valley Vixens, a local women’s-only cycling club with over 100 members, on their bi-annual quest to clean up a 2-mile stretch west from the Wolcott Yacht Club.
For this year’s trash bag hunt for anything shiny, we were rewarded with the usual suspects of beer cans, airplane booze shot bottles (aka “nippers”), fast-food containers, cigarette butts, a few vape pens, an election sign from last November and lots and lots of plastic crap.
But standing out to me was the amount of Styrofoam, as we picked up hundreds of pieces, which I concluded probably came from a single delivery truck of some sort and had exploded over about a mile stretch. It was everywhere, with the color and texture appearing to match.
In what I can only assume is credited to the beer bottle industry’s engineering design of modern beer bottles, dozens were found completely intact, no glass shards to inflict pain upon unsuspecting cleanup crew members.
It was a positive in a veritable sea of negatives.
A highlight, if that’s how one would choose to describe it, was a condom (used, of course, and yes, gross) and my bride stumbling across a carcass, at which point I immediately Googled to see if Kristi Noem had visited our ski mountains for a family trip this past winter, as I read she liked to travel with her pets.
I could find no such record of a visit, but one never knows for sure.
Driving home to Avon, we were amazed at the number of stuffed orange bags along I-70, and we both commented that it seemed to be a lot more than in previous years.
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Does it mean more trash being indiscriminately dumped by inconsiderate morons or the 800-plus volunteers being more meticulously thorough than in years past?
Hopefully, it’s less of the former and more of the latter, but at least no one came across anything horribly unexpected, like say a Boeing whistleblower.
We’ve had enough negative publicity lately as it is.
Richard Carnes, of Avon, writes weekly. He can be reached at poor@vail.net.
