In my time first growing up in, and then leaving and returning to rural Northern Illinois, I’ve come to appreciate the quiet beauty of the countryside. While I think this is true for most people out here, it’s clear that, for a small subset of folks a quiet, empty countryside represents an opportunity to divest oneself of waste material without the need for use of purpose-built receptacles and distribution systems.

In simple terms: they view rural lands as a personal dumping ground.

Riding the trike through the countryside puts one directly in contact with these events. On rare occasions this reaches extreme levels, and some of the things you see are perplexing.

Now, I’m not saying it’s unusual to find fast food refuse on a country road. That isn’t the perplexing part. What is unusual is that this appears to be an entire Happy Meal. How does this happen? Did they set it on the roof and forget it? Given that the closest McDonalds is about 5 miles away that seems unlikely. Did the child it was intended for get mouthy on the trip home, resulting in an exasperated parent throwing their meal out the window?

Either way, it was now an Unhappy Meal... (feel free to insert your own rim shot here)

A week or two later I came across a similar phenomenon:

Yes - that does appear to be an entire, intact and wrapped McChicken Sandwich. And yes, it is sitting at the edge of the road, completely unmolested, as if it was simply set there gently by caring hands.

I came across it about a mile away from, and four days after, coming across the Unhappy Meal, so they seem to be different phenomena. Did someone, perhaps, pick the sandwich up out of the bag, hit a bump, and drop it out the window? Was it an offering to the great asphalt gods of Illinois, in an effort to keep in their favor and maintain our paved roads, keeping away the gravel? Has McDonald’s been working on a teleportation delivery system, but still hasn’t worked out the bugs? (That would be far preferable to the two-lane drive-thru system).

And if it did fall out a window, the maintenance of structural integrity is either a testament to the wrapping job or an indictment of the sandwich materials.

But if these items are puzzling, the more usual items found fall more into the category marked "frustrating"...

However, by far the most common thing that one comes across when riding the country roads is... anyone? Anyone?

That’s right - beer containers. Usually cans, sometimes bottles, sometimes the ancillary components. This is, on its face, a blight upon the countryside, and it raises the question as to what the disposition of those containers was prior to finding placement in the ditch. But as with anything that one encounters in a high enough frequency, it starts to become usual, almost expected. And that means that it might be helpful to look at it another way. So I decided to give that a try:

As I began to do more and more of this I began to detect... well... something of a pattern to the containers I was finding. See if you can find it too...

Are you seeing it? Maybe one more will help:

If you aren’t familiar with the brand, that’s a Natural Light can. Natural Light bears the distinction of being the beer so cheap it’s what the fraternities bought in kegs for party nights when I was in college. It is truly the beer that one consumes when the goal is intoxication at minimum expense. Assuming, of course, one does not consider the sacrifice of flavor an expense.

What I increasingly came to realize, as I rode along and took stock (and photos) of all of this is that the Venn Diagram between people with bad taste in beer and people who are countryside litterbugs is essentially a perfect circle.

Of course, there’s always an occasional exception to the rule...

For the casual observer it would be easy to assume that the act of tossing beer cans out the window is an occasional event - that these cans just sit out in the ditch for an extended period of time, non-degradable testaments to relatively rare behavior. The very generous might even assume that these blew out of the back of trucks of people who were taking them in to recycle.

I ride portions of the same routes over and over again, since my driveway is my common starting point. I can assure you there are routinely new additions to the crop, and while there are some of the same brands represented here, each picture is a unique individual - perhaps the cans are reproducing in the rich Illinois soil...

Or perhaps not - they usually show up in linear groupings. It’s harder to see among the Busch and Bud Light cans due to sheer volume, but when something less typical shows up it becomes clearer.

While they look similar, these are shots of two unique individuals. The second picture is about a quarter mile down the road from the first. If I’d kept looking, or maybe if I’d gone back the other way, I wouldn't have been surprised to find others at a similar frequency. I’ll leave the how and why of it to your imagination.

This spontaneous sprouting of aluminum receptacles is not a new phenomenon to the open lands. When I was a kid growing up out here I briefly started a beer can collection from cans I picked up alongside the roads. I say briefly, because I was probably about 10 years old, and the idea of cleaning them out before putting them on display simply did not occur. It was not long before the growing smell resulted in a parental eviction of my prized possessions. Clearly the loss haunts me to this day.

And, if I’m being honest, I suppose I’m part of the problem. I do recycle aluminum cans, and I’d like to be able to say that I stop and pick up these blemishes of the byway, but I don’t. While I’ve considered it, I’d have to set up the trike to do it and make a special trip. Otherwise I mostly ride for exercise, and I’d never get above 10 mph if I stopped to pick up every can I encountered.

I’m not sure trying to look at them a different way really helped, but it seemed worth the try. I have no doubt there was an occasional passerby wondering what the hell the oddball with the trike was doing now, on his hands and knees in the ditch with his camera. And I have to give it to them - I’d consider myself an oddball too.

Time to ride - but I think without the pictures today...

Applied Life

Unnatural Phenomena /June 28, 2020 by Erin Wade

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