Baggage

by Katharine M. Hikel

I love it when it’s warm enough to drive around with the windows open, with all the signs of summer bursting forth. Ancient cemetery lilacs in bloom; new foals and calves in the herds; red-winged blackbirds staking out turf on fence posts and cat-tail stalks.

Fields are freshly plowed, losing their winter stubble; others are waiting to dry. In the lowest, wettest pasture on the road to the elementary school, I saw a white speck on the ground, far off the road, between two puddled rows of cut stalks. An errant snow goose? A white cat out hunting? Around here there’s always some nature exhibit giving free lessons.

It was actually a plastic shopping bag. Far enough out of reach, so that someone would have to pull on mud boots, slog through heavy clay and puddles, and slog back – about fifteen minutes’ worth of litterbug counter-activity. It stayed there for two weeks, before finally getting plowed under. A tag end still sticks out of the new furrow.

Every day, while waiting at the end of the driveway for the kindergarten bus, I pick up a diet soda bottle or a beer can or a cigarette pack that some low-lifer has chucked out the window into the ditch. I find plastic bags and wrappers under wild rosebushes, along stream banks, and in the turnouts where I pull in to answer my cell. It’s not as bad as places I’ve seen, like the Dominican Republic, where hurricane winds whip the litter into tall trees, and leave it festooning the beach like some bizarre seaweed. I read somewhere that in South Africa there are so many plastic bags decorating the landscape that citizens have nicknamed them “the national flower.”

Every so often, on the road to town, there’s an entire black garbage bag of unmentionables that has flown intact out the back of somebody’s pickup truck.

At the grocery store, when asked “Paper or plastic?” I say, “Fabric,” and hand over my funky collection of cloth totes – an idea I stole from the gal ahead of me at the register one day. In one of the totes, I keep a few small produce and bread bags, all organized for grab and go, in my cubby in the mud room.

Still, the bags pile up. The guy of the house won’t go the tote-bag route. It’s just not spontaneous enough, or else he likes the aesthetic of fresh plastic grocery bags nestled among the tool boxes in the back of his truck.

And – I blush to admit this – there is also the mall problem. A new bag per person per trip, minimum. So in they creep.

A few go into the glove box for auto trash. A bunch more line wastebaskets in the bathroom and bedroom. Some go out as packing material, which I realize is a sleazy way of foisting the problem onto somebody in, say, Bangor, or Beverly Hills, where perhaps they won’t notice. The rest end up in the ‘bag bag’ in the pantry, where they undergo exponential replication until we can’t shut the door any more. Then I ball up an armful of the oldest, stickiest ones, and throw them away – into the kitchen trash, which I have lined with 13-gallon bio-degradables from the EcoStore – who are we kidding? What a civilization, buying things with no other purpose than to throw them away.

I would love to line the trash bin with them, but they don’t fit the one we’ve had for 20 years. I could buy a smaller one, but then what would I do with the old one? Put it in a garbage bag and throw it away?

I once tried to recycle a whole bunch of IGA bags back at the IGA. The cashier gave me the kind of look reserved for the criminally insane, and jammed them into the trash.

On a visit to the American Folk Art Museum, in New York, I saw a lovely rug crocheted entirely out of Wonder Bread bags, nicely framed and lighted. There’s an idea. Maybe I could braid up some bath mats.

We Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags each year. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

My accumulation of styrofoam trays goes to the folks at the school art department, who’ll take everything I have. I don’t even want to think about styrofoam peanuts (known in the trade as “angel poop”). I’ve stopped ordering from companies that use them, including my favorite discount book supplier in Connecticut. I had been recycling them to a local potter, who used them in shipping his wares, but the last time I took over a batch, he pointed to his 30-foot storage silo and said, “Sorry – we’re full.”

Other, more sensible nations have instituted a tax of ten to twenty cents per plastic bag acquired in stores. In Ireland, for example, a seventeen-cent tax reduced bag use by around 90 percent. American chains push plastic, as the bags are about half the price of paper; a rise in oil prices may change that. Maybe by then we’ll be all bagged out.

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